Ultimate Mobile App Design Guide: Best Practices for a Seamless User Experience
5.00/5The average user spends between 3 and 5 hours per day using mobile applications. Competition is fierce, and if you want to launch a new app and make it a success, you need to pay close attention to one thing: user experience. This is what separates a good app from a bad one, as it is responsible for making it easy to use, visually appealing, and relevant to your target audience. In this mobile app design guide, we explain how to create an app with a high chance of success.
What Is Mobile App Design?
Mobile application design refers to the process of ideating and creating the visual and interactive elements of a mobile application. This includes various accessibility requirements, app flow, color and font selection, and look and feel.
You can think of mobile app design as a multidisciplinary field that includes user interface (UI) design and visual elements (UX) design. In other words, a mobile app not only has to look good, it has to provide a seamless and intuitive user experience.
To achieve a user-centric app, you need to go beyond design principles and take the time to understand your target audience. Focus on learning the problems they are trying to solve with your mobile application, their needs and preferences.
UX Design
As the name implies, UX design focuses on creating meaningful and engaging user experiences through factors that include:
- Navigation style
- Screen size
- Screen orientation
- Accessibility
- Offline and online use
All of these decisions are based on a deep understanding of the ideal user and their online behavior, as well as data gathered from a variety of industry-relevant sources. In short, UX design is all about how you make the user feel when they access your application.
UI Design
On the other hand, user interface design is all about the look and feel of the application. It focuses on achieving a consistent style across every screen, button, icon, or text. The goal is to create an app that’s visually appealing, but also consistent and easy to use.
While UX is more about how the user feels, UI focuses on structuring the layout, white space, and creating a visual hierarchy.
Why Is Mobile App Design Important?
From what we’ve explained so far, you can see that there’s a reason why companies work with mobile app designers to ideate, build, and launch their mobile apps. But let’s dig a little deeper.
We live in a world where there are over 7 billion smartphones. People spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on their phones. Time spent using a mobile app, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and any other app for shopping, banking, entertainment, or work.
App development is at its peak. It’s estimated that there are over 8.9 million apps worldwide (the majority for the Google Play Store, followed by the Apple App Store). To make your app successful in this crowded and competitive world takes a lot of effort.
Of course, you need to allocate a significant budget for marketing and promotion. But it won’t be enough if your app keeps crashing, is hard to understand, or is not relevant to your target audience.
That’s where mobile app design comes in. To turn your idea of an app into one that attracts and retains users.
How to Design Your Next Mobile Applications: What Are Mobile App Design Guidelines?
At this point, you’re probably convinced of the importance of launching a mobile app that’s functional, easy to navigate, and aesthetically pleasing. But how do you get there? Let’s take a look at the steps you should follow and the small details you need to pay close attention to.
Determine the Purpose of Your App
Even before you hire an app designer, you need to focus on determining what you want to accomplish with your mobile app. These goals should be set using the SMART methodology, where you write your goals in a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound manner. Your goals can be related to any aspect of your app, including user acquisition, retention, engagement, monetization, satisfaction, and others.
Increase the number of active users by 15% in the next 6 months.
Reduce average customer support response time by 10% in the next 30 days.
Keep in mind that to set your goals, you need to carefully consider your value proposition, competitive advantages, business goals and strategies, and target audience. You should also conduct a SWOT analysis to help you understand what your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are.
Once you have your goals in mind, be sure to prioritize them based on their importance and urgency. You should also be specific about the various KPIs you will use to track progress. Metrics should be constantly monitored and tracked so you can make informed decisions that help you move forward.
Research Your Mobile App’s Existing Competitors
Now that you know what you want to accomplish with your app and the problems you want to solve for your end users, you need to spend some time researching the competition.
You want to focus your time looking for other mobile apps that serve the same purpose and their performance. Check the comments and reviews left by users in the mobile app store and online. This information serves as a key indicator of what to replicate and what to avoid. You don’t want to make the same mistakes as others.
Choose the Platform You Want to Build Your Mobile App For
As you move forward in this process, you need to think about where your users are. Are they iPhone users? Or are they Android users? Understanding the answer to this question will help you determine whether you are building an iOS app, an Android app, or a cross-platform app.
Having this clarified is essential as it will determine the type of mobile app development agency or mobile app designer you need to hire, the skills they need and, more importantly, their overall experience.
Think About Your Mobile App Monetization Strategy
Even if your app’s goal is not financial, they offer you an interesting opportunity to make some revenue from your investment. After all, you will be spending a significant amount of money to design, develop, launch, and maintain your app, so why not look for ways to cover the costs without hurting your business budget?
There are many different monetization options for you to choose from, including in-app advertising, in-app purchases, paid subscription plans, affiliate marketing, and more. It’s common to see apps that charge a download fee. Others require you to pay a monthly subscription fee to access their content. And there are those that offer everything for free, but constantly bombard the user with ads.
But before you choose one, you need to carefully consider two factors. The first is which one is more appropriate for your target audience. The second is the type of app you are launching, take a look at your competitors and their monetization strategy. This will make it easier for you to understand what you can and can’t do.
Create Your User Personas
Next, you need to create your user personas, or semi-functional representations of your ideal users, and evaluate their behaviors. This information will serve as the foundation for your UX and UI app designers to create an app that aligns with their goals, motivations, and solves their pain points.
Hire Your App Design Agency or Team
At this stage, you have a clear understanding of what you want. Now it’s time to hire the people who will actually make it happen. We highly recommend working with a mobile app development agency. They have the mobile app designers, the development team, the UI and UX experts. They have backup options, and most importantly, they have the know-how and experience.
This is a considerable investment, so try to work with people who really know how to do it. Of course, you have the option to hire an app designer and do everything in-house. But this will come with software and tool costs, and you will have to oversee all the work. Do you really have the time and experience to do this?
Whichever option you choose, just make sure they have a strong understanding of user experience and user interface design, experience with responsive design, experience with iOS and Android app development, HTML and CSS skills, and a deep understanding of the type of app you want to build.
Start the Wireframing Process
The next step is to create digital sketches of your mobile app screens and interactive elements. This will help structure the functionality, usability, and aesthetics to ensure it is intuitive and provides a seamless user experience.
Create a Style Guide for Your Mobile Application
In a single document, you should lay out all the design specifications so that everyone who works on your app knows what to work with. It should include:
- Color scheme
- Fonts
- Spacing and positioning guidelines
- Buttons
- Widgets
- Any other relevant design elements.
Start With The Mockups
Now that you have your wireframes and style guide, the next step is to combine them and create the mockups of your mobile app. Remember to check that the design is consistent across all screens and visual elements. You want to create a seamless experience for every user that comes in.
Develop the Prototypes
The final step in the design process is to develop prototypes. They help you simulate the user experience and workflow of your entire mobile application. In other words, the prototypes give you a good idea of how your application will look to the end user.
This is where you can list all the issues and details that need to be resolved before launching. So spend enough time on each screen.
Development, Testing and Deployment
Once you have approved the design of your mobile application, you are ready to move into the development phase. We won’t go into the details in this blog post, but keep in mind that this includes both front-end development (what the user sees and interacts with) and back-end development (the elements responsible for the app’s performance).
When the development team is done, you need to spend time testing your mobile app to make sure it is stable and working without any issues or bugs. You want to prioritize functionality, performance, and security, three elements that will make or break your app.
Finally, it’s time to submit your app to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, fill out the paperwork, and wait for approval. Keep in mind that they may ask you to make changes to your app to meet their criteria.
Once your app is launched, you will need to monitor its performance and keep a close eye on the KPIs you identified in the first step. It’s also important to track your app’s downloads, active users, average visit time, retention, churn, conversions, ratings, and reviews.
8 Mobile App Design Best Practices
As you can see, mobile app design combines two great things: science and art. On the one hand, you need to make your app work properly, solve a problem, and provide a seamless user experience. On the other hand, it has to be visually appealing.
With that in mind, here’s a short list of some best practices that will come in handy for your mobile app design team.
- Simplicity is key. Avoid excess and a cluttered interface; it only distracts and confuses users as to what they should be doing.
- Consistency is important. Fonts, color schemes, and button styles help users feel familiar with your application.
- Design for thumbs. Your mobile app design team should always design for thumbs to ensure users can easily navigate and interact with your app.
- Prioritize readability. Text is the primary source of information for your users, so make sure fonts, sizes, and contrast are easy to read.Use push notifications.
- Make effective use of notifications to keep your users informed of relevant updates and personalized content. Let them decide what they want to receive.
- Make sure each item is tied to an action. Save your users the frustration of swiping or clicking and waiting for a response that never comes. Test every element of your app and tie it to a specific action.
- Use white space. These breathing spaces give the user a sense of harmony and balance. It also helps establish a dual hierarchy.
- Prioritize onboarding. Don’t lose your new users’ interest, use their first few seconds in the app to provide a quick preview of content and only ask for mandatory login information.
What is the Key Factor to Consider When Designing for Mobile Apps?
Your mobile app design team should always work with the user experience in mind. This means understanding your audience, providing intuitive navigation, creating a responsive design, ensuring accessibility, optimizing speed and performance, and maintaining consistency across screens, layouts, and elements.
Best Mobile App Design Software
Even if you’re not the one using the mobile app design tools, it’s always a good idea to know their names and key features. After all, you need to be able to understand what the app designer is saying.
Some of these tools are exclusively for designing, others are there to streamline the process.
- Marvel: one of the best tools for mobile app design as it is a one-stop-shop that provides a huge set of utilities for prototyping, testing, wireframing and more. What makes it even better is that it easily integrates with other tools like Sketch, JIRA, Slack, etc.
- Mockplus: a mobile app design tool that includes everything you need for UI design and prototyping. It includes widget libraries, component libraries, drag-and-drop interactions, and more.
- Adobe XD: perfect for anyone who wants to design, prototype, and build user experiences and interfaces quickly and innovatively. It’s ideal for collaborative projects and lets you move from design to prototyping with a single click. It’s an application that is highly valued by both app designers and app developers.
- Figma: Considered by many to be the best collaborative interface design tool because it allows you to carefully design and prototype. It encourages teamwork, community sharing, uses AI capabilities, and more.
- Framer: This tool is perfect for prototyping complex mobile interactions, tactile experiences, look and feel, and more. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and everything you need to make your mobile app intuitive and engaging.
3 Examples of Great Mobile App Design
Here are some examples of mobile designs that have followed design best practices and conquered the market. Use them as a source of inspiration for what to look for in your own mobile app design. Remember, a successful app not only has to look good, it has to follow mobile app design guidelines, include carefully selected interactive elements, respect the thumb zone, and provide a seamless user experience. Working with a mobile app design agency will help you get there.
- Spotify: The world’s leading music streaming service has nailed its mobile app design. On the one hand, they use color gradients to convey emotion. On the other, they offer a personalized experience based on your music interests and listening habits. Their daily mixes and recommendations increase user engagement and set them apart from the competition.
- PayPal: When you enter this app, you will see that it is very different from other mobile financial apps. They use a bright and vibrant color palette where blue is the dominant color and others help make it more impressive and engaging. All of their CTAs are perfectly placed in a clean design where each screen has its uniqueness.
- Cofe: A mobile app design that simplifies the process of ordering coffee. The interface is simple, clean and easy to use. Its visual elements are clean and clear. As a user, you don’t have to stop and figure out how to place your order or what to do next, the process is easy and the app quickly guides you through each step.
Key Takeaways
- The success of a mobile app hinges on its user experience. A well-designed app should be intuitive, visually appealing, and relevant to the target audience.
- Mobile app design encompasses both UI and UX design. While UI focuses on the visual elements, UX focuses on the user’s overall experience, including navigation, accessibility, and performance.
- Understanding the target audience is crucial. Designers should consider their needs, preferences, and the problems they’re trying to solve.
- Before diving into design, it’s essential to define the app’s purpose, research competitors, choose a platform, and develop a monetization strategy. Creating user personas can help tailor the app to specific user needs.
- Adhering to design best practices like simplicity, consistency, and thumb-friendly design can significantly enhance the user experience. Additionally, using effective tools like Marvel, Mockplus, Adobe XD, Figma, and Framer can streamline the design process.
Conclusion
Launching a successful mobile app is no easy task. As you’ll see in our article, there are many parts to the process of ideation, creation, design, and development. That’s the main reason why we highly recommend working with an app design agency; they not only have the team of designers and developers, but they also have the know-how, experience, and tools needed to make it happen.
As you get ready to start this process, always ask yourself if you would use your app, and if the answer is no, then you need to rethink until you have a product that solves your end users’ pain points.
