Five Important Tips to make Your App Design from Good to Great

Enough has been written about good app design. It’s time to take things up a notch. Today, let’s talk about GREAT APP DESIGN – one that transcends the boundaries of good and pushes designers to create extraordinary experiences that redefine app UI/UX design. How to create an app design that becomes exemplary? Design that wraps itself around the user’s needs and intuitively provides users all the guidance they need to navigate your app smoothly. Design that answers users’ questions before they have to ask, and shows them the way forward before they need to find. App design that evokes the right emotion and gets users to feel a certain way. In short, design that delights your users and keeps them coming back to your app.

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Such a design goes beyond aesthetics and visual appeal. Great app design gets the work done. In this post, we are going to share with you the secrets to making your app design truly intuitive and functional, in addition to being stunningly beautiful.

Understand the Users and Their Emotional Journey

Armed with our powerful smartphones, be ready to take on digitization. Online shopping, mobile banking, it all comes naturally to us. Or so we think.

The truth is that the honeymoon period of digitization has passed. Your app users now need humanization. They demand seamless, on-demand experiences. Showing user paying bills on their phones is better than queuing up the utility office, was easy. Today, users are no longer happy navigating a cryptic internet portal just to pay bills. Millennial and Gen Z users grew up with smartphones and don’t really care about how hard bill payments used to be in the pre-internet era. They only expect the technology to get better day by day. They expect mobile transactions to be as simple as handing a dollar bill and taking the groceries.

Great app design is the one your users can’t see. Don’t design your food ordering app sometimes makes show the complexities you’ve tackled to make the app possible. Design the app in a way that makes the app look like a piece of nice cake. Design for the simplest layman. Let all the complicated functions happen in the background, while the user should be able to get his work done in the minimum number of clicks possible.

Minimize the User’s Work, Use Intelligent Defaults

The idea is to give the users a feeling of having accomplished something. They should have saved time if I am ordering dinner (ex. Pizza), it’s clearly because I need quick and effortless food. But the food ordering mobile app sometimes makes me scroll through 4 assorted lists, choose each topping individually, touch a dozen of buttons in the app, and sometimes it loses all my information because of one error and I have to start the entire process again. Now if it takes a good Ten minutes just placing my order and the 20 minutes, waiting for the pizza to arrive, I can’t help but feel that I could’ve made myself some mac and cheese.

Your mobile app design needs to be intuitive, it needs to predict user needs, it needs to offer intelligent defaults. Think how much easier it would have been to order my pizza if all the regular toppings had already been selected, and I could just unselect the one or two which I don’t want.

Design apps to do most of the work for your users. Be it typing, choosing, deciding or any other form of work, reduce the effort a user has to put in.

Be Subtle With Your Animations and Visuals

You want your mobile app to be used repeatedly. You won’t end-users use your app several times a day. So keep that in mind when designing animations, micro-interactions and visual effects for the app. You could come up with a really lively, interesting and complex animation that looks truly stunning in your app design. But will it look stunning after the user has seen it a hundred times? (No!!) When it comes to repeated usage, over-the-top, complex and multi-faceted animations could get distressing. It is safer to choose simplicity and minimalism. If overdone, animation will turn into the cognitive load, so know where to stop.

Don’t Ask What You Don’t Need Right Away

Most of the users don’t like to be questioned too much. If it’s not absolutely necessary, don’t ask. Enough has been written about why apps should simply do away with the login page. You understand by now that forcing the users to divulge their email address and other personal info can be detrimental to an application. Of course, apps need to get enough users to sign up, but it is better to let them use the app continuously and grow a liking for it, at which point they’ll be happy to sign up.

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Similarly, not all apps need to know the gender, age or address of the end-user. At least not until a specific need shows itself. Refrain from asking too many questions and only solicit information that is indispensable. Doing so will help build the trust of your users, making it a little easier to turn them into loyal users.

Talk along the Way

That’s right, you need to talk to your app users, show them the way and use positive reinforcements to encourage users to complete the transactions they came for.

Using creative copy and leading the way for your app users can greatly help you humanize the user experience and help build empathy. 

Especially when yours is a utility application, as opposed to a gaming app, you know that the user is here to get something done. Be it ordering food, downloading music, buying products or anything else, most apps are work. They have a user flow that leads to the user taking an action in app. Using phrases like ‘thanks for coming on board, let us show you the way’ or ‘just one more step to get you onboard’, can be helpful in making the app user comfortable and gently nudging them to your CTA. So be extra careful with your copy, make it conversational and establish a relationship with your app users that will keep them coming back.