On daily basis, we encounter with a number of mobile apps but have you ever thought about developing your own mobile app? If yes, then you must know the ten most important things before moving ahead because without knowing these important things, your mobile app may fail to achieve its purpose. Let’s see what you need to know before actually designing your mobile app.
- Think about your niche or place/category for your app
First of all, it is very important to think about your niche, the place or category that your app will relate to. Every mobile app is designed to meet a specific purpose and none of them is designed to serve the multiple things all in one app. For example, there are apps for ordering food online, buying and selling things, knowing about weather forecasts, maps, or news app. You must define your niche before progressing towards the next step. For example, if you are going to build an app for the business purpose or selling products, there must be clear heads/buttons for “Add Item to Cart” or “Place Order” or “Track Order” etc. Similarly, whatever niche or category you choose for your app, there must be clear representation of its important tasks.
- Clearly define and list your goals
Another important thing is designing a mobile app is to firstly define and list down all the goals that you want your application to serve. For example, if you are developing a mobile app for selling products, your goals may include to develop such a mobile app that provide users the opportunity to view all the products under their heads and sub-sections. Additionally, your goal may include that the app must provide the cart button for the customer where he or she can add all the items for shopping purpose and later on easily proceed to checkout, payment and delivery. Your goal may also include to gain profits through selling a specific category of products to customers within 3-5 business days and by offering COD (Cash on Delivery) of bank pay options. Whatever your goals may be, you must know them before designing your app so that the app can be designed in such a way that meet your desired goals and function in that way which you want.
- Ensure “Clarity” in your design
If a mobile app is so vague that the user downloads it, open it and gets confused about how to access its various sections or information or unable to use it effectively, then your mobile app would fail in long run. In order to avoid this loss, you must design such an app that represents a very clear design for the users where all the titles, sub titles and all such relevant information can be easily seen and assessed by the users. When users open your app, they must be able to know immediately about what services your app offer to them, from just viewing the homepage or front page. The menu of your app should had clear sections without any type of error and everything must be prominent and easily readable.
It must be kept in mind that there should not be the overload of information on the main page of the app that user opens the app and get frustrated immediately by seeing a bulk of information for which he has no time to read. Try to add more visuals and graphics than words wherever possible.
- Never ignore the size of your app
One mistakes that most of the people do is that they design such an app which fails to load properly in different mobile phones, screens or laptops. They ignore the basic criteria of designing the all of being fit to all GUIs and all screens. You must define your margins, layout sizes and everything that may impact the display of your app. Furthermore, the mobile app should also be designed in such a way that the user can easily download it into his/her mobile phone. Another important tip for designing your app is to avoid making it very heavier or larger in size that the user mobile may end up installing it due to memory or space issues in mobile. Such apps may be problematic for the users due to their size and related issues and ultimately they end up moving to another mobile app which serves the same purpose but provide the best platform to meet the users’ specifications.
- Design your app to cater the Multi-user and the Multi-device issues
One important thing to remind you is that a single device may be used by multiple users and a single user may be involved in using multiple devices. In order to remove this confusion, the best every way is to embed the process of registration for new users into your mobile application and the process of “sign in” for existing users. Otherwise, this multi-device or multi-user issues may become highly problematic for your app. For example, if you are selling some product and one user places an order, how would you identify whether he is user “A” or “B” or “C” on the same device who placed the order and to whom you will contact for order processing or confirmation or payment etc. Similarly, it will remove the issues of generating payment bills twice or any such related issues.
Therefore, always ask the new users to register and the existing user to sign-in into the app before performing any task on the app, such as registering or singing-in before placing order for a specific product. Another important thing that must be kept in mind is that the new user registration process should be not more than a minute or 2 because if it will be longer, there are chances that the user may go away from using your app. This is the biggest reason why most of the mobile apps have less traffic while the others with simple processes has more traffic over their app.
- The Platform is everything that either lead to success or failure of your app
Make your to use the simple and best platform for your mobile application that must be user-friendly and would not propose functional issues when running on users’ devices. There are a bulk of platforms available over the internet and mobile app developers usually get confused and choose the wrong platform for their mobile app which further leads towards dysfunctional issues. You must keep in your mind that your platform has the tendency to either make it or break it, either make your mobile app a complete success or a complete failure.
- Use different colors to distinguish and exhibit purposes
It is another important aspect of developing your mobile application. The mistake that has been seen by most of the mobile app developers is that they use very sharp colors in the background and related colors with the content and buttons on the application that reduces the visibility of the content and important sections of your application. Another important thing to consider is to use different combinations of distinguishing colors to make your website more attractive and more enhancing for the users. You should use different colors to highlight the content and important features of your app. However, it must be ensured that the color scheme of your overall mobile application must be in a rhythmic manner that look good and attract the readers.
- Label your icons clearly
Introducing the icons with labels is also the best choice as it greatly helps the new customers or first time visitors to go through your app while understanding its basic function i.e. what it actually does and what purposes it supports. When a person install your mobile application into his mobile, he may not be able about which content is kept under which section. He may face difficulty in finding the required information or required category.
There are also chances that he is unable to understand the basic icons that you have placed in your application. In such cases, the user may click on one icon, realize that he is on the wrong side, goes back to the main menu, then click on another icon, then again realize that he is on the wrong side and again go the main menu and so on. In such cases the user may feel disinterested into your app as he feels it very complex and complicated and start looking for another app that is relatively easy to use. In order to lose your customers in this way, the best option is to start labeling your icons so that every single customer can understand the basic services or categories on your website and easily go through it and reach his desired content. Labelling your icons at your mobile also enhance the beauty and clarity of the content available at the app. Therefore, this point should never be ignored of missing the labels.
- Design ergonomically
Another best thing to consider is to design your apps ergonomically. This means that you will design your applications in a user-friendly way. It is important to keep in mind that we are living in the information age where everyone is using the touch screen electronic devices with only the exception of a few. The trend is changing and the users demand such apps that they can easily operate in their mobile phones and which provides them the ability to use enhanced features. In designing ergonomically, you must consider navigation buttons, allow the diagonal gestures horizontally and vertically and design your apps in such a way that they effectively and efficiently recognize and utilize the thumb’s rotation and the movement of fingers and hands.
- Give feedback wherever needed
It is a very important feature of the best and successful websites and mobile applications that they keep their users engages and satisfied while giving them feedbacks for every action and for every query. For example, when you place an order on an online website for your desired product, a dialogue box appears that “Thank You for placing your order” or “Your order has been placed”. This types of feedback in response to a user’s action gives a feeling of satisfaction to the user that he is doing the right thing or is on the right track. Similarly, if he adds wrong contact number by mistake during placing an online order, the dialogue box should appear that says “Wrong Contact Number. Please Enter a Valid Number”. These types of feedbacks are very important is making the customers feel like you are with him in guiding him how to operate the tasks at your website.
Not only this, but the feedbacks also enhance the customer satisfaction level by ensuring him that he is being listened and answered carefully. Similarly, when a user drag the mouse cursor on some icon, the icon should get a little bigger or glow or highlight or so, because these actions would assure the user that the application is very efficient and responding to him and he might use it again and again. Not only this, but you should also provide the “Contact us” or “Ask a Question” field for the users through which they may ask their queries from you. Not only this, but you can also embed a file in your application which is known as FAQs or frequently asked questions as a way to feedback or response to the customers.
If you are thinking to design your own mobile app, then following all these above discussed 10 advices are the best and valuable assets for you. By using all these characteristics into your mobile application, you can make your app standing high among the bulk of other related aps that do not follow these instructions and thus less attractive and more confusing for the people to use. However, you shouldn’t stick to only these features of designing the best mobile application in your desired category because there are a number of other wonderful features that you can use and design the top ranking mobile applications.
