Human-centric mobile app design has always been a game changer for any app, in terms of creating the first impression among the users. Making your customer satisfied and comfortable with the app design is a priority; evaluation of your app’s functionalities by the users comes much later.
In a world where you have countless competitors recreating and repackaging successful ideas into their own app products, let us explore how an immersive user experience can prove to be an effective differentiator for your app.
Why Design is Crucial for Mobile App Success
Before delving deeper into what all you need to take care of during your mobile app design process to ensure an appealing user experience, let’s first see why mobile app design is so important for an app’s success.
Attracting Users with Appealing App Design
A great UI/UX design is the trick to making your users spend more time on your apps. The design of your app should be so eye-catching as well as on-point, that it attracts your users’ attention at the first go. Adding aesthetic elements to your mobile app, like cool visuals, appropriate theme colours, or infographics can also be the show stealers in this scenario.
Strengthening Brand Image with Responsive UI/UX
In this smartphone era, a mobile app is a platform that showcases a business’s brand image. Therefore, as an opportunity to empower your brand image through mobile apps, you can easily create the first impression for your users, with an out-of-the-box UI design.
Building a Loyal Customer Base with a Powerful UI
A hassle-free user experience is the key to building a loyal customer base for any business. Offering your user a painless experience through mobile apps can be exceedingly advantageous in not only turning them to become loyal customers, but also providing you with opportunities to promote your brand image.
Critical Elements of Mobile App Design
Regardless of whether you design your app in-house or hire an agency’s mobile app design services, you must ensure to implement some critical parameters in your mobile app design process.
1. Provide Clarity
Your mobile app design must convey a single concept, without confusing the user with too much information or giving the them the wrong impression regarding what they should do. Provide necessary information to the user regarding how to navigate through elements or type inputs correctly.
2. Avoid Clutter
Mobile app design that seems cluttered is never appealing. Do not try to fit all elements into a single screen. The elements in your app’s interface must be of appropriate sizes, so that the user can interact with them without accidentally tapping adjacent elements. If you’re implementing a drag-and-drop functionality, make sure that there is sufficient spatial room for such interactions. Control elements must be between 7 and 10 mm in size, with visible edges, to be able to smoothly handle finger taps.
3. Ensure Consistent Templates and Uniformity
For your design to capture the user’s attention and turn them into a loyal customer, you must use colour and consumer psychology to implement the right icons and colours. You must also ensure uniformity in design by predicting how the user might navigate and placing visual elements in a way that facilitates a smooth flow across them. Use standardized forms to that the user can easily detect or predict where standard elements may be on the screen.
4. Optimize the User Flow
To avoid overwhelming the user with long-drawn navigation or processes, split them into smaller steps or tasks. At all times during the process, the user must be able to see how many steps they have covered and how many they are yet to do. Limit each screen to only a single action. Ensure that the user does not have to enter data that you have already collected from them. Use automated fill to pre-fill forms with collected data.
5. Efficiency of Skeleton Screen into Design
Use progressive bars and spinners to indicate progress during loading screens. You can also use
skeleton or splash screens, where information is loaded gradually.
6. Show Notifications for Errors
Don’t leave users wondering when something goes wrong in your app. Instead of showing dead or zero state error messages, show your users the status of the error and possible solutions to fix it.
Evolving Trends in Mobile App Design that You Must Explore
Your users’ needs are constantly changing, as the world keeps changing around them. You must be prepared to address these evolving user needs in your mobile app design. It’ll also help your cause to keep up with latest design trends to make sure that your app’s design feels modern and innovative.
1. Remote UX
The COVID-19 pandemic has made remote-working and remote-engagement the new normal for the entire world. At a time when it seems that this dramatic paradigm shift may be here to stay, enhancing user experiences and removing barriers for adoption of digital tools that facilitate virtual interactions is THE need of the hour.
- Collaboration Tools:
Ensuring collaboration and smooth communication of information between remote teams is of paramount importance to maintain productivity. While remote-working has certainly been somewhat aided by virtual meeting tools, the world has quickly learnt that what seems seamless during physical interactions poses unforeseeable difficulties when tried virtually. Reduction in lag times, easier ways to track team tasks and better modes of presenting ideas are some of the crucial aspects that enhanced Remote UX Design will need to solve.
- Virtual Healthcare:
Although modern UX solutions like gamification, wearable tech and AI-driven chatbots have been successfully implemented in the world of virtual healthcare, UX designers will need to work on lowering the barriers hindering the widespread adoption of telehealth tools. Mapping the journey of patients and what they need will prove to be crucial in effective Remote UX Design for virtual healthcare.
- AR/VR:
Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies hold a lot of promise in solving many issues for remote and virtual interactions. VR tools can help create the much-needed ‘virtual office’ ecosystem that would prove to be immensely helpful for virtual communication and collaboration. Effective Remote UX Design of AR technologies enabling virtual travel, hospitality, interior design and even education can be just what the world needs now.
Besides the aforementioned areas, Remote UX Design will also aid online education, virtual networking and even virtual employee engagement.
2. Advanced personalization
Personalization is as much a user experience trend as it is one of the best practices nowadays. Making the users feel that the content is exclusively created for them is where the personalized design approach is gaining traction, resulting in increased conversion rates.
For instance, tech giants like Google and Apple continue to revamp their ecosystems through personalized assistants that are capable of recognizing humans by their voice, face, or fingerprint.
AI plays a crucial role when it comes to making more personalized interfaces. Be it personalized music suggestions on Spotify or recommended videos on Netflix or YouTube, AI makes for more grounded design, bringing it closer to the users by generating personalized content.
3. 3D and immersive experiences
3D designs are no more a novel design trend and have successfully captured the sight of users for a while now, both on the web and mobile. However, designers are now on the lookout for 3D components and how to implement an entire 3D scene in app interfaces, elevating the very idea of web and mobile app design.
With the sharp increase in the availability and implementation of AR/VR technologies, it is quite obvious for the 3D designs to take their place in app interfaces. Making websites or mobile applications more appealing, 3D design attracts users’ attention, allowing them to spend more time on the page and increasing session time.
Closing Words
The world of design is ever-evolving. The design principles laid out in this blog may not hold true a couple of years down the line, when users’ needs and tastes will have changed, or some new technological innovation will have completely transformed users’ expectations. If you want your mobile app design to always be at par with such benchmarks, you have to be on top of latest technological innovations and design trends.
If you’re unsure of how to do that, the best way forward would be to partner with a seasoned mobile app design agency like Josh Software.
With decades of industry experience, Josh Software is a leading name when it comes to mobile app design and development services that fetch results for businesses. Having assisted multiple businesses to embrace the digital transformations of their respective industries, we have a front row seat to major technological innovations. Moreover, our expert design teams are pioneers of design principles and trends that dominate the industry. At Josh Software, we know just what your mobile app design needs for that added oomph.
Create immersive in-app experiences for your users, with UI/UX designs by Josh Software.
