The last few years of digitalization have been fascinating, evolving and exponentially solvent for mobile app development. The message is clear. Demand is high for app-based tech startups. While some innovative mobile apps have been a crowd-puller for a decade, there’s still plenty of room for well-designed and finely executed apps that get things done.
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Studies show that an average American checks their phone 262 times per day. That is once every 5.5 minutes. Moreover, 88% of mobile time is spent on applications. This is encouraging news for businesses and companies who plans on developing an application. The mobile app ecosystem is flooded with billions of applications and to make your app stand out in the crowd it is crucial to follow the best practices that make your mobile app UI/UX design unique and intuitive. But in order to be successful in this market, the app design on which a user is entitled to spend so much time needs to be flawless.
What is mobile app design?
Mobile app design refers to the complete user interface from top to bottom. Each and everything that the user touches, sees and interacts with is part of the mobile application design. The way a user feels about your app directly impacts the way they use it and whether or not they share it. This also influences the growth rate of your app and how quickly you can monetize it.
The primary reason that design is so crucial to your app’s success is that it has a dramatic effect on user experience. A well-designed innovative app can make the user feel positive and engaged, while a poorly designed app can make the user feel frustrated and disengaged.
Important design factors to consider when creating mobile apps
When creating mobile apps, there are several important design factors to consider to ensure that the app is user-friendly and visually appealing. Let us walk you through the most vital design factors you need to consider in mobile app UI/UX design.
User-friendliness and Functionality
One of the most crucial things to consider in mobile app design is the effective functionality of the product. Users are bound to frustrate if the app doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do reliably. A good app design knows its purpose and works in an intuitive yet easy-to-use way.
The key to an effective app design is simplicity. Users don’t have time to dig through piles of documentation to figure out how certain service or product works.
Pleasing Visual Design
The looks of an app have a massive impact on the users and how they perceive it. It plays a critical role in creating a positive user experience. The visual design of an app aids in creating a sense of brand consistency and helps build trust.
Moreover, a visually pleasing and consistent design can help to make the app more accessible with features such as high contrast mode and larger text size making it easier for people with visual impartments to navigate the app.
Decluttering
One of the most important recommendations for creating a user-friendly interface is cutting out the clutter in the design of a mobile app. When an application is cluttered, it can be confusing for app users and make it more difficult for them to understand and navigate the app.
By decluttering the design, you can help to simplify the user interface making it easier for consumers to focus on the more important elements of the app. Along with that, a decluttered design can improve the performance of an app as the number of elements on a screen are significantly reduced.
Use Familiar Screens
Familiar screens in mobile app design refer to the navigation patterns and common layouts such as grids and forms that users are already familiar with. These screens also include ‘Getting started’, ‘What’s new’, ‘Search results’ and other patterns that have become a standard convention in mobile application.
Using familiar screens not only aids in increasing user engagement but also makes the app feel more like a natural extension of the user’s life with little to no learning curve.
Minimize User Input
An important factor to consider in mobile app design is minimizing user input to make the user experience more subtle and the process easy. If an app requires a lot of input from users, it can be time-consuming and frustrating, making it less likely for the users to stay on your app.
Minimized user input can be achieved through several practical tips such as shorter forms, input masks, autocomplete features, dynamically validated field values and customized keyboards based on the type of query.
Make The Navigation Simple
One of the most vital factors to consider in mobile app design is the process of creating simple and user-friendly navigation. When navigation is difficult and confusing, it can make the app feel overwhelming and disappoint the users. Thus, making navigation simple is a crucial aspect of creating a positive user experience.
Simple navigation can be accomplished by using understandable labels, standard components, limited elements, consistent patterns and using common navigation patterns such as hamburger menus and tab bars.
Make Your App Appear Fast And Responsive
The loading time is a factor that is extremely important for the user experience. The faster the technology is getting, the more impatient we are getting. Studies suggest, that 47% of users anticipate a page to load within 2 seconds or less. If your app is taking more time to load, the user gets irritated and leaves.
Thus, speed should be one of your top priorities when developing a mobile app. To make the app appear faster and more responsive you can offer a visual distraction, use skeleton screens and make it clear when loading is occurring by showing a loading spinner.
Optimize Content For Mobile
The content integrated into your app plays a significant role in mobile app design. The main goal is to ensure that your content is easy to read and well-crafted. The key to mobile typography is readability, accessibility and usability. There should be an overall graphic balance between font size, font family and color contrast.
Content can be optimized by breaking up the text into smaller chunks, using taglines, subheadings, attractive images and much more that make the content more scannable.
Humanize The Digital Experience
Last but not least, app design is not just about usability, it’s also about feelings. It is important to create an emotional connection with the users by providing the information they need in a genuine way. User experience can be improved drastically by incorporating personalization and humanizing their digital experience.
In addition to that, you can ask your mobile app designers to add delightful animations that make the interface feel more human and optimize push notifications by sending valuable and well-timed notifications.
Summing up
A great design is an amalgamation of beauty and functionality and that should be your aim when developing a mobile app. Now that you have a thorough idea of mobile app design and the important factors to consider in the process, it’s time to get started with the most critical stage of your app development process which is design. A reliable and experienced company providing mobile app design services can help you navigate through the elements of mobile UI/UX design and create a design that impresses users while driving sales. Thus, do your research, determine ways to impress your users and keep updating your application to stay ahead of the trends.