Feeling cornered

The other day I was on my DuoLingo mobile app, practising my French. I do not have the paid version of the app, so I have to endure the ads. Usually, I just ignore them and wait until I can click onwards. This ad popped up and to my surprise, it was not formatted for my iPhone 13! The close ad button - in the top-right corner - was ill-formatted and sat far too close to the edge of the screen and in fact was hidden, under the phone’s face camera notch. Surely, this would not be the fault of the advertiser but of DuoLingo for allowing this to happen! I was surprised as DuoLingo is such a giant company and you’d think they would have always factored in the Apple iPhone 13 - a hugely popular, latest model mobile.

Key Heuristics to remember…

“Software should have common sense” - Alan Cooper

“Visibility of system status” - Jakob Nielson

Solution…

Simple. Make sure all ads fit formats that work for all phones. At very least all * very popular * models of phones! Come on DuoLingo.