Home screen is your main menu

The way we use software has changed a lot since modern mobile operating systems became popular. User’s expectations also changed. Now everyone wants to do one particular task as quickly and efficiently as possible. One thing that is often neglected by mobile app designers is the fact that you cannot count interactions from the moment application is launched.

So do I need to care about my app placement on user’s screen?

Not exactly. But I think that this should be factored into the design. Especially for more advanced apps.

Let’s look at the short video example — to create new a task in Jira I need to perform 3 interactions. One of them could be omitted if the app wasn’t in a folder but it’s still more than average UX flowchart would show.

This is, of course something that designers cannot foresee, users can place the app wherever they want. What they can do though is design interface in a way that focuses on short interaction paths and leverage that fact that home screen is the best and most customizable main menu that their app can have.

Split!

Google, for example could go with a combined approach and pack Analytics and Adwords into the same app, they could possibly even squeeze My Business into the same icon. All of the tasks that those apps do are somewhat related. Instead, we have 3 different applications that users can choose to install and place independently.

The same thing is happening with Atlassian suite, Jira and Confluence are separate apps to keep them simple.

Creating multiple applications can be definitely more expensive and time-consuming. The benefit outweighs the costs in most cases thought. The same approach that is used by software architects to divide responsibilities between microservices can be used by designers to split responsibilities among different apps. Thanks to such approach, we are cutting down at least interaction from the user’s path. At the same time, all applications can have much simpler UI what further enhances user experience.

How to split?

The first sign that application could be split is having two separate sections that serve different purposes. For example, I don’t use Medium on iPhone to write stories, the desktop version is my tool of choice. I would be very happy to be able to access statistics on mobile on a separate app and don’t need to wait for the system to load all the stuff that is needed to show recommended stories.

Other benefits

• Different applications can follow different UI patterns, they don’t need to be 100% consistent with one another. That helps to adjust UI to the task that the app needs to perform.
• Maintenance is easier. Modernising, redesigning and improving smaller projects is easier.
• More accurate feedback from users. They can focus on smaller, coherent experience and help you make it better without thinking about rest of the app.
• Users have a choice. They don’t need to install a huge application that takes a lot of the precious space on their precious device, they can choose what to install.