When it comes to user engagement, the first thing that drives our attention is user experience design. UX design is considered one of the most essential components of mobile app development in particular and any other sort of development in general. There is a direct relationship between the success of your mobile app and its UX design. A good design will lead to a successful mobile app and a bad design will most certainly lead to failure.
This is exactly why designers should pay so much emphasis to the user experience design of a mobile app. No matter if you are working on the UX design yourself or you have taken the mobile UI UX design services from another organization. There are some guiding principles that you must not overlook. In this guide, we will be talking about the top 5 UX design principles for mobile apps. With them, you can guarantee a higher acceptance rate of your mobile app within your target audience.
Make it User-Centered
When you call it “user experience” design, then it definitely means that the design you are supposed to build must focus on your target user. While crafting the UX design, you need to prioritize your user’s goals. You basically need to consider the user’s perspective behind using your app instead of making everything according to your choice. After all, at the end of the day, you are not the target user. User research also plays a very crucial role in this regard. It helps you highlight the major concerns of your target audience. Moreover, you can also know what your user really wants from your mobile app.
You need to carefully consider the value of your mobile app or similar ones in the market as perceived by your potential users. The closer your mobile app’s UX design is to its perceived value in your user’s mind, the more likely he will be to return to use your mobile app. Another important thing to ponder upon while working on the UX design of your app is that users highly prefer mobile apps that provide validations of their actions. You can incorporate small feedback messages in your app based on user interactions. For example, a user is clicking the “Save” button after entering some information. Then, a small message saying “your information has been saved successfully” should pop up on his screen. In this way, the user will feel a sense of assurance that he is actually heading toward what he intends to achieve.
Apply the KISS Principle
At times, when you ask UX designers to be creative, they tend to forget the human aspect of design. Thus, they end up making it so complex that the whole mobile app becomes useless. That is where the KISS principle of design comes into play which stands for “Keep It Simple Stupid”. It means that no matter how much creative you are, you still need to keep your design simple. So that it is equally easy for a first-time user as well as a returning one to use your mobile app.
You should keep the navigation of your mobile app very convenient. All important tasks should just be a few clicks away. Keep the fonts minimal, the color schemes should neither be too loud nor too dull. You should also try to minimize the need for typing by making most of the tasks clickable. In a nutshell, you need to ensure that the learning curve of your mobile app is kept moderate.
Be Consistent in your Design
Mobile apps have not come into being very recently. Rather they have been in use for quite a long time now. Therefore, there are certain generally applicable design standards that you should take into account when working on the UX design of your mobile app. For example, there is a certain way to display the hamburger menu icon on the app. It is either placed at the top right corner or the top left corner of your screen.
You should also take care of all these general standards and ensure that your app conforms to these standards. In other words, you need to make a design that is consistent with general design practices. In addition to that, you also need to make sure that the UX design of your app is consistent throughout the different screens of your app. For example, the user should not experience a very drastic change in the overall appearance of your app while navigating from one screen to another.
Apply Touch-Friendly Controls
Mobile apps gained popularity with the emergence of smartphones. Everything in today’s modern phones is accessed by tapping or touching. Therefore, you need to design touch-friendly controls in your mobile app. This can be done by keeping the average finger size in mind. In this way, you will not end up making too small and closely spaced buttons that will ruin the overall experience of the user by accidentally clicking on an unwanted button.
You should also pay close attention to the way an average user holds a mobile phone. This will help you out with the appropriate placement of different controls on your mobile app while working on its UX design. You need to have detailed discussions on this matter with your in-house UX designer or with the mobile UI UX design services provider if you have outsourced your mobile app design so that you can ensure maximum usability of your mobile app.
User Testing is the Key to Success
Last but certainly not least, you should allocate a good amount of your app development time to user testing. This includes both the usability as well as accessibility testing of your mobile app. The former ensures that your app is usable in all the different aspects. The latter guarantees that the user will be able to perform all the intended tasks conveniently without any hassle. You can perform user testing periodically at different stages of your mobile app design and development process.
For that, all you need to do is to recruit a small set of participants from your target audience. You need to present them with the testable version of your app. You can ask them to perform certain tasks by using your mobile app. Meanwhile, you can record how easy or difficult your potential users found it to use your mobile app. This feedback will help you a lot in improving the overall UX design of your app.
Concluding Remarks
If we talk about the UX design principles for mobile apps, then the list literally goes on and on. However, with this article, we wanted to give you an overview of the 5 most important UX design principles for mobile apps. You should definitely spend time learning and implementing these principles. However, if you need any further guidance with the UX design of your mobile app, then you can instantly consider taking the Mobile UI UX Design Services of Folium AI.
Web App Development
Mobile AppDevelopment
MVP Development
QA & Testing
Cloud App Development
Custom Software Development
UI/UX Design
Fixed Cost
Dedicated Team
Startup
Staff Augmentation
AI Services
Data Engineering
Blockchain
Healthcare
Web 3.0
Machine Learning
SAAS Development
CMS
Development
Software Product Development
AWS/CGP
DevOps
Services Now
CTO
Product Manager
Saas Developer
MERN Stack Developers
QA Testers
Nodejs Developer
Python Developer
Django Developer
AI/ML Developer
Java Developer
Data Engineer
DevOps Engineer
ReactJS Developer
VueJS Developer
Typescript Developer
UI/UX Designer
iOS Developers
Android Developers
AWS/GCP
Azure
WordPress Developer
Shopify Developer
(415)316-1346
