Mobile Apps – UX Guidelines « Outbrain Developer Center

Introduction
Recommendation Area Guidelines
Image & Text Guidelines

Introduction

About This Document

This document outlines the UX guidelines to avoid accidental CTRs for widgets. This document additionally lays out the guidelines for images & text used in widgets.

Recommendation Area Guidelines

Non-clickable areas in the recommendation area^{1, 3}

At least 20px “safe zones” from top/bottom & left/right edges of the mobile screen

At least 20px of vertical/horizontal spaces between clickable areas of two recommendations

3% of the left and right edges of the recommendation area (unless this is covered by A or B)

5% of the top & bottom edges of the recommendation area (unless this is covered by A or B)

Time Delay Guidelines^{2, 4}

The click will not count if the action taken by a user is less than a second after the widget is visible.

¹ From Google’s article “Better click quality on display ads improves the user and advertiser experience”: “Blocking clicks that happen close to the image edge: On mobile image ads, we’ve identified the image border as an area prone to accidental clicks when users are trying to click or scroll to adjacent content. Now, they must click on a more central part of the image to navigate to an advertiser’s website or app..”

² From Google’s article “Better click quality on display ads improves the user and advertiser experience”: “Adding a clickability delay: Ads will only become clickable after they’ve been onscreen for a short period of time. This gives users enough time to examine the content of an ad and helps eliminate accidental clicks from users who didn’t expect to see an ad.”

³ From Google’s article “Preventing accidental clicks for a better mobile ads experience“: “Not surprisingly, we found super-fast clicks on ads to provide little to no value to advertisers. That’s why we ignore fast clicks that we detect to be accidental immediately upon ad load. Rather than our ads causing surprise low quality clicks, users can continue on uninterrupted.”

⁴ From Google’s article “Preventing accidental clicks for a better mobile ads experience“: “Not surprisingly, we found super-fast clicks on ads to provide little to no value to advertisers. That’s why we ignore fast clicks that we detect to be accidental immediately upon ad load. Rather than our ads causing surprise low quality clicks, users can continue on uninterrupted.”

The images below illustrate the clickable & non-clickable areas on a recommendation: