No one wants to build a poorly designed mobile application. Unfortunately, many mobile apps fail because of critical design mistakes. Generally, User Experience (UX) problems arise from lack of clear understanding of users’ preferences and other issues, resulting into design flaws that cause users to quit the app and never return.
So, how important is the design when you create a mobile application? To be honest, it is the key to superior User Experience and something that marketers continue to struggle with. If provided 15 minutes to spend on content, 2/3rd of users would rather utilize it on something designed beautifully than something plain.
Between December 2013 and December 2015, internet consumption on Smartphones grew by 78%. Mobile devices such as Smartphones and tablets now account for nearly 2 of every 3 minutes spent online. Taking the above statistics in consideration, it can be said that app design or UX has never been so important before. After all, it is a great design and improved user experience that can attract, engage and retain your users.
Therefore, there is no scope for mistakes in app design.
Discussed here are the most common app design mistakes that you should keep an eye for and avoid:
1. Too Much Clutter
It happens when your designers try to stuff many things on the app screen, forgetting that it will be accessed on a device with smaller screen size. Cluttering your app with text and images does not let the items breathe, and can overwhelm your users regarding what to click and what not. Needless to say, improperly designed and cluttered interfaces can simply cause your users to leave or delete your app.
Therefore, strive to follow a simplistic approach while designing UI/UX for a mobile application. You may too many ideas in mind, but the app design should feature only the most important components. Rather than stuffing too many things in one display screen, you may distribute them among different app screens to decongest and at the same time offer superior functionality to users.
2. Improper or Boring Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a step-by-step process of introducing your app to users. While it can be a good way of getting someone oriented quickly with your app, onboarding can also be a lengthy and boring process that may stand in the way of your app content and users. In fact, often the onboarding process is blindly swiped through to get to the content quickly. Sometimes, your users are aware of what your app is all about, and just want to jump in. So, there should be options for that too.
The onboarding process should be more than just an explanation; it should feature the value of the app to engage a user.
3. Lack of Standard Icons and Visual Cues
Often, to be unique, mobile app designers do not incorporate standard icons that have been acclaimed by prominent mobile designers across the world. As app users might be familiar using these icons, completely doing away with them can lead to confusion and even lead users to abandon your app.
On the other hand, what may appear interesting to you may be vague for a first time user. Lack of relevant visual cues may cause users to get perplexed and leave the app. To avoid this, it is recommended to make the app design more intuitive and include universal cues such as navigation models and conventional symbols.
4. Not Taking into Consideration the Importance of UX Design Mapping
One of the biggest mistakes that app designers do is to skip the process of planning an app’s UX architecture and jump directly into the design. However, even before reaching the wireframing stage, it is important to map out the flow and structure of an app. Many designers tend to focus primarily on aesthetics and details, and generally under-appreciate User Experience and the importance of navigation or logic in an app. This can result in major design mistakes, causing your users to leave your app and never come back again.
To avoid this, you must first create the flow of the app based on which the design process should take off. It should always keep the bigger picture in mind.
5. Creating an Ordinary First Impression
According to a report, the rate of users abandoning a mobile app on the first impression is considerably high, at 20%. The first impression of your mobile app design largely determines whether your users will continue using the app or abandon it. A mediocre user impression will leave you nowhere in the competition.
If the mobile application is able to create a strong and engaging first impression, chances that your users would go ahead with app increase significantly. Therefore, it is important that the app creates a powerful and engaging first impression and then offer quality features at further stages to engage the users.
6. Design Inconsistencies
Design inconsistencies are most common, especially when you are trying to incorporate new standards. Are the texts formatted uniformly? Do UI elements behave in intuitive, yet pleasant ways all through the app? Remember, every feature or function does not have an opportunity to introduce a new design. There should be a balance between being aesthetically dynamic and incorporating the common visual language to eliminate design inconsistencies.
Conclusion
The mistakes mentioned above can be extremely costly; especially when you are trying to build an app that is unique and delivers superior user experience and aesthetics at the same time. App designers should take these into consideration so as to avoid them when designing an app.
Author Bio: Mehul Rajput is CEO at Mindinventory – mobile app development company that specialize in designing and development of Android and iOS apps. He also blogs as hobby and love to write about mobile technologies, app development, and mobile app marketing.
Very well written and informative article, the article shows up the common mistakes that take apart while the development of mobile apps. we have to consider each and every mistake that occurs while app development. thank you for sharing such an article with us. keep sharing.
Yes, absolutely these are common mistake developers going to do you and every developer once should go through these kinds of articles, so they can gain bit knowledge and avoid errors. thank you for sharing this nice article.
First of all Thanks to Ravi Ahuja for sharing such an informative content on app promotion. I am on the same boat actually, since i am a android developer and very interested in SEO too, recently in our company we have developed a very innovative IOT app based on Artificial intelligence and its still in beta stage and definitely I will implement the points you mentioned above.