By Juned Ghanchi
What makes a good design for a mobile app? If anything comes to our mind facing this question, it is nothing but ease of use. Yes, first of all, a great mobile app design is incredibly easy to use and instantly engaging. But to achieve all these aspects through your mobile app design, you need to consider a few crucial elements. Over the years the most time tested and dried principles of mobile app design didn’t change much. This shows that once you know the art of designing a perfect mobile app you can only make it better.
Here we are going to introduce seven time-tested mobile app design principles that can guide your app to success.
Reliability
Does your mobile app look trustworthy? Can users easy Lee submit crucial information and can rely on the security measures provided by your app? Mind it; this is a key question every B2C business has to face invariably. If your customers cannot rely on the data security and protection measures for their personal information they cannot share the same with your app. For example, consider the success of Uber. They made processing payment so easy with assured security for financial information of the customers that they literally could transform an industry existing for more than a century. Here are few tips to ensure optimum reliability for your app.
- do not ask for too many information. Only ask for what is absolutely needed.
- Give them a clear idea about what you are going to do with the information provided.
- Use customer testimonials and number of benefited users in support of your request.
Clean and intuitive user interface
When it comes to mobile app there is nothing as important as clarity and clarity begin with a clean and intuitive user interface. The user upon coming on the app screen should instantly know how to use the app and where to go for the relevant content they are looking for. The layout should be absolutely clutter-free and helpful for the readers and users of the content. Here are few effective tips to ensure clarity.
- each of your pages should have one objective.
- Make use of white or negative space around contents and clickable areas.
- Minimize the number of clicks required to perform an action.
- Ensure a great on boarding experience to allow users know how to use the app to get the desired things.
Design for the target audience
Yes, you have guessed it right. We should have begun our discussion with this point. You need to decide on the design of your mobile app as per your target audience. Your target audience, first of all, can be niche oriented and thereafter can be segmented as per demographics, language, age and different preferences. When targeting a broad audience spread globally across regions and cultures, you should always make your app accessible in different languages and with different localized attributes. Here are few things to consider designing your mobile app for different audiences.
- Try to use colors appealing for your target audience in a specific region. The same color may not be appealing for every area.
- The Younger audience is likely to have low attention span and naturally, when targeting them you need to address their queries faster. A fast paced design with more visual contents will be ideal for this audience.
- Ensure other localization attributes like translation, local time, location map et cetera.
Ensure familiarity with your design
You can have a ground-breaking design concept, but if it doesn’t convert the business, you are at a loss. So as far as business conversion is considered your design should help it. An entirely new and unfamiliar design can actually prove to be a stumbling block for the business conversion. On the other hand, a familiar design will help quick engagement and interaction from the users. Familiarity is necessary to prevent confusion and help the users know instantly what they should do for the thing they are looking for. Here we provide some key tips to make your design reap the benefits of familiarity.
- Always use signs and icons that are already known to the audience. Using unknown icons can only add to their confusion.
- Avoid unique design layout to prevent misunderstanding and confusion from your existing customers.
- Maintain a certain level of familiarity with the apps of your niche to the target audience of that niche better.
Design for the low attention span
When using mobile most users detest reading dense paragraphs. Too much text content slows down the engagement and user interaction. As mobile users tend to be more fickle and have a considerably low attention span compared to their desktop counterparts, your design should also address this aspect. You should always use only a legible amount of text content and should focus more on visual contents. Apart from that to make your app ideal for low attention span you also need to ensure faster loading time. Consider the following tips to make an app for decreased attention span of the mobile audience.
- Only provide structured text content with small paragraphs, heads, subheads, and bullet points.
- Boost readability of your content by using mobile friendly font add font size.
- When using visual content is always optimize the image and video files for faster loading time.
- Offer a mix of contents with images, media files, the GIF and text contents to help better traction and engagement.
Mind the rule of thumb
Most mobile users around the world use their handheld devices single-handedly and to navigate through the on-screen elements they mostly use their thumb. Naturally, any clickable area or navigation element outside of the reach of thumb risks lower interaction and traction. So, your mobile app design should allow easy navigation through the use of thumb when holding the device single-handedly. Here are some effective tips for thumb friendly design.
- Place most of your important buttons and clickable links within reach of the thumb.
- Design the layout in a way so that the user can easily navigate through the app single-handedly.
- Make the CTA buttons and navigation elements bigger for easy finger tap.
Do you feel there are some more elements that we missed to cover here? Well, when it comes to UX design principles you cannot exhaust all the aspects in the span of a single post.
Juned Ghanchi is business strategy and analytics lead at IndianAppDevelopers, a mobile app development company India which specializes in comprehensive mobile application developments for industry leading brands. He regularly publishes expert presentation tips on the various technology blogs.