4 Keys To Designing A Great Mobile App

From Amy Ngai, Thunkable Product Designer

So you’ve made your first Thunkable app. It works exactly how you want, but something’s missing. It doesn’t look as nice as you had imagined it. I won’t drone on about the differences about UX and UI design in this article (don’t worry, we’ll get to that soon enough) instead, let’s go over some basic visual design principles to help your apps come to life.

Why doesn’t my app look good?

Many articles talk about visual design being subjective, however, there are some common principles that can be the building blocks of any effective visual design.

• Hierarchy
• Consistency + Cleanliness
• White space
• Brand tone

Our very own head of creative success Domhnall created this app the other week for one of our Weekly Design Challenges…

Let me go through the principles I’ve outlined above to help improve the visual design of this app.

Establish a Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy tells the user in what order they should look at the elements on a page. This can be accomplished by how components are laid out on a screen, visual weight, relative size, and contrasting colors. A successful layout balances these properties and can visually showcase to a user what to look at first.

• Location: In most western countries, we read from left to right and top to bottom. This trick can help you organize your items in a layout by placing the most important items near the top left and the least important or last items on the bottom. When designing the UX of an app, you can also keep this trick in mind when adding buttons to go forward and backwards. Right and bottom will often mean “next”, so try to utilize different areas of your screen to help users know where to go.

• Weight: Instead of making components bigger to indicate importance, think of changing its weight instead. Weight can be created by making a font bolder or darker. The opposite is also true, lessen the visual weight of a subtitle by lightening the font color, or even use a thinner font. Not all fonts need to be black — use tones to create visual weight.

• Size: The larger the better right? Not always. While a large item can indicate a more important object, it can also take over the items on a page when clashing with other parts of your visual design.

• Color: The brightness and saturation of a particular color can draw a lot of attention to an object on your page. Colors can also represent a lot of meaning. Red will often indicate danger, yellow as a warning, and green as success. With this in mind, try to design your page without color first to see if your hierarchy works, then add in color later to enhance its visual appeal.

With the example of the KitKat or Candle app, because all of the items are the same size, but have a slightly different weight, the present hierarchy shows the score being the most important, followed by the remix button, then the question, then the kitkat and candle buttons. In redesigning it, the first exercise to do is to determine the relative order that I want my users to look at each object.

Consistency & Cleanliness

Whereas a lack of hierarchy can make an app feel confusing, the lack of consistency and cleanliness in an app will make it look messy. The top 3 things that contribute to a messy-looking app is poor alignment, too many styles, and low-resolution images.

Poor alignment: Have you ever looked at those photos of items laid together in a grid? They feel super satisfying, don’t they? This is because the human eye craves order and pattern. When we see objects aligned, they feel whole; however, the minute we see things out of order, it calls out to us — drawing attention to the chaos. We use alignment in design to create structure on a page.

Source: Unsplash

Too many styles: Think about style like creating a matching outfit. When there are too many clashing patterns and colors, an outfit can look messy. That’s not to say contrasting patterns can’t be pulled off. Hey, Harry Styles can do it well by maybe you shouldn’t try that approach for your app… So for the rest of us, it’s easier to pick a theme and stick to it. What this means in the world of interface design is to think about component attributes and how we might stick to them. In this image, I’ve laid out a few ways that the button styles can be used. When you’ve picked a style, try to make all your buttons feel the same.

Low-resolution images: I don’t know about you, but blurry photos make my eyes hurt. They make me feel like I need glasses (aside from the ones I’m already wearing). So how do we fix this when making an app?

Generally, our eyes can perceive 300ppi (that’s pixels per inch) on a screen as looking nearly “real to life”. Anything less than that looks blurry, and anything more is pretty indistinguishable. In the days where monitors were less sharp, we could get away with low-resolution images — this is because nearly everything on the web at 72 ppi didn’t look very sharp. However, as screens and monitors start to improve, so too do our images. The Apple retina display can display 226 ppi and the new Super Retina display can display 458 ppi!

So what does that mean for exporting images? Basically, because a retina screen can display twice as many pixels per inch, our images need to be twice as big to show up sharper. In programs like Figma or sketch, you can export at 2x or at 3x. In other programs like Photoshop, you can set the export ppi/dpi to 200 or 300. This means that if your image is 250x500 pixels, the exported image size will be at least 500x1000 or even 750x1500 pixels.

White Space

Now that we’ve learned some rules about how to put components on a page and line them up, let’s talk about space. My old graphic design teacher liked to talk about how visual design is like creating a physical space. Imagine a little person walking around the room of your design. Can they move around comfortably? Do they get stuck in the corners or between objects? Is there too much space between 2 objects and the room feels empty? All these feelings we get in physical spaces translate very well to digital ones as well.

I personally like the standard of using the 8-pt grid system. A quick google will get you tons of articles on how to set it up (here are a few) but put simply, it sets a system where all the spaces between is a multiple of 8 — small items are 8 px apart, medium items can be 16 px or 32px, larger gutters and margins can be 64px etc etc. I love this system to fall back on because as mentioned above, consistency is the key to a clean UI.

Designing in Greys

With all the principles in mind, we can rearrange the items in the original design as a wireframe.

At this point, we’re not thinking about what the final images and style are, we’re merely thinking about hierarchy, layout, and relative sizing. This is a great first step to make sure your app feels right before finalizing the colors, fonts, and images of the final app.

Brand Tone

Finally, let’s talk about branding. There’s a whole other article that can be written about branding, but let’s cover the basics. In the consistency section, I showed some examples of how styling a button can create different looks, so the question is how do we go about deciding which look to go for?

In order to keep it simple, let’s not dive too deep into the nuances of developing a brand and instead keep the focus on making the app consistent and clean. My best rule of thumb to do this is:

• Define a small set of greys to use (4–5, ranging from light grey to dark grey)
• Define 1 primary color (try to limit yourself to just 1 primary color)

To help me define this set of colors with my KitKat and candle app, I’m going to first find the images for my buttons and base the rest of the styles around that.

I found these images at https://www.flaticon.com/

With these images as my base, here are the colors I picked as my grey palette and the blue I chose as my primary color. Notice that grey’s don’t have to be pure grey (eg: the same percentage as in all 3 primary colors). Instead, think of your grays having some tonality. In the image below, I took the warmness of the yellow candle and inserted that warmth into my 2 middle grey colors. In my lightest and darkest grey, they have a slight blue tinge so that I might have some contrasting hues. The dark blue that I picked is the same as the base of the candle image.

After choosing some colors, let’s choose some styles. The images are very flat, so I won’t add any extra shadows or gradients to my button styles. I also noticed these small rounded corners in both images and wanted to invoke that into my button styles.

And here’s the end result:

Not too shabby. We’re not winning any awards, but it’s clean, clear, and much more usable than how we started! If you want to check out the final app: https://x.thunkable.com/projectPage/6077882727e0bb00122716e5

I hope you've learned a little today, and until next time, happy thunking!

To get started designing your perfect app, check out Thunkable! We are the no-code development platform that makes it easy and fun to build native mobile apps.