If you are a mobile app developer looking for inspiration to improve the user experience and make your app a worldwide success, you need to look at it from the user’s perspective. From theme to GUI, your app is an experience yet to be felt by the user. But best experiences are the physical ones, and your app is on a digital screen. So how do you make your users feel your app?
Real World Model
When users interact with your app, they want to feel that they are navigating through it the right way, without making any mistakes. To give that experience, you need to familiarize them with the app. Apple, in its early days of app-making, represented the items in its UI design resemble its real world counterparts (like using the graphics of an envelope to display the inbox). This imparts a personal touch and makes the users interact with the app more.
Moreover, differing from the larger desktop app designs, the UX design of the mobile app needs to be narrowly focused and more targeted on a particular call-to-action basis. This enables quick access to the user.
Design Through Time
Even with continuous technological advancements, where smartphones and tablets are being used by all generations, the approach to UX design doesn’t change (Research + Sketching + Prototyping = Complete App). But the outcome does!
Due to kids not habituated to accurately tapping, developing apps for children might need prominent call-to-action buttons. For the elderly, a clear explanation of how the app works might be helpful, owing to their limited experience in the tech-savvy world.
For the Y-gen, who’ve grown up using smartphones, it might be easier to include a certain degree of mystery to the app for them to experiment and unfold. Pokémon Go was one such app which left everything, right from how to use the app to play with friends, in the hands of the user. There was no manual which gave a detailed explanation of the game. This could be the main reason behind the worldwide popularity of Pokémon. Maybe, the app developers designed their app based on the instinct that people will identify with it more, if left to their probing nature of the users to discover how the game works.
Compromised UX
Talking about the same game, Pokémon Go didn’t sail through its initial stages of release glitch free. It failed to load on several devices and crashed multiple times. It even caused fast battery drainage with prolonged use. With all these technical faults and terrible UX, it still persevered. This means that there might be several other apps which would not be technically sound in their entirety, but still have a strong brand presence. This leads to a successful app in the long run.
Optimized UX
An app which has brilliant minimalistic design features and gives you easy access to its specific function is all the experience that the users need. Weather Apps like Solar allow its users to just swipe up and down to see the weather outlook at different times of a day. A gesture-based app gives users a visually stimulating experience. If you are designing an app that is used every day, you need to design it in a way so that users ‘almost don’t have to think about what they are doing‘. Intuitive UX design will become more ubiquitous with the coming days owing to multi device computing.
Service-Based Apps
Assistant apps like Pana (travel agent assistant) or Vida (health coach app) rely on interface parameters associated with social media, where interaction with real life travel agents and personal trainers takes
place via video chat or messaging. This approach makes you feel more comfortable when you know that there is a human on the other side, not a bot.
The future of UX design lies in the hands of designers and developers who live-in-the-current. Users want to use the app with minimum additional thought or effort, and you have to take them through this experience.
For More Information
We hope this post helped you develop an understanding of experience design. To learn more about our apps development or UI/UX design services, please write to us at info@sutecindia.com. We are ready to design your app success.
