A UX guide for creating awesome apps
We all want to build great apps that our users love. So here‘s a guide to creating awesome apps that your users will love.
Consistency & Familiarity
How users feel when using your app is important. Consistency with the platform will ensure that users are familiar with how your app works.
Interaction Design
How users interact with your app should be consistent with how users interact with other apps so follow the platform guidelines. It helps users to immediately know how to interact with your app. Not following them will make your app hard to use it and trust me, that’s not good!
Information Design
Make sure to present information based on what you think is the best to get it across to your users. If you think that you should present your information in graphs, maps, lists, grids, photos etc then that’s exactly what you should do. But you should leverage what the platform provides for presenting information.
Branding
It’s important that you get your brand across to users so that your app is instantly recognisable. Do this by blending your visual identity with the OS design such as adding tint colours to buttons, labels and widgets.
Simplicity
How your app simplifies the lives of your users is key to its success. You constantly hear the word simple when people are praising news apps, “It’s really simple to use” and especially when compared to it’s competitor’s. With that In mind I’ve a few little tips that will improve the simplicity of your app.
Don’t let them get lost
Users should know exactly where they’re in your app so that’s it’s easy to get back there the next time they use it. With this in mind you want your users to be able to discover content and share that content. They’re going to be able to do this a lot easier if you make navigating your app simple for them.
Do the heavy lifting
Instead of getting users to do most of the work, your app should do it so that novices will be able to do tasks that they never dreamed of. Also don’t ask the user for information that you can gather without pestering the user. An example is instead of asking them for their currency, pick one based on their location.
Make decisions
There is a time and place for displaying confirmation dialogs. Every user action does not need one, so it’s acceptable to make some decisions for your users but allow them to revert the decision.
Keep it brief
Making your app content as readable and digestible as possible is a must. Make sure to use short sentences, don’t use industry jargon and speak in same language as your users. By writing clear and short text you’ll ensure that all your messages are brief which in return will make it easier for the user to understand them.
Provide help
Provide your users with help when they need it. This might mean providing tips or hints when they first interact with a certain part of your app or having a dedicated help section. Make sure you keep it up to date and accessible when the user is offline, chances are that’s when they’ll need it the most.
Encouragement
Chances are they’re many similar apps to your one. So you’ll need to encourage users to pick your app over a competitors one. Here’s a few way’s to ensure that you encourage instead of frustrate users and keep them using your app.
Permissions are scary
If your app requires permissions then make sure you ask users at the right time. Not doing this will frightening them with a barrage of permissions. So only ask them for permissions when they’re needed.
Don’t block users
Too many apps ask users to sign up to the app before they can try it out. This will put off new users who are still unsure of whether your app is right for them. Remove blockers by letting users use the basic functionality of your app without needing to sign up or log in.
It should always work
Designing around how your app will respond when things go wrong will result in a better user experience. The app should be able to handle when the user has no internet or when an error occurs. Try to ensure that your “app just works”.
Never spam your users
How might I do this you ask? Push notifications! When done right they add a pleasant experience that keeps bringing users back into your app. But when done wrong it will drive users to uninstall your app. Make sure that any push notifications you send to users are both useful and valuable.
Try to remove bloat
More features in your app doesn’t mean more value but it can increase complexity. Generally, the best apps don’t have the most features but have excellent core features.
Respond to user feedback
Be honest with users and always respond to user feedback if possible. For the DoneDeal app, we made sure to respond to all feedback — good and bad — within a few days. It’s not a good user experience if you only respond to positive feedback and ignore the negative ones.
Enchantment
Some of the best apps and games enchant users, they do that hocus-pocus stuff that makes the user say “WOW!” when using the app. The following are essential to enchanting users.
Make it fast
It’s best to let the user know why they’re waiting. Sometimes you can mask slowness in your app, Expedia, in particular, did a fantastic job of this in their app. Searching for a flight they mask the load time with an interactive flight window which takes the users attention away from the app loading.
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It should be fun 😀
You want your users to keep coming back to your app and for them to enjoy using it. It shouldn’t be a chore for them but rather it should be fun. There are plenty of way’s you can add fun elements into even the bleakest or boring part of your app. Ask yourself is there a way you can make the user smile or how can you present a sense of your humour to the user.
Attention to detail
When developing it’s easy to say “no one will notice that” or “it’s not that important” so you put it off to doing it till later. Generally, it means you’ll never do it because something more important will jump in the way. Don’t do this, it’s important to show an attention to detail when developing an app because it shows that you care. It distinguishes you from the competition and your app will look all the better for it.
Animations & Gestures
The things that bring your app to life. Providing users with that “WOW” moment.
Animations
Should be subtle yet noticeable as well as being both purposeful and informative. They can make your app look very polished and have that wow factor. A warning for having animations in your app is that poor implementation will make your app look crap.
Gestures
They reward users who like to discover things in your app and speed up tasks for your power users. They shouldn’t overtake actions but enhance usability so provide another way of performing the same action — for your less savvy users.
Finally don’t be afraid to mess up. It happens, we’ve all done it at some stage so be brave and if you do mess up, learn from it!
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