App Design: Enabling Businesses To Take Great Strides

When you have only 10 minutes to visit the National Gallery in London, what do you do? You quickly ask about Van Gogh paintings, then find the Sunflowers, and then relax. You will have the best experience in such a short time. The mobile app design resembles this visit, where people get a feel of the app design in a few seconds.

The UI paints a picture of UX because the people don’t have time to waste on poor UI. They are looking for sunflowers in your app design. If the website images take too long to load, the layout is unattractive, the design elements are not properly organized, and the design appears cluttered, then users take no time in abandoning the app.

Let’s dip your toes in the water to know what statistics are saying:

• 75% of people give time to read the content that’s beautifully designed when they have 15 minutes to navigate the app.
• 90% of people stop using the app if images take too long to load.
• 74% of the visitors return to the app if it delivers a good user experience.

The UI and UX statistics showcase that it’s essential to master the art of app design, or else you lose the game. Before digging deeper to know- how to engineer an exceptional design, let’s understand the core concept of app design in a nutshell.

What is app design?

The app design is a front-end of the mobile application that users can view and enable them to navigate through the app. The visual interface is not only a combination of colors, fonts, animation, buttons, and other design elements. Instead, it’s beyond the rich visuals. The team of designers and developers conduct market research, create a prototype, conduct user interviews, and perform rigorous testing to craft the app’s UI that ensures seamless UX rendering.

The app design is a perfect blend of UI and UX design that is ultimately responsible for wow experience delivery. UI is a visual interface that users can view and UX is the interactive part of the interface that enables users seamlessly interact with the application. Let’s understand the differences between the two.

UI designing

UI designing is all about deciding the graphical presentation of the visual elements such as color scheme, icons, typography, and spacing on the layout that makes it aesthetically pleasing and appealing. The app UI design showcase brand’s identity which helps in attracting more customers.

UX designing

UX designing involves making the users smoothly interact with app design by knowing the customers’ emotions, perceptions, feelings, satisfaction, and judgment ability better. The easier and simpler is to access and interact with the app functionalities, the better is UX design considered.

Which are the differences between UI and UX design?

Often, UI and UX design are not understood fairly. Commonly, if the UI design makes the users experience the product/service, then you are a UX designer. It’s the biggest myth. It’s like- if you can fix the problem in the pipeline, you are a plumber.

The UI and UX design are two different things, but not comparable at all. Both of them are made up of a bunch of different design components which together make up the user experience. However, using the two terms interchangeably is wrong.

“UI is focused on the product, a series of snapshots in time that is specific to visual style, structure, labels, and more. UX focuses on the user and their journey through the product.” – Scott Jenson, former product strategist at Google.

What are the benefits of UI/UX design to realize business success?

Optimize Productivity

The well-researched and well-crafted app’s UI allows users to easily search what they are looking for and navigate through the app smoothly. It satisfies the users and improves the chances of buying on impulse, which, in return, improves efficiency and productivity.

Improved Conversion

The user research and usability testing help in knowing the navigation structure, layout, minimal design, and content that users like to see on the app, which intrigues them. You can consider the app design tips that help in engineering user-focused design which boosts conversion rate and maximize customer retention.

Enhance Consistency

UI and UX design are not only about adding visual components consistently. Instead, it’s about using the right mix of UI and UX design components that provide a unique look and feel to the mobile app. The tailored design that has all the visual elements arranged in sync and consistently, they deliver the best user experience.

Reduce Designing Costs

The well-planned design engineering reduces the time, resources, and effort investment that otherwise go in vain in crafting irrelevant or unnecessary design elements. Also, it eliminates the chances of changing or upgrading the design frequently which saves huge bucks and time.

This is why, mobile app development companies always conduct user research for app design that remove the redundant efforts that get wasted in iterating the design multiple times, which further reduces the development cost. The research enables creating a design plan that’s aligned with users’ needs, which makes the app design approved at one time or needs trivial changes.

Seize an extra edge

Amidst fierce competition, the businesses are nearly offering similar products/services with slight differences, which makes it important to make the app stand out with a unique design. The app design can engage the visitors, makes them repetitively return, and make the purchase. The exceptional app design allows the business to perform exceptionally in the market.

How to engineer the exceptional app design that enables businesses to stay successful?

Product hypothesis

At first, the client is asked to share the project scope so that the team can hypothesize the project goals and the real-world problem that it solves for the target audience followed by visual design expectations. The information is crucial in outlining the opportunities and possible challenges in the app design from the get-go.

Discovery workshop

Wearing the users’ shoes is important to identify what users’ needs and challenges they are facing. The discovery workshop helps in unfolding the world’s reality. The best app designers start conducting in-depth market research and user research to come up with the app design that appeals to the users and makes the app stay ahead of the game.

The research includes analyzing user behavior, browsing habits, content preferences, and other patterns through surveys and interviews. It enables building and strengthening the emotional connection with target users.

UX wireframe creation

The low-level presentation of the app’s UI before it’s designed is termed a wireframe that defines UI structure, interactions, and transitions. There are multiple tools available that facilitate designers to create wireframes using drag and drop options for buttons, arrows, shapes, and more.

The clickable wireframe gives a rough idea tothe client that how future app design works in a flow. It’s a good alternative to test the waters through UX wireframe creation rather than reinventing the wheel when app design is built. You can consider these tips to build an efficient wireframe.

Prototype building

Low-fidelity to high-fidelity prototypes are created that enable the design team to communicate the app flow and experience the design visually to the business client. The digital prototype replicates the future app design fairly. Post-wireframe creation, low-fidelity prototype development is preferred as it’s an inexpensive and time-savvy approach. It doesn’t make sense to waste money when the purpose of prototype development, that’s checking the app’s look and feel is served with a low-fidelity prototype.

UI designing

We did UX research, created a wireframe, and built the prototype to know how the app works and looks. The result gained after UX testing and iteration, is brought into shape with UI designing. Here, UI designers experiment with fonts, color schemes, buttons, animation, illustration drawings, shapes, and others to craft elegant UI.

App design testing

The UI designed once is tested and iterated multiple times to ensure it goes well with the target audience when the app is launched. The A/B testing, user testing, and surveys are conducted to ensure the design gets validated by the target users and exceeds the client’s expectations.

Finally, it’s time for design rendering

The app design is crafted using an agile methodology so discovery, wireframing, designing, and testing go on for every sprint. The app design is passed to the development team and then delivered to the client in parts for their approval so that the designing tasks move ahead consecutively.

Wrapping it up

The app design is not a work of an average Joe. It requires professionalism, creative twist, and aesthetic design engineering that makes the app design meticulous and enables the business to achieve goals. Nailing the art of app designing requires going through all the app designing tips and using tactical design strategies that enable mapping UI/UX carefully from UI research to design delivery. Build the design that goes beyond UI designing and engineer unparalleled UX.