In today’s fast-paced digital world, mobile applications are an essential part of our daily lives. From social networking to e-commerce, banking, and entertainment, mobile apps have transformed how we interact with technology. However, with millions of apps available across several app stores, competition is significant. To stand out and create an amazing user experience, developers must adhere to mobile app development best practices. In this article, we’ll look at some key methods and data that can assist improve the user experience (UX) and achieve success for your mobile app.
What is User Experience?
At its core, UX includes all components that influence how people interact with and perceive a product. In mobile app development, UX refers to the tangible, experienced, meaningful, emotive, and valuable aspects of human-machine interaction and product use.
- Usable: A mobile app needs to be effortless to use. It needs to be designed in such a way that is straightforward and intuitive to the user.
- Useful: No matter what, an app needs to fulfill a user’s needs. If the product doesn’t fill a gap in the user’s life, they will not use it.
- Desirable: The user interface (UI) design of a mobile app needs to be aesthetically pleasing. Visual design components play a major role in positive emotional attribution.
- Findable: If a user finds a deficiency in the software, a solution should be immediately apparent.
- Accessible: App design needs to accommodate every user.
- Credible: The company behind the mobile app has to be reliable.
The combination of these six components is what creates value for the user. The priority of any mobile app is to deliver a UX which maximizes user value.
Practices to Enhance Your Mobile App User Experience
UX designers are responsible for attentively studying every facet of a user’s interactions with a mobile application. Without a thorough understanding of user behavior, the product will fall short of meeting users’ requirements and expectations. Achieving a great UX design requires a deep understanding of user behavior, motivations, aims, desires, and needs that are aligned with the app’s purpose. Here are some practices discussed below to enhance mobile app user experience. Let’s delve into it!
Optimize Onboarding
Onboarding is the beginning of a user’s journey with your application. A poor onboarding experience is a typical problem that can degrade your mobile app experience. If you’re experiencing short-term retention challenges, as many apps do, you should rethink your onboarding processes.
Remember that onboarding should ideally aim to minimize your platform’s learning curve, promote feature uptake, pique users’ interest in your services, and highlight your app’s essential components. Popular onboarding flows you can implement include function-oriented, progressive, and benefits-oriented flows.
Conduct UX Research
In an industry where UX trends change so frequently, it’s critical to conduct research on both what’s generally popular in mobile app UX and what’s trending in your specific app category. Looking at the broader ecosystem and understanding the emerging UX trends is crucial for keeping up with user expectations. For example, UX trends emerging in 2022 include AR, VR, motion design, and animations.
When it comes to category-specific trends, you should look into what your competitors are doing to determine the standards for your UX. Food delivery applications, for example, are now expected to provide an easy way for consumers to track the placement, route, and delivery of their orders in real time, with many incorporating a map component that displays a delivery’s progress.
Reduce Friction
App users are impatient and easily disengaged from the app experience when they are inconvenienced or frustrated. The concept of reducing in-app friction is lowering the amount of work users must expend to complete a procedure or achieve their goal. You should find friction spots in your app experience by analyzing user data and determining where and when consumers leave your platform.
Friction can be produced by difficulties in completing a task, such as an inconvenient checkout procedure. It can also mean minimizing the amount of steps required to execute a necessary job, such as placing an order.
Examine User Trends
Assessing high-level trends in your user base allows you to determine where and when your audience is leaving your app, which can help you enhance your UX. Examine trends in app installs, uninstalls, session count, session duration, and more. Figuring out where and when users lose interest or fail to take an action can help you figure out what you need to improve in your UX, and these insights can drive you to the areas you should work on.
On a high level, you should consider measures like Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU), which quantify the number of users active on your platform on a daily and monthly basis.
DAU and MAU are stickiness measures that can tell you how effectively your app retains users over time and where you’re losing them in the UX. These measures serve as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for many mobile-first businesses.
Collect Direct Feedback
Collecting client feedback on aspects of their UX that they are satisfied and dissatisfied with is the most reliable technique to identify the UX adjustments your app needs. Gathering user input allows you to immediately address their concerns, drive particular feature enhancements, and make them feel heard.
Ask users for input on many aspects of the app experience, such as usability, onboarding flows, design elements, and so on. Assume you’re a gaming app. You could, for example, use an in-app survey to gather feedback from customers on three new levels you’ve added to your game.
An In-App Survey is a shorter version of a regular survey that is integrated directly into the app experience. These solutions enable direct and focused engagement with your customers, as well as the seamless collection of data needed to optimize your offering.
Personalize the App Experience
Personalizing your UX based on explicit preferences expressed by users or other data collected about your target audience is a good method to improve your present strategy.
User expectations for personalisation are increasing as organizations acquire more user data across their tech stacks. To personalize your user experience, you can leverage data about a user’s purchasing stage, known preferences, specific behaviors, and personal information.
Play on Human Psychology
You may better engage consumers with your app experience by injecting motivation at key times during their app journey. You can employ a variety of common psychological marketing methods in your UX, such as generating curiosity, creating scarcity, delivering incentives at appropriate stages, or creating a sense of urgency. These strategies have been shown to exert psychological influence and help in developing habits.
For example, strategically timed in-game rewards might activate a user’s dopamine system. Your eCommerce app can create scarcity by providing push alerts that count down to a limited-time deal.
Implement New Design Elements
Regularly upgrading your app’s design is a key strategy to keep your entire UX fresh. If you don’t improve your design on a regular basis, such as updating your app interface, adding new components, reworking logos and layout, and so on, your app experience will fail to keep up with ever-changing standards.
New design components that you may use into your platform include new buttons, an updated menu, new logos and brand colors, and more.
Troubleshoot Crashes
You should regularly monitor the large picture issues that your app is encountering, such as app crashes. When customers experience app crashes, they are more inclined to leave your platform. For example, Android app users can only bear an average daily crash rate of 0.25 percent.
Monitoring and responding to crashes should begin as soon as your app goes live. App crashes can happen for a number of different causes. Memory management, a lack of prior testing, error and exception handling, device compatibility concerns, excessive code, media optimisation, and other factors are common causes of mobile app crashes.
Your teams should address the reasons for app crashes on a regular basis to keep consumers delighted with your UX and reduce the impact of these inconveniences.
Scope Your Competition
When it comes to standing out in your app category, you must understand what your main competitors are doing to improve their UX. What features did your competitors introduce? What elements do they add or remove? Understanding your competitors’ strengths and limitations will allow you to place your platform ahead of other players on the pitch.
For example, suppose you’re a banking app and observe that your main competition has included a new two-way customer support messaging tool. Your product team can decide whether this feature is worth developing and proceed accordingly.
Leverage Push Notifications
Mobile push notifications are an essential channel for mobile apps, and they play an important role in your brand’s ability to provide a connected and fulfilling UX.
This channel can be utilized in a variety of creative ways to improve user experience, including integrating brand touchpoints, rewarding engagement, and incentivizing conversions.
Transactional push messages, such as delivery updates, shipping confirmations, and appointment reminders, that meet a need and directly improve the customer experience, are good examples, as are marketing messages like limited-time offers, seasonal promotions, or subscription upgrade prompts.
Offline Support
Offline support can dramatically improve the user experience, particularly when users have limited or no internet access. According to a Statista survey, [26% of users] remove mobile apps because of limited offline access. You may ensure that customers can engage with your app even when they do not have access to the internet by caching essential data and capabilities.
Security and Privacy
User data security and privacy are critical in today’s digital landscape. According to a Pew Research Centre survey, [79% of adults in the United States] are concerned about how firms utilize personal data. Implement strong security features, like encryption, secure authentication, and frequent security audits, to establish trust in your app’s users.
Gesture-based Navigation
Navigation is critical to the overall user experience. Integrating intuitive gesture-based navigation can improve the overall usability of your software. Swiping, tapping, pinching, and long-pressing are all common movements that users have been accustomed to. According to a Dscout survey, consumers touch their smartphones on average [2,617 times each day].
Accessibility
Accessibility is frequently forgotten, but it is vital to guarantee that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and use your programme efficiently. According to the World Health Organisation, 15% of the world’s population has a disability. By following accessibility principles and standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), you may make your app more inclusive and improve the overall user experience.
Conclusion
Mobile app development necessitates a deliberate strategy to give an improved user experience. You can develop a seamless and engaging app by optimizing performance, embracing responsive design, including gesture-based navigation, and prioritizing personalization and accessibility. In addition, requesting user input, providing offline help, and prioritizing security and privacy are critical for establishing trust and long-term success. By adhering to these best practices and staying current with changing user expectations, your mobile app can prosper in a competitive app market while leaving a lasting impact on its users.
