Crafting a successful mobile application that gets many downloads is fundamentally based on designing an astonishing yet easy-to-use Mobile UX.
Can your users easily navigate through your app well, or it’s hard for them to use it?
A great mobile app design not only offers renowned UX but also helps you retain your potential customers. Bad and boring UX design can make your customers jump on your Competitor’s app. Ultimately, everything on your mobile app goes back to the type of experience it offers to its users.
The success of a mobile application is reliant on a combination of factors. However, mobile UX design is what makes or breaks your app. Businesses that invest in user experience see a lower cost of consumer acquisition, increased customer retention, lower support cost, and increased market share.
How should you design your app for maximum growth? In this article, we outline a few successful strategies that will get you to design an alluring UX.
Do’s of Mobile UX Design
User Interface (UI) Design
A good UI design can actually help make your app reach its full potential. User Interface design focuses mainly focuses on interaction, and while being easy-to-use is necessary, attractive yet still practical design is key to the success of your app.
Instead of cramming too many items within the screen, use swipe-able pages to plunk all the content you want. Make sure to reserve proper spaces for users to interact.
Use proper texts and sizes to enhance readability. It’s worthless to build a mobile application that no one can read. Texts are the key delivery representatives of the messages of your mobile apps, and hence should not be disregarded.
Be Careful with Colors
Colors play an essential role in enhancing user experience. It’s wrong to practice to choose any color for the design. Proper selection of colors can help and enhance interactivity and visual continuity in your mobile app.
When choosing colors for your mobile application, focus on color contrasts. To enhance the user experience, plunk sufficient contrast in the background of the navigation bar and the bar button tiles to distinguish the buttons easily.
Use at least 50 per cent contrast differences and test the results on different devices in different lighting conditions such as outdoors and indoors.
Never use the same or slightly different color in both interactive and the non-interactive elements. Increase contrast between them to make your users easily identify where to tab.
Ultimately, colors should be used to enrich the flow of information, not to distract users.
Minimal User Design
A mobile application is not only about looking appealing, but it also needs to be super functional as well. The popularity of minimalistic design is growing year after year.
Minimal User Design is all about keeping your mobile app simple while cutting all the clutters such as evading irrelevant 3D images with textures and shadows, beveled edges and reflections in favor of a flat, and several others.
In short, the key principle of minimal user design is to offer the user with only what they need to know and see in the app. A minimalistic approach helps deliver a world-class experience to users.
In-App Personalization
With the growth in the mobile app industry, user expectations are also growing. The main goal of App personalization is to present users with experiences tailored to the specific requirements, rather than offering a one size fit all experience to all users.
Mobile app personalization plays a crucial role to enhance the user experience, boost loyalty, and eventually, grow your business. With personalization, you can tweak the app experience for each user, making them more likely to engage with your app on a regular basis.
Personalization can help app stand out from the crowd – users are far more likely to use a mobile application that addresses their specific requirements and interests over a range of generic, impersonal platform.
Pleasant Onboarding Designs
Nowadays, for first-time users, showing onboarding screens has become a very common practice in mobile applications.
The primary purpose of these onboarding screens – also termed as walkthroughs – is to introduce the mobile application and demonstrate what it does to the first time users.
Evaluate whether onboarding is required for your mobile app and, if so, to decide the best possible approach to implementing it.
Onboarding is essential in mobile applications to support interaction techniques that a large percentage of users would not have been exposed to on a regular basis.
It is used particularly by gesture-driven applications as these applications are still in the exploratory and experimental phase.
As such, designers require guiding users on how to interact with them by clearly displaying every gesture and its corresponding function.
It makes your app interactive. Birdhouse app by Twitter offers an excellent progressive onboarding experience for its users.
Fascinating Gestures
Adding new and interesting gestures gives superpower to your mobile application in terms of UX, usability, and retention.
Earlier the user interface of some of the top mobile applications was restricted to minimum functionalities like pinching and swiping.
Now, professionals are adding new gestures such as drag and swipe in mobile apps to enable speed in user action – making a comfortable way for users to interact with your app with devices of varying shapes and sizes.
Don’t Of Mobile UX Design
Here is a list of the UX blunders usually made while designing a useful mobile application. Moreover, you would get a guide on how to avert such issues.
Making the Display Too Much Crowded
If you have multiple creative ideas, putting them all together into one single app only would make it over-crowded.
This would not only make everything so cluttered, but the users might get confused which is not acceptable for a useful mobile application. Moreover, too much of everything would slow down the speed of your app that users hate even more!
Hence, it is advisable not to drive away from the sole purpose of devising the application. You should pay much more attention to an impressive combination of UX and UI.
Straightforward illustrations, clean display while embracing the cutting-edge technologies to enhance the usability and effectiveness of your mobile app might result in fruitful business success.
Thinking Good UX is Only Designer’s Responsibility
Technically, the mobile app designers are responsible for providing an impressive UX. However, you would make an utter mistake if you don’t think of making this UX better with the help of the collective efforts of the entire app development team.
When an app development process starts, along with the designers and developers, project managers and analysts also take part in the beginning.
While designing the application, apart from the designers, all these members are just like simple users, who can give their honest feedback on the user experience aspect. Using this feedback making the necessary improvements in the UX become very easy.
Unlabeled Icons
You shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that your users would understand everything just by looking at the icons present in the app. Yes, popular icons like ‘home’, ‘settings’, ‘search’, ‘back’ etc. are fine.
Users are well aware of such basic icons. However, if you use any customized icon in your mobile app, you shouldn’t forget to add a proper label to it.
It would help the users to understand the functionalities of that particular icon. Any unlabeled icon would make the users confused.
Apart from these above-mentioned aspects, putting too much content is another blunder usually made today. Yes, providing top-notch quality content is obviously appreciating, but too much of it might ruin the game.
Same Web & Mobile Experience
When it comes to experience, you need to stop making app extension for its website. As we are already in the year 2019, we all know that for mobile and website experience, user intention is different for both. So, the same reflected in app and web designs.
It is better to make sure about intention and elements od users are different to stand out among competitors.
Summing Up
In the past few years, we have experienced the revolution of technology that once seemed to be impossible to achieve. However, with the increasing expectation of the users, innovation in every second is the must.
Now that, we hope that with the help of these important do’s and don’t, this article has provided you with some valuable insights regarding the mobile app UX designing.
