Best Practices for Mobile App Design

A well-designed app doesn’t occur overnight, and any good application goes through rigorous testing, feedback, and iterations before being swiped about by potential users. A great application feels natural, like it’s just part of your phone. A badly designed app feels cheap and often counterintuitive. 

In this blog, we are going to take a look at what we believe are the best practices to keep in mind during the development journey of a mobile app – and we have made a lot. 

Empathy-driven design:

An Agile development process enables you to achieve a desired product quickly through ongoing development, testing, and iteration. Embedded within this process you need empathy-driven desire, which allows you to understand users and design from their motivation, not yours, all of which leads to a more refined development process and a better end product. 

Testing, testing, testing:

Ideally, your new application will reach as wide an audience as possible. So, testing your application with a wide variety of potential users is critical. While the vast majority of the population now owns a smartphone, the use cases and technical skill levels vary wildly across countries, age groups, and languages. 

Performing user testing allows you to identify slow spots in an application, or test the wording across screens. You might need to implement a short tutorial upon first launching the application, or adjust the size of buttons or text. This circles back to why empathy-driven design and the agile development process are so important in modern development techniques, as both employed together allow for swift and inexpensive changes throughout the testing process. 

Behaviour-driven design:

This goes hand-in-hand with empathy-driven design. In both, you are considering your application from the users’ perspective and needs, the only difference being that in behaviour-driven design, you are talking directly with users to gain real-world feedback that can inform future iterations. Using these design approaches, the advice is to iterate, and keep iterating based on feedback till you’ve got it right. 

Simple is best, best is simple:

During the development of the first iPhone, Steve Jobs famously reviewed every single screen and said if he couldn’t complete an interaction in three intuitive clicks or fewer, he would tell his team to go back to the drawing board. 

That was over 14 years ago, and phones have become so much more advanced and complicated – but in this case, apps should stay in the past. Nobody wants to dig to find a feature, or scroll for too long, or have to complete a complex set of steps. Keep it simple. 

When considering functionality, it is important to reduce complexity and remove unnecessary features identified through behavioural and empathic design methodologies. When you focus on what is necessary, you will naturally impact your overall design aesthetic, resulting in an app that delivers what your users want without overly complicating the delivery of that functionality. 

How Poeta can help:

Poeta is your one-stop shop for all your digital needs. We can make any idea a reality, and our team of experts are fluent in all the coding languages, development platforms and services required. We follow all of these UX best practices in the applications we develop for both mobile and desktop, and we meticulously test throughout the entire design process using both empathy- and behaviour-based design methods.

We know that a truly effective app is one that solves a problem. It’s the result of a lot of questions, a lot of info gathering, and plenty of testing. We’ll work closely with you to develop the right tool for the job. Poeta builds digital solutions and lasting friendships. As your development team, we’ll offer ongoing support services to make sure your digital product leads the market. 

So, get in touch today. We would love to hear from you.