Mobile App UI/UX Design: Best Practices

The times when smartphones were only used for communication have passed: today, these smart devices cover multiple needs and support us in solving a range of problems. Mobile apps give us a chance to study and entertain, to complete a lot of basic operations only in seconds, to edit and calculate, to remind and connect us to others. Due to the considerable role of mobile apps in human life, currently, mobile app development companies pay great attention to the mobile app UI UX design. Delivering a great user experience has become the number one priority as it has a powerful influence directly on the engagement, conversation, and revenue.

Nowadays, when smartphones are everywhere in our lives mobile applications in various industries assist us and make our life easier. In this reality, the designers’ responsibility is to create a user interface that meets users’ requirements and provides a pleasant and satisfying experience. In order to build effective mobile user interface design, designers need to go deep into the peculiarities of applications, learn more about their constituents and functionality. In this article, I’m going to introduce the two aspects of mobile app design - UI and UX.

Mobile UI Design

As we may express in human language, UI (User Interface) refers to space where human interacts to the machines (in this case mobile applications). However, while finding inspirations for an accurate UI, designers should never forget about the most significant principles of the user interface. I’ll bring these principles out to your attention below.

The Structure

The mobile app design should purposefully organize the user interface, in meaningful and useful ways. These ways, in their turn, should be tailored to clear and consistent models apparent and obvious to users. The structure principle puts related things together and separates unrelated things, differentiates dissimilar things and makes similar things resemble one another. This principle is concerned with the overall user interface architecture.

The Simplicity

The design should provide simplicity, making common tasks easy, helping to communicate clearly. It is also acceptable to offer many languages so that there is a higher chance that users simply communicate in their own language. Another point of the simplicity principle is to provide good shortcuts that are deliberately related to longer procedures.

The Visibility

The mobile app users should easily identify all the required options and materials for a given task without distracting their experience with irrelevant or redundant information. Nice designs don’t crush users with alternatives or confuse them with worthless information.

The Feedback

A good design keeps users informed about actions or interpretations, changes or conditions of the state, errors or exceptions that are relevant and interesting for the user due to its clarity, conciseness, and an apparent language familiar to the users.

The Tolerance

Mobile application design should also be flexible and tolerant. The crucial factors are to reduce the cost of mistakes and misuse that is done by allowing undoing or redoing. On the other hand, wherever possible, the errors are prevented by interpreting all reasonable actions and tolerating various inputs and sequences.

The Reuse

Mobile UI design should reuse both the internal and external components and behaviors by maintaining flexibility with purpose rather than merely irresponsible consistency, therefore, reducing the requirement for users to think once more and remember.

We may consider that the UI helps users to connect with the app due to different design elements. It plays an important role in attracting customers. Here a question arises: then what about the engagement? This is when the term “User Experience” appears.

Mobile UX Design

Mobile app UX design (UX stands for user experience) refers to the design of certain experiences while using mobile apps. Mobile UX design strongly focuses on efficiency and discoverability as UX concentrates on people.

It’s all about improving the overall user experience while interacting with your mobile app. The final goal of practicing in the UX process is to identify how the end-users feel about your application. It includes users’ expectations, requirements, and desires from the mobile app. A clear UX design guarantees that users feel how the app works after having a one-time experience. It ensures that the users do not feel frustrated or hesitate while using the app. Below we’ll discuss some aspects of best UX apps that require specific consideration.

Usefulness

The mobile app should address the daily challenges of users’ life. An app that doesn’t fill the gap in users’ requirements is useless.

Accessibility

The easy to use mobile applications support the users in effortlessly performing their expected actions effectively and quickly. The mobile app navigation should be so clear that users can easily identify what they need.

Credibility

A clear image of design elements has an influence on users’ trust. It will be essential to include engaging and attractive graphic elements that will be extremely pleasing for the end-users. It is also important to consider that visually appealing design evokes positive emotions from the target audience.

The most essential factor is to understand that a great UX design is to improve customer satisfaction. Using familiar elements (symbols, buttons, icons, call-to-actions, shrifts, colors, etc.) in the mobile app design, you convey a message to the users.

Clarity

The high-quality mobile apps don’t require any manual to help users understand how to make use of the app. The consistent mobile apps help users to identify usage patterns. Once the app users learn how the mobile application sections work, they can easily use this knowledge to explore other functions and features.

Responsiveness

The best app design should be implemented in a way that provides quick response to user action. When users get immediate responses while loading your app, they become more interested and tend to learn more and go deeper into your mobile application. As a result, user engagement increases.

Mobile App UI UX Design Tools

Currently, there are various mobile app design techniques and tools that help designers sketch attractive application wireframes, develop prototypes, and bring all of them to life. You may find some of the top mobile application design tools:

• Sketch: A design tool based on vectors which are mainly used for screen design.
• Adobe XD: This advanced tool provides a quick way to design and share user interface and experience.
• UXPin: This product design platform offers interactive and pixel-perfect prototypes and wireframes.
• Figma: A collaborative interface design medium through which you may easily design and prototype your digital experience.
• InVision: Due to its intuitive vector-based design and flexible layers, InVision is one of the best mobile app design tools in the world, that offers to design better and faster.

Conclusion

The mobile UI UX design aims to satisfy end users. The UX is to ensure the effectiveness of your application UI by increasing its usability. To create the best UI UX apps one needs to understand the expected customer behavior and their preferences. People may be attracted by your mobile app UI UX design because of engaging visuals or graphics. However, they may spend a lot of time in order to understand how the app helps them to achieve their final goals.

A strong mobile UX design envisions business requirements as well as the end-users’ needs to increase the base of loyal customers and also sales. So, the mobile UI UX design aims at achieving both business objectives and customer satisfaction.