‘First impression is the last impression.’

The saying manifests an important fact of life. A striking personality makes a lasting impression. As homeowners, we take great measures to add beauty to our homes. But, one aspect that remains highly neglected is the landscape lighting. Without proper lighting, the beauty of the entire landscape can go to waste.

Landscape lighting is a very broad area to explore. It can prove to be a little tricky without an expert’s help. Instead of considering it as a DIY job, it is advisable to hire a professional electrical contractor who knows the job well. But, you can consider a few tips before hiring an expert.

1. Visualize

Consider different looks for your home. There are so many varieties of lighting fixtures available in the market. And each day, a new type of fixture is added to the list. Make clear decisions to avoid confusion in the future. Do not forget your main aim. It can be anything from illuminating an entire pathway to highlighting a particular part of the lawn. So, it is important to visualize what type of look you want for the exterior of your home.

2. Focus on the ‘Must-Haves’

While listing all your lighting objectives, make sure that you have all the basic elements covered. It includes pathway, porch, garden boundary, staircase, water fountains driveway, etc. Consider all the basic elements because they not only accessorize the exterior of your home but also add to its curb appeal.

3. Take care of positioning the Lighting Fixtures

While positioning the lighting fixtures, take care of how they will look at night. Make sure that they do not cast any unwanted shadow. Be extra careful and ensure that the fixtures do not throw unwanted light-rays in any rooms that are supposed to have a soft appeal.

4. Inclusion of Technology

It is frustrating to turn on the lights every night and wake up early in the morning to turn them off. Instead, set the lighting fixtures to a particular time and opt for automatic operation. Nowadays, there are lighting fixtures that come with power-saving features. Ask the electrical contractor to make optimum use of modern technology in order to make the exterior of your home look beautiful with minimum effort.

5. Avoid Nuisance

Landscape lighting can be a major setback if it disturbs the surrounding areas in one way or the other. Light-rays must not create nuisance for your neighbors. It must not throw unwanted attention on the neighboring homes. A practical approach to the problem can be the use of shields or glare-guards.

Landscape lighting is a good idea to add an extra touch to the overall curb appeal of your home. Whether it is highlighting the small elements of your garden or adding an architectural effect to your home, an electrical contractor can work wonders with the help of landscape lighting. If you want your home to look the best, do not forget to incorporate landscape lighting in your ideas.

When it comes to adding beauty to the exterior of your home, landscape lighting can be a great way to achieve the goal. Power Electrical is a licensed electrical contractor of Greater Toronto Area. We will help you with all types of electrical work for custom homes. Trust the expert for upgrading the electrical panel as well as installing and repairing landscape lighting.

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Fitness Tracking App UI Design
Well, not all the fitness apps will have the same user journey. Still, there are some screens that are common, while some other screens will be there to serve specific purposes. Following are the most important and common design elements that need to be considered while designing the fitness tracking app:

Home Screen
Most famous fitness apps home screens contain simple charts that showcase the progress through the user’s training and nutrition plans. The fitness app home page design should be in a manner that contains the user’s recent activities and their progress through their fitness goals.

It becomes too risky to make changes on the home screen when the application is already live and has millions of registered users, because even a small change in the content formation can ruin the user experience.

Home screen’s functionality and elements depend on the app’s primary usage. It is tricky to design the home screen, especially when the app has many primary functions.

Onboarding Screens
Almost every fitness tracking app requires user registration and the most common methods are via a Google account or Facebook. Usually, any other ordinary mobile app would require the user’s mobile number, email address, name, gender, age, and demographics. But fitness tracking apps need more than just the user’s biography.

While it is essential for the fitness tracking app to have detailed user data, apps are likely to lose some potential users during this data gathering process. There is a chance that users will abandon the app if the onboarding functionality is presented as static information. The onboarding process should guide the user through each step of the onboarding process. It keeping the user motivated enough to fill in the required information.

There should also be an option for users to skip the onboarding process, and explore the app first. This option mitigates the risk of app abandonment during the onboarding process.

Activity Tracking Screen
Fitness tracking apps use a variety of data to provide the user with valuable insights. Such applications are supposed to have separate screens dedicated to the user’s activity. For example, there should be separate screens focusing on the user’s heart rate and running sessions. Especially, when the charts shown in the app screens have a variety of data types such as duration, distance, pace, calories, heart rate, etc.

Fitness Plans Screens
This is where most of the fitness tracking solution providers make money from. The apps include a variety of plans the user can pick and follow. The service providers use various types of content such as short videos, pictures, gifs to showcase the plans.

While some plans are free, others come with a price tag. The paid ones are more personalized as they include a workout generator. This generator creates a customized workout plan based on the user’s fitness level, desired duration, props choice, and so on.

Animations
Animations are a great help for illustrating exercise steps to the users. The app designers can also make use of gifs to make this more interesting for the end-user. It is observed that animated elements and charts make the app more interactive to the users, which results in the end-user is more likely to use the app often.

Fitness Tracking App UX Design
The fitness tracking app user experience (UX) is what makes the app features comprehendible and easier to use. If the mobile application requires too many actions from the user to get desired information, it ruins the user experience. In a similar fashion, when the button size is not appropriate for finger touch or responsive, it makes it hard for the users to use the application.

One of the biggest challenges occurs when a fitness training app is developed for both iOS and Android platforms. It is to be considered that both the applications shouldn’t look too different. Although there will be some navigation differences, as both the platforms are very different in functionality.

Following are the some of the fitness tracking app UX considerations:

Navigation
The focus should be on making the app easy to navigate. Unnoticeable buttons and cluttered screens are certainly a dead-end for the application. For example, if there are more than three buttons on a tab bar, it becomes too complicated to navigate.

It is preferred to provide input masks to users for filling out forms. The forms can also have a smart auto-fill feature. Some accessibility features can also be configured. For example, the keyboard shall be programmed to automatically be customized to turn into a number pad if the user is supposed to enter numeric information.

Notifications
Push notifications are very helpful to remind users of their fitness goals, and motivate them to keep consistently using their fitness program. While too many notifications may freak the user out resulting in abandoning the app, too little notifications mean the user might forget that the app even exists on their phone. The app creator needs to find a perfect balance here.

One way to optimize the use of push notifications is to empower the user to personalize their notifications. The fitness tracking app can have a notification setting functionality, where the user can turn on and off any type of notifications. Some apps such as Strava, use friends activities reminders to motivate the user. But it doesn’t mean that every user would want to receive such notifications, and this is where a notification personalization feature will be handy.

Data Usage Transparency
While asking the user’s permission, It is important to provide the user with a clear indication of why the data is needed. Data privacy is a big concern in 2020, and the users want their data to be handled with care.

Fitness App Design Update
While it is important to update the app design once a while to make the app look modern and useful in the ever-changing environment, the designs should be according to the user reviews and research. In the past, we’ve seen many app design updates that made it painful for the users to adapt to the changes. One such example is Twitter. It made a small change of changing the star icon (favourite icon) to a heart icon. It was a very bad design change decision for twitter as it ruined the user experience.

Premium Membership and In-App Purchases
It is tricky to promote premium membership to the users that are already enjoying free services because they might abandon the app if they are pushed too much for paid services. For example, a health and nutrition app Lifesum shows food ratings for meals without any paid membership, but they ask users to get a paid subscription to know deep insights about those ratings.

You won’t want to irritate users by constantly notifying them about paid subscriptions. Instead, you shall sell the paid membership in accordance to the user’s actions. For example, you can send sales-oriented notifications when the user has completed his basic training plan.

You’ve just lately purchased a brand new cell-phone and are prepared to personalizing it. Mobile covers are very useful for making your cell phone look stylish, and they also safeguard it from getting damaged or scratched.

If you are a female, you most likely carry your phone inside your purse, and it’s easy for it to get broken. If you’ve a good-quality cover, it’ll act as a defense from dings, scrapes and scratches. Your phone will get scratched also, if you carry your phone inside your pocket. Therefore, again mobile cover would be the key to safeguard it.

Some of the unique benefits of wrapping your mobile with a high-quality cover are the following:

• The cell can be kept away from moisture and dust

• Extreme heat can damage your headset, but when put cover on them the diffusion of heat can be eradicated.

• Users can safeguard their buttons.

• Your handset will be protected from sudden falling, scratches and other damages.

Finding the appropriate cover to meet your requirements is feasible, as there’re thousands of diverse cell-phone covers to pick from.

When it comes to phone cover colors, themes and designs, your options are endless. You can find mobile covers with pets, movies, bands, sports teams, cartoons, and Disney characters, just to name a few. Whatever personality you’ve, you find a cell-phone cover to fit it.

One can find cell phone or iphone covers made in many different kinds of materials as well. You can buy a handcrafted leather cover if you wish to go with a high-priced cover. These types of phone covers are durable and safeguard your cell from any kind of wear and tear. You can easily find leather cover for your phone at your local or online cell-phone store.

If you do really hard work, then you may wish to spend your money in a rugged phone-cover. These mobile covers are made from industrial nylon and very durable in nature. They fit right over your entire handset and have a metal clip so you can fix them to your pocket, purse or belt. The cost of a rugged phone cover is very much affordable for a common man.

Though, there are so many cell phone accessories available in the market, but a cell-phone cover should be in the top of your list. It’s stylish, and it does safeguard your costly item form everyday wear and tear.

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