10 Important Principles Of Mobile Design
Millions of mobile apps are flocking the app stores every month. But only a few make the right cut to success. In today’s scenario where mobile has become a primary mode for accessing the web, your app needs to have the best UI essentials to make it stand out from the crowd. Mobile devices are way too much different from regular desktops and hence you cannot rely on UI principles that apply to the now outdated desktops. Gear up your app design using the following principles of mobile design from the experts:
- Mobile mindset
Get out of your desktop mindset and get into a mobile mindset. Mobile devices vary in screen size, battery power, connectivity and bandwidth. They have powerful functionality achieved with powerful sensors that detect temperature, location, acceleration, movement and proximity. So a mobile app design has to be unique and different from its desktop ancestor.
2. Target the platform
Don’t try to create a same design for all the platforms (blackberry, Android or iOS). Honor the target platform and give consideration to its capabilities and limitations to make the user who chose the platform feel more engaged.
3. Launching
Launching has to make the best impression for new users and invoke curiosity and willingness to explore for returning users. Users are most likely to miss menus and controls, so place your key call to action controls on the launch page. Your app should be able to launch from where the user left off last time to give a feel of responsiveness and speed. Making your initial launch page to be a ‘content- less’ image of your app will avoid user frustrations.
4. Controls
Keep your menus short and sweet. Only the most patient users will stick to your app if it has lengthy menus. Don’t oversimplify either. It is as much as harmful as over complexity. Design in such a way that there is no difficulty in centering the user focus on the current task. Avoid too much scrolling and put your controls at the bottom of the screen.
5. Navigation
Choose a navigation model that makes sense for your app. Make your icon as a navigation control to get back to your homepage easily. The user should be able to seamlessly navigate and explore your app.
6. User input
Choose the simplest method for each input task. Give real time form validation to avoid user frustration at the end of a long task. Design your app for faster thumb typing and choose appropriate auto correct features.
7. Orientation
Though portrait is the most popular orientation used to optimize your app for this case first. Also give support for landscape if your app needs a lot of typing. An orientation lock feature can be quite useful too.
8. Responsiveness
Provide feedback either tactile or visual for each interaction. A responsive app is loved by everyone and will make them stick to it even when an operation takes time.
9. Mobile capabilities
Mobile offers certain capabilities like camera, location services and sensors that can be used by your app to provide a better service. Take advantage of these capabilities to provide optimization in terms of memory and power.
10. Site search
Make the search box prominent and ensure your search results are relevant to the query and context. Let your users explore before committing by giving options for saving your search results. Provide filtering options and guide your user to better results.
These were the most important 10 principles of mobile design that we stick to while designing and developing mobile applications at LetsAlign.
Can you think of anything we missed out? Share your thoughts with us here in the comments or tweet to us @LetsAlign
