Blog posts by Evan Kirkwood | Arter Kirkwood & Associates

Evan is an experienced and accredited solution designer and developer with over 19 years of software systems delivery experience. Passionate about delivering elegant experiences, Evan’s expertise lies designing and developing iOS and Android native Apps, mobile and responsive web sites, and cross-platform hybrid applications. Evan is a Professional Scrum Master and certified in User Experience (UX) by the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g).

Initialize Your iOS Apps for Push Notifications in 5-Steps

February 2, 2017 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

If you want to boost user engagement with your iOS Apps through- push notifications, you’re going to need to initialize support for notification receiving in your App. Research found that users who opted in to push messages averaged 3x more app launches than those who opted out. To give users the ability to opt-in to […]

NOW AVAILABLE! Our Exclusive MobilizeWorx Notification Model!

February 1, 2017 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

If your app users find the notifications you’re sending distracting or irrelevant, you may be doing more harm than good. Surveys show that over half of the respondents found push messages to be “an annoying distraction.” And 32% of respondents said they would stop using the app altogether if they received just 6 to 10 messages in […]

What’s New in iOS 10.3 for App Developers

January 30, 2017 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Last week Apple released the first beta for iOS 10.3 to developers. While the “Find My AirPods” mode may be the most talked about feature, the update includes a number of new features for custom mobile app developers. SiriKit has been updated with new APIs, and iOS 10.3 updates the device file system to use Apple […]

Setup APNs for Your iOS App in 4 Easy Steps

January 23, 2017 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 1 comment

Notifications matter! Notifications done right can significantly boost app usage. Notifications done wrong can have the opposite effect, driving app usage down and causing your your app to be deleted outright. Doing notifications right isn’t easy, but we can help! Research has shown that push notifications boost app engagement by 88%, but before that can be […]

Tips for supporting accessibility in iOS Apps

April 18, 2016 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Supporting accessibility features in iOS Apps can be tricky, but it’s important to do. In their Accessibility Programming Guide for iOS, Apple points out we should do this because: It increases your user base It helps meet guideline from governing bodies It’s the right thing to do And, as Jakob Nielsen points out, the overlap […]

Faking visibility of system status for camera input

November 30, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

How do you communicate to users that an App is doing something “passive,” like waiting for input from a camera? Sometimes you have to fake it! Visibility of system status is one of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, and is stated as: The system should always keep users informed about what is going […]

Getting started with continuous integration for iOS using Ship.io

September 30, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Continuous Integration (CI) is tremendously valuable to an agile development process, but also require some upkeep that’s always felt “costly” to me (and annoying, as I’m generally lazy when it comes to “sys admin” tasks). UPDATE October 6, 2015: I’m sad to report that Ship.io is shutting down as of October 30, 2015. You can read more […]

How to build a UX-friendly progress indicator with AngularJS

August 18, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

This post demonstrates building an animated progress indicator using AngularJS, and follows user experience (UX) recommendations for visibility of system status. To skip right to the demo, you can check out this JSFiddle. As one of the original 10 heuristics for web usability, visibility of system status remains one of the most important and universally applicable principles […]

Safari back button and web service response behaviour

June 17, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

On a recent responsive website project, we encountered some puzzling behaviour in Safari on OS X and iOS when making asynchronous JavaScript requests to a web service. When navigating forward to a page (i.e. from the navigation menu, a hyperlink, or even entering the URL directly in the browser) things worked as expected. However, going back […]

Recent search ranking changes highlight importance of mobile

May 31, 2015 / by Evan Kirkwood / Uncategorized / 0 comments

Google’s search ranking update released on April 21 was heralded by many as “Mobilegeddon,” a change to their ranking algorithm that would favour mobile-friendliness, and mark the beginning of the end for search ranking of non-mobile optimized sites. Many pictured prominent web properties disappearing from search results on mobile devices. And not long after Google […]

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