Designing Multi-Device Experiences

Chapter 5. Integrated Design Approaches

This chapter describes how the three approaches act as building blocks for constructing a multi-device user experience. In most product ecosystems, it’s necessary to integrate more than just a single approach in order to meet people’s new and diverse needs across distributed contexts.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the 3Cs framework, let’s take things a step further. In the previous three chapters, we examined the three design approaches—consistent, continuous, and complementary—in an isolated fashion; in this chapter, we’ll take a bigger-picture look at some of the different approaches working together in varied and integrated ways. When you begin designing multi-device experiences, you shouldn’t treat the three approaches as a crossroads from which you must choose one of three paths. The three approaches are actually a set of building blocks available for you to construct the experience that best fits your users. Each approach defines different types of relationships and task flows between devices. Together, as part of a greater ecosystem, they can help people achieve their goals across different contexts.

We saw in Chapter 3, for example, how single-activity continuous experiences, like with the Amazon Kindle and Google Drive, are actually a combination of consistent and continuous approaches. These products provide access to all the content anywhere, and at the same time support a continuous flow of reading and editing across ...