Your website represents the most powerful tool of your business to endorse your products and services. It serves as your salesman 24×7, and as such, could be your most powerful asset and a centerpiece of your marketing efforts.
A website or an app of your business creates a great impression on a customer. However, that impression could be good or bad, depending on various factors.
And to leave a good impression on users, user experience – UX plays an important role in that. User experience is the crux of product design, whether the product is a website, mobile app, or something else. Hence, the majority of the success ratio of your app depends on a quality user experience (UX).
To create an engaging experience, intuitive design, and in-app behavior patterns, you have to understand a product, its target audience, and their pain points. This way, you can exceed your goal and exceed expectations.
As per the study, 90% of all downloaded apps are used only once and then eventually deleted by users. Well, there could be plenty of reasons for deleting it, but the foremost reason is “Poor User Experience”.
“The average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install.”
— Andrew Chen
Yes? So who will go on a second date, if you have not liked the first date?
However, in these ever-changing digital trends, your website can become old and outdated soon. If you think of redesigning an app, you may not have proper access to time and resources for such a massive project. Therefore, you need to consult a web development company or hire graphic designer who helps you overcome this challenge.
In this article, we are curating some ways you can improve your user experience design to make it more helpful and useful for your business.
1. Keep it Simple and Intuitive
Well, keeping a simple and intuitive app design is not a new concept, that I am going to explain to you here.
However, you have to keep things simple while designing the user experience. But, you are not sure what a ‘simple design’ stands for?
One should keep the new app to the minimum. You must know that people use the app based on their previous experience and interactions with a mobile app. There must be some expectation from users that which page or screen should come next. And you have to create and put that screen, which takes the user with a flow.
The other aspect of simplicity lies in the content and the words used in the content. You may have thought that using heavy vocabulary can create an impact on the user. But you are wrong here! If they don’t understand what you are trying to say or convey, the users will not even read the content and move away from your app. Henceforth, you have to use precise language and simple words to let them know. It should define the purpose.
Additionally, having plenty of elements on one screen can lead to destruction and confusion.
The cleaner and simpler the screen is, the easier it will be to keep the users rooted to the screen. Therefore, you should add simple and needed elements.
2. Keep Users in Mind
If you don’t know what your destination is, you can’t reach your goal ever. It’s the same while designing an app. If you don’t know who would be your target users, well, you will lose the game.
If you are unaware of the end-users of your product, it’s likely to fail your expectations of success. But if you know for whom you are developing an app, you will be able to make many design decisions easily.
To develop a great UX for your app, you should know your audience. Before doing anything or developing the wireframe, ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is the targeted user?
- Are they experienced or beginners?
- When they use this app?
- Where do they use this app?
- What do they need to complete their goal?
Still, thinking of, how to find out the needs of your users?
Well, let me explain here! Even with such diverse factors as gender, location, age, and language all mobile users are either result-driven and want to get a quick solution to their problems. They are looking forward to enjoying the process only.
However, if you know the specific and particular users’ demand, that might be more beneficial for your app than pleasing all customer’s categories.
3. Focus on Loading Speed
Mobile app speed or page loading time is one of the major concerns for UX designs. When you start designing your mobile app, you tend to add more elements, fix the positions, make the design more intuitive, and in the process, you forget about the page loading speed.
Well, if your site takes more than 5 seconds to open, your users will not try to visit you again. They will surely choose your competitors. Eventually, you will end up losing your valuable users and decrease traffic on your site.
So, whenever you are designing your app, ensure to keep speed in your mind while adding elements. The higher speed of your app is, the better the user experience is.
4. Keep Consistency in Your App Design
You should know that your app users are sharper and smarter than you. They will observe each and everything in your app. If there is no consistency in the font, design or colors, then they will not prefer to use it for a long time. And generally, if you fail to keep consistency throughout the app design, your user will feel disconnected.
The uniformity of the app design will assure users that they are using the same application and on the right path. It will provide consistency in User Experience. If you don’t use more uniformity in your app, then it will distract users and that will lead to more frustration.
If you hire web designer, they will put all the effort into consistency and make your app design more intuitive. Moreover, as a UX designer, you have to keep the font and size similar across the app. Keep a readable and appropriate color combination and CTA for all the pages.
5. Enhance Search Feature in The App
Whenever a user lands on your app, they have some goal in their mind. It varies from users. Someone wants to buy something or use your services, whereas, someone simply wants to surf and explore the things.
If your app has poor navigation and useful links are difficult to find, then users will leave your app and choose other apps. You can provide a feature of an in-app search engine, which makes it easier for users to search easily and quickly. The seamless navigation design, advanced search, and robust program will enhance the usability of your app.
6. Test an App and Improve It
Testing an app serves as a life-savior. However, testing consists of two main phases which helps you improve your app.
- Remote user testing
- Test analysis
Quality assurance or remote user testing is an important part of any app design. It allows you to know the feedback from the users once they use your product. Once they get the feedback, they will try to improve the changes in the development and fix the bugs if they may meet. Hence, user testing is the best way to come up with an accurate and perfect app in the market.
On the other hand, test analysis is essential for apps as well. Before launching your app worldwide, you can test your app and get rid of errors and fix it. This way, you can launch an error-free app.
7. Use Minimalist Design
Minimalistic speaks louder than any much-crowded design. Putting plenty of elements into a single space will create chaos. It won’t give breathing space to the users and tends to frustrate them. Because too many elements will cause distraction, which eventually leads to customer attrition.
You can utilize a good amount of space with the minimalist design rather than adding too many things. This will surely help you create a conversion.
So, when you develop a wireframe, try to make a balance between the white space and space covered with the elements. The positive-negative space balance will smoothen the eyes of users and retain them for a longer period of time.
If you want to highlight a product or some feature, add some white space around it. It gets highlighted automatically. You need to plan the main content, and then the white space.
Wrapping Up
Well, UI/UX design is not a simple and easy task as you think. It requires versatility, in-depth skills, and experience to create an ideal user experience for an app, which meets the objectives of business at the same time.
For this, you should contact a graphic design company that will design the best app for you. However, while designing an app, you must think of the users’ objectives. You must test your mobile application on a regular basis, too. If you are hiring a mobile app development company, you must ask for the tips or points which are going to be implemented to make an intuitive user experience.
If you or your hired company implement these points, then your mobile application will be more engaging and user friendly for your users.
So what do you think?
How can we improve the mobile app user experience?
Share your views in the comments section.