In a recent presentation, I discussed the role that guided interaction and coaching can play in onboarding new users to a product. Playthroughs and user-guided tutorials are some examples of guided interaction. Guided interaction allows users to start playing with a new product quickly in an authentic context (instead of wading through abstracted coachmarks, instructions or intro tours), but also gives them enough coaching so that they’ll be motivated by an early success.
To help teams explore the right cadence of guided interaction for their product’s new user experience, I created a template to help with judging that interaction between a product and a new user. I’ve been calling it the coaching cadence worksheet. This can be used to audit an existing experience, or to explore variations for a revision or completely new first time ux. The worksheet follows.
For the past month I’ve been using 2 different styli, the 
A budding navigational design pattern that is growing in use is the custom center tab button. In this approach, app designers centralize their app’s primary tasks or content under the middle-most button of a standard 3- or 5-button iPhone tab bar. This “focal button” provides a way to indicate and drive users to the primary functionality of the app, allows for top-level awareness of secondary content sections, and doesn’t require as much re-learning as a completely custom navigation design.
To differentiate the focal button from the other tabs, it is typically given a special visual treatment and an action label (ie, “Check In” or “Scan” vs. “News” or “Featured”). Its visual emphasis helps users quickly recognize the core action they need to take, while its location, directly above the iPhone’s hardware home button, gives it a natural physical reference point.
