In case you didn’t know, a typical American spends more than 7 hours a day looking at a screen. Apps are ubiquitous in today’s digital world, and virtually everyone uses them regularly for something, whether it’s communicating with friends, sharing photos, or playing games.
While healthy competition is always welcome, entering a market where apps seemingly spring up overnight can be both daunting and rewarding. If you’ve made the decision to develop an application, coming up with a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is crucial to your success. That USP is nothing but just a captivating design!
What Makes A Good Mobile App?
User-Friendly Interface
An app with an easy-to-navigate interface is one that provides the user with helpful indicators about what to do next. Users should have an effortless experience in navigating to their desired content. Moreover, to create an intuitive and user-friendly interface, you can opt for outsource app development.
Consistency
Your app’s visual style should match the rest of your brand’s visual features (logo, colors, fonts, etc.) so that users recognize it as an official extension of your company. As time goes on, this will also assist establish credibility and familiarity with your brand.
Mobile-Optimized
You must ensure that the app is optimized for mobile devices and may be used on any device, such as a phone, tablet, laptop, etc. It must also be responsive, so that it displays well on a wide range of screen sizes, from the small displays of mobile phones to large tablets.
Responsiveness
Experts predict that by 2025, more than 70% of all internet users would rely only on their smartphones to connect to the web. In order to keep users engaged, your app needs to be responsive to their touches instantly and without any hassle. Users should be able to navigate your app and engage with its content with minimum latency or lag.
How to Mobile App Design: Step-By-Step Process
Conduct research
Starting with research into existing mobile apps and studying as many examples as possible can equip you with invaluable insight into the difficulties you’ll encounter later on. While researching mobile app design, it’s a good idea to look at some examples of applications that didn’t work out.
Specifically, look at apps that didn’t make it because of their design. Understanding the errors of others can help you avoid making the same ones yourself.
Learning from both the successes and the failures of other app designers is an important component of your research process. However, there is much more to research than analyzing designs, successful or otherwise. The following are two sorts of research that a designer should undertake in order to learn how to better create mobile applications.
Audience research
Finding out what your intended audience needs is crucial. You’re not alone; there are probably thousands of other designers, advertisers, developers, and business owners wondering the same thing.
Whoever makes an effort to discover the right response will have a leg up on their competitors. There is no substitute for doing research to comprehend the needs of your market.
Competitor research
Researching the competitors entails learning about their practices and, in particular, the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) elements they’ve included in their apps. Analyzing the competition should be seen as something that never ends.
If you want to know how your rival apps stack up, it’s a good idea to be abreast of the latest news about them all. In order to keep up with, and ideally surpass, the competition, you should have first-hand knowledge of the newest design trends.
- Review existing mobile app layouts
The creative nature of mobile app design is undeniable. Everything from picking the perfect color palette to designing a beautiful splash screen depends on nailing the details. Mobile app design requires a lot of imagination and originality because visual appeal can only be achieved from an artistic perspective.
Before starting something new, you should analyze as many illustrations as possible. Everything, down to the size and color of the icons, must be perfect. In a nutshell, an app’s color scheme is what makes it instantly recognizable, thus it’s important to get that part right. Don’t forget that a flawless design is essential for the global optimization of the core processes.
2. Develop a wireframe
Wireframing is an essential part of the app design process, as any professional App design, Development Company will tell you. Once you’ve settled on a color scheme, it’s time to go to work on the wireframe. Developers play an important role in this process, and designers should consult with them to ensure the greatest possible layout.
What exactly is a wireframe? It’s just a rough sketch of each screen in the application. Design teams use wireframes to plan out fundamental aspects like navigation, interactions, principal function placement, and conversion zones.
Your wireframe must detail the order in which screens will load depending on input from users. Colors and design variants will not be included in wireframes. There are no graphical elements beyond the basic app structure.
How important is it to use a wireframe when creating a mobile app? Designing a mobile app is about more than making it seem nice. The quality of the user’s experience is much more crucial than the design.
3. Design each screen
The next step is to create each screen, which is a task that is far beyond the abilities of a novice. This is a critical section because it is where your design skills will really shine. Some things to keep in mind are as follows:
- Remember the research, since it will come in helpful at this point.
- Pay attention to the little things, like where you put the buttons because they can make a big difference in how well your app performs.
- Clarity is crucial. Every feature and capability of the app must be readily accessible to the users. The designer needs to make sure that every detail is understood.
4. Work with designers to ensure design viability
It’s much easier to buy something from the app’s catalog if there’s a large, obvious button next to each product. This reduces the total number of clicks required to complete the checkout process. But you need to collaborate with a programmer to accomplish this.
Occasionally, designers will make a call that has a negative impact on the app as a whole. Adding a new feature or moving a button can have an impact on how well the app works. Designers should always collaborate with developers because only then can all necessary modifications be implemented without disrupting the app’s functionality.
5. Develop testing criteria for monitoring app performance
Testing is the final phase. During the testing phase of an app’s development, it is crucial to establish and verify realistic user expectations. High standards are placed on functionality, aesthetics, and, most importantly, the user experience. Design testing entails the following:
- Functional Testing: This is useful in showing if the app is functioning normally in all respects. If there are any navigational flaws that could slow down the user flow, these kinds of tests can assist find them.
- Usability Testing: It’s a common approach to testing app designs that yields more accurate predictions of the full user experience.
- Interruption Testing: This is done to ensure that the app continues to function properly despite a disruption. Mobile phone calls, battery degradation, and internet outages all cause interruptions.
- Performance Testing: It’s a benchmark designed to assess how well the app meets specific requirements. The goal of the testing is to guarantee that the application will continue to function normally under load.
The aforementioned testing methods are beneficial for app developers in finding app vulnerabilities. The primary goal of testing a design is to find and fix problems that could negatively impact the end user. Having a solid app design strategy is therefore essential for avoiding errors.
Bottom Line
Developing a cutting-edge app layout that can break through in today’s competitive digital marketplace is no simple task, but it’s not impossible, either. As long as you stick to the tried-and-true rules, you should be able to create a simple and effective app design that meets all of your users’ needs.
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Author Bio: Nikunj Shingala is a Co-founder of Webs Optimization Software Solution Company, a leading web & mobile application development company specializing in Hybrid, Native, iOS, and android app development.
