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October 22, 2019
The market today is all about a customer-centric approach. When designing a project, you must put yourself in the user’s shoes to deliver exactly what they need. The inability to do so can lead to users leaving your platform for a competitor or just not become recurring clients.
To ensure a good user retention rate, the user experience needs to be seamless. The central idea is to create a clean interface, with accessibility to the most important functions and clear application flow. Giving users control is also an excellent way to provide a custom solution that fits individual needs!
How do you make a user-friendly app? Let’s take a look at some of the things to do and some things to avoid when designing an application from the UX perspective.
The To-Do list!
Make Navigation Intuitive
It’s no secret that people often scroll through applications when they need something, or if they’re bored and casually using their phones. In both these cases, the lack of intuitive navigation across different sections of an app can be a pain for the users.
Users need to be able to identify swiftly what their next steps can be and how to do them. This also applies to their ability to search for things or find things in the application.
As designers, using conceptual icons or images can help in relaying such information. Using a newspaper icon for the news section or an avatar for the user profile helps guide the user. Moreover, to ensure a seamless experience, pre-design work is also important where you decide the application’s flow.
Here you can sure there’s no going back and forward to complete one simple task. Every task should feel like a progressive process. Step one to step five, in the best manner. For this, you need to understand your user, their needs and demands. Conduct this market research or use deductive reasoning to come up with a great flow.
Seamless Experience and Compatibility.
In this age of technology, users keep on shifting their mobile devices, upgrading them to the next best in the market. Here, it is important to ensure that your app design works best across devices and is compatible with iPhones to Android devices. From tablets to iPads, creating a seamless experience ensures user satisfaction.
Standardizing the experience across devices help create consumer loyalty, in a world with ample choices for them.
A Touch of Personalization as Empowerment
Personalization can help improve the user experience exponentially. There are two crucial elements to personalization that can help achieve results.
First, the content or marketing strategies implemented should be specific to each client’s consumer pattern. This can be based on their search history and their behavior on the application. By giving clients what they are looking for, you can help create convenience that in turn, improves retention.
Second, you can give users the ability to customize the UI to a certain degree by allowing them to place items or sections in their preferred position. This can help empower users and make them feel in control.
While there are always restrictions to the extent to which this is possible, variable placeholders are important. The key is to find the right balance between creating chaos on the application by allowing any and all customization or allowing none of it.
Letting users choose where they want certain icons or sections in a list based on their personal preference improves UX greatly, without harming the functionality of the app.
Designing the layout
Designing mobile layouts isn’t entirely different from designing any other kind of layout, but there are certain considerations designers need to take into account.
An important consideration when designing an app is to understand the most accessible points on a mobile screen. The “thumb zone” is the area of a phone’s screen that is most accessible with the thumbs when a person is holding their phone in their hand. Place the most frequently used features or Call to Action improves the user experience.
It also helps the process of developing muscle memory. This allows a casual use of the application and increases the amount of time spent by users on the application.
Furthermore, having a clear typographic hierarchy is important to mobile app design.
The information you provide should be easily readable and spaced well. The line spacing, the font, the size of the headings should all be easy to read.
This ensures that users can easily find relevant information and don’t have to strain their eyes. It makes the experience on the application more pleasing. Strategizing which text should be bold, which should be italic is all part of this process.
Clear information processing is a great asset that doesn’t push away users simply because the information is too hard to find or too hard to read.
Things to avoid when designing an App:
Screen cluttering over minimalism.
A user-friendly app design company understands that there needs to be restraint in the information you provide on a screen. A minimalistic design is better than a design that oversaturates the function of the screen.
Each screen of the design is supposed to fulfill a function, and the design should aid in highlighting that. Reduce what is happening on the screen and keep what is important.
De-cluttering can be done by identifying design elements that don’t help with the functionality and thus are less likely to impact the user experience.
Color contrasting is also fundamental within this principle. Apart from branding, your call to actions or main features should pop out more on the screen. This shouldn’t differ in sunlight or unnatural light.
This attracts user attention to do what you want them to do on the platform. This is how you utilize branding and design to drive customer engagement on the application.
Don’t put too much on the screen, don’t try to cram information or features in and keep the design clean and simple.
Providing irrelevant information – Don’t forget your target audience
A lot of times, businesses flood the design with the information they think is important for the business. This is an intuitive decision based on the goals of the brand.
This can be a problem. Sometimes, the information you want to give out might not necessarily relate to your target audience.
If businesses want to put out certain information, they should still follow the “customer first” approach. This reduces the amount of irrelevant information a user has to go through to filter out what they need.
The user experience needs to reduce the filtration process, and for that, you need to remember who your users are and why they use your application.
Don’t Ask For Rating and Permissions Immediately
As a user, one of the most annoying things that could happen to me is applications asking for a rating as soon as I start using it.
This is because I haven’t established a relationship with the brand or platform yet. My mind is unmade on how useful the application is to me. Most likely, users like me will never rate an application and get disenfranchised from it.
Perhaps the best time to ask for a rating is when a user accomplishes something on the application. This is basic psychology. If the user feels like they’ve achieved something, they are more likely to not hate the platform for asking for a rating.
Pre-set determinants or milestones, after which a request for a rating is generated for the user, is a better alternative. This helps them find a use for the app in their daily lives without thinking of it as a transaction. This helps provide a better user experience and develop a better consumer relationship.
Similarly, asking for permission can be a problem if asked up top, the moment someone launches the application. Rather, a great way to integrate design into this process is to ask for permission along the user journey.
The moment in which a user tries to utilize a feature that requires permission, a design-driven permission request can be sent. This creates an urge not just to accept to use the feature, but it also doesn’t feel unnecessary.
