It is hard to imagine any line of work that could overshadow app development’s potential in 2016. However, this also means that in app development competition is getting tougher than ever. Because of this, you need to find a way to gain a competitive edge and the safest way to do so is to improve mobile app user experience (UX design). This being said, you cannot just go and randomly polish various aspects of your app and hope for things to improve drastically. You need to know where to start and with this in mind, here are some strategies that are known to work.
New Is Not Always Better
Sure, change in this field is usually for the better, but your users usually don’t want too much change. People usually hate leaving their comfort zone, and changing your application too much or making it strongly differ from similar applications can easily leave it discarded. Familiar features are something that strongly appeals to the nostalgia of your customers which in turns gives a significant boost to their UX design. In other words, if you absolutely have to change things, take it one step at the time.
Pay Close Attention to Interface Design
One of the most difficult, yet most important issues you will face here is optimizing your user interface. It is a known fact that visual stimuli are often a determining factor when it comes to response of your users and their disposition towards your app. To make things more complicated, this is not one and the same thing for android and iOS. In facts, these two major competitors are known of releasing updates at an astounding speed and as an app developer you cannot allow for your application to get left behind. Follow them vigorously and although this may seem as a lot of work, it is vital for your overall UX design.
Color and Layout
Now, we already mentioned just how important visual stimulus is for your users, but what this actually means is that you need to pay close attention to both choices of color and layout. When it comes to colors, different hues have different effect on our minds. For example, red and orange are known as energizing while blue and yellow are usually associated with something soft and calming. It would be absurd to talk about a “perfect” color, so what you are looking for is the perfect color for your app in particular.
As for the layout, you would be surprised but there is even a difference in user response between horizontal and vertical layout. Needless to say, phone users usually find scrolling in vertical manner to be more convenient, although other way around may see as new and unique. Still, for all the aforementioned reasons (we mentioned this when we talked about familiarity) this might not be a smart move for your app.
Going for the Minimal
Another smart move might be to try and make your app as minimalistic as possible. In theory, having so many options may indeed sound great, but in reality this only causes a confusion and dissatisfaction in your customers. Sometimes, having too many options can be as frustrating as not having enough and frustration is something you want to avoid your application being associated with. Furthermore, it is known to slow your application down and there is nothing that can diminish your UX design than this it being unresponsive.
Just remember one thing, regardless of how good your app looks, if it is not functional it is absolutely useless. In other words, you need it to do its part and if it can look nice by achieving this, if not, this is still far from your primary concern (although it should be dealt with in time).
Gathering Invaluable Data
Now, most people think that these strategies only exist for the users, when things are not necessarily so. In fact, some of the world’s greatest brands use their apps mostly to keep a track of their customers as well as their habits and dispositions. This gives you not only more intel on your customers in general but also allows you to further personalize your approach to them in form of customer rewards, notifications and promotions. All in all, a great way to work on your branding strategy alongside the market penetration.
Quick Registration
Now, when people first learn about your app, they will want to start using it right away. The easiest method of swaying them from doing so is making a lengthy and complicated registration process, which is going to make them give up halfway through it. In order not to let this happen, what you need is to facilitate this, usually by offering hybrid approach to registration. What this also means is that you need to make your application accessible from your other accounts. This will significantly improve your sign up rate.
From all of this, you can see that improving your UX design and UX in general is not that difficult at all, if you know where to begin improving it. There are so many areas, both functional an practical that require an improvement of some sort and by managing to do this properly, you will do both yourself and your customers a great favor.
