10 Mobile UX Design Principles Every Designer Should Know

Mobile Tech is changing faster than anything right now and along with it mobile UX Design principles for designers.

 

In the past few years, the mobile industry has witnessed many innovations, from fingerprint scanners to face recognition, text to voice search; the transformation is tremendous.

 

As the mobile industry is changing itself with every passing day, the trends in the UX design world are changing too.

 

If you’re planning to build an app, you need to make sure that it’s both useful and instinctive.

 

Useful because there’s no point in downloading and app that isn’t useful and instinctive because even the app is useful but needs a lot of time and effort, users won’t keep it for long.

 

Recently, Google in collaboration with Apple released a post regarding four stages of principles of mobile apps, that includes:

 

• Adopt- Eliminate all the hurdles to usage and adoption of your app.
• Use- Provide an easy-to-use platform and let users continue their transactions regardless of the device used.
• Transact- Allow your users to make transactions with minimal efforts.
• Return- Make your app so useful that your user keeps getting back to it.

 

But that’s not it. In this article, I will be telling you about 10 UX design principles that every designer needs to know for building a world-class app.

 

Mobile UX Design Principles

 

1. Put Your Users FIRST

 

Be it any kind of app; your users should be the first on focus. If you fail to cater to the needs of your users, you fail your app.

 

You need to know what they want from your app, why did they download it in the first place?

 

Once you know what your target users want from your app, you will understand what features you need to add as the primary feature and what should be the secondary ones.

 

2. Clear The Clutter

 

As mentioned, your users are your priority, and so you need to seek their attention the most.

 

Overloading your app with tons of features and content can make it look messy and complicated, which can annoy your users.

 

You must eliminate any unnecessary elements from your mobile UX design.

 

One of the best ways to do so is by adding just one action per screen.

 

This makes the app easy to use; even if there’s a first time user, he or she won’t feel like it’s complicated. Remember, less is more!

 

Some of the most popular apps out there are using the same principle, and hence their user engagement as well as user retention rate is much higher than the other available app.

 

3. Make Navigation Intuitive and Seamless

 

Another way to make your app simple to use is making sure navigation is clean and intuitive.

 

Your users should intuitively be able to navigate through the app without getting confused in any step and should be able to perform any action that they want to.

 

Any person downloads your app with their own agenda, and if they feel like it’s too complicated to achieve their goals, they will start looking for an alternative.

 

That will lower down your app’s engagement rate and downloads. You don’t want that, right?

 

Make the navigation intuitive and don’t make users switch between pages just for performing one action. Simplify the process as much as possible. In simple words, keep it simple!

 

4. Friendly Touches

 

While designing touch targets or buttons for large-screen devices is easy; designing them for mobile devices can be a little difficult.

 

However, there’s still an easy hack- make the targets a little bigger, just enough to handle one fingertip.

 

You can design targets to be around 7-10 mm so that they aren’t too big and even easy to touch for any size of a fingertip.

 

If you put too small touch targets, the users might unknowingly end up touching something else, and that can be too annoying for them.

 

Also, try to keep enough space between any two touch targets.

 

5. Legible Content

 

Desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, there’s a lot of variation in the sizes of these devices, but your app should be a fit for all.

 

However, it’s one of the toughest challenges for designers to build an app that fits a lot of content in small screen sizes.

 

But just fitting the content is not enough, your content should also be easy to read.

 

You can improve the legibility by just increasing the letter spacing.

 

A good amount of white space can make your content easy to read and not messy at all.

 

6. Provide User Control

Everyone prefers to feel like everything’s in their control. And that’s what you need to make them feel like.

 

Allow your users to make their own decisions while setting up your app. Let the change their setting: notifications, canceling actions, and all the other kinds of settings.

 

However, you also provide them with an option of recommended settings, but they should be the last one to finalize how the app should work in their devices.

 

You can also notify them is any new feature gets added on the app, or you can also provide them with a demo regarding how to use the app effectively.

 

These things make the user feel like they have got all the authority.

 

7. Minimize Data Input

 

Typing on a mobile phone is a slow and error full process, and trust me, none likes to provide a lot of information to an app just for signing up.

 

Typing on mobile phones can be too annoying if there are several fields to complete. Users prefer easy things, and too much typing isn’t one of them.

 

Allow them to sign up or fill any form by asking just a couple of questions. Also, you can allow autocomplete and voice typing to make the process easier.

It will also help you to minimize the Cost To Make App. So, start implementing this trick.

 

8. Make The Elements Clearly Visible

 

A user can use their phone as well as your app from anywhere at any time, like inside, outside, daytime, or night-time. And your app should be able to adjust to any situation.

 

So your app must have enough contrast between background and content. However, it isn’t easy.

 

You need to have some pro skills to make this happen, although there are many guides available on the web for the same.

 

9. Use Established Gestures

 

What are the established gestures? Gestures that already popular among the users and are used in most of the apps — for example, pinching or tapping twice for zoom-in or swiping for going to the next tab. It helps the users to understand the working of the app at once only.

 

Else, if you plan to deviate from the established gestures, you need to tell the users about your app’s working style through a small guide during the process of onboarding.

 

10. Focus on Speed

 

It goes without saying that speed is an essential part of any mobile app development strategy. And your app needs to be fast, or else it won’t thrive for long.

 

One of the ways here is to build an app that doesn’t require downloading the content every time the app is opened.

 

It should have an offline version and should be downloading content when it’s needed or asked for. This will also not annoy your users with the loading screen all the time.

 

Conclusion

 

The mobile era is already here, and one of the pillars of this era is apps.

 

While the world is revolving around mobile and related developments, the competition among the apps is getting worse by every passing day.

 

In order to make your move for reaching your goals, you need to take the extra mile.

 

By following these essential mobile UX design principles, you pave the way for your app towards achieving its goals.

 

Want to know an all-time winning mantra for great mobile UX- Get into the shoes of your users and then planning your mobile UX design. All the best!