What is the Usability of your Mobile App?
Usability efforts make your mobile app usable enough for your targeted audience. Your targeted users should have easy access to the services you offer in and through the app. Whether you have developed awesome UI with all bells-n-whistles or created sumptuous interactions using the latest tools and technologies, your app may consider an incident of failure. It misses usability at all. It indicates the significance of usability while investing your hard-earned money on a mobile app development project. Now, the question is that how to improve your mobile app usability.How to Improve App Usability using UX Design?
To find the right answer, someone may tempt to promptly answer that we can improve usability by improving overall user experiences of the application. It does not mean that UX alone is not sufficient to enhance app usability; rather, usability is a part of user experiences. Thus, without the help of UX, we may never refurbish app usability. In usability, UX designers can focus on the following significant factors to improve it.- Usefulness: While using app design interface, your app users should feel easy to use it and should able to get proficiency quickly
- Effectiveness: The design interface of the app must enable users to hit their intended goals easily
- Learnable: The design interface must be easy enough to learn for any level of the user, so users intuitively come again-and-again to use your app
- Likable: UI must evoke positive emotions to use the app
Follow the 5 Best User Experience Design Tips to Improve App Usability
Tip 1: Bring Simplicity in App Design
We know our targeted users are visiting the app with keeping some goals in mind to accomplish using the app and its interface. If you create obstacles to hit their goals, they may frustrate or lose the straight path that helps them reach faster. Those obstacles in the way of users may be additional but unwanted features and functionality in your mobile app that may frustrate them or misguide them to achieve their targets quickly and easily. If you are familiar with minimalistic design terms, it is a perfect design approach to create a simple yet highly usable mobile app. The best tool to achieve this is high fidelity prototyping software to create wireframes and prototypes to design and test the simplicity of your mobile app with some limited iterations and live interactions with the design.Takeaway:
Remove unnecessary features and functionality from your app and provide essentials only.Tip 2: Bring Consistency in App Design
Consistency in UI design assures users that they are using the same app and focusing on achieving their intended goals with your app. For instance, your logo and header design of your app UI assure users that they are not missed their path. Similarly, consistency in navigation systems provides consistent user experiences. Another thing is branding, which again comes with a consistent branding-oriented design. Apart from internal app design consistency, we can consider conventions as the best UX design practice. You may ask, how? When a designer designs something to achieve the design goals and others find it convenient in their designs, it becomes a convention, and others willingly follow it. If your app design is missing most of the design conventions, your users may find it uncomfortable and tend to learn those unique but unfamiliar ways to use your app. If you infuse more non-conventional designs in your app, it hampers app intuitions and leads to user frustration at the end. Thus, keeping consistency by following conventions in design brings trust among the users, and trust is vital to build user loyalty with your app, which is again more rewarding than catching new users at all times.Takeaway:
Bring predictability by following design conventions rather than leaning on ‘wow’ factors in your unfamiliar and non-intuitive for users.Tip 3: Be Native in App Design
Unlike web applications, mobile applications are mobile OS-centric when user experiences come into the picture. Particular mobile OS requires particular hardware sets. Therefore, no mobile app can access all platform-specific features and functionality without the support of hardware and mobile OS. Therefore, if you want to develop an app for the iOS platform, you should have tested your app within the Apple ecosystem, iOS devices and iOS version compatibility. The same is somewhat true for Android, Microsoft, and Symbian, like other platforms too. You must use platform-specific programming languages, development tools, libraries and check 3rd party integration compatibility in due course. If you think of cross-platform app development instead of going for each platform with individual app investment, beating native experiences is miles away despite the advent of technologies and tools.Takeaway:
Follow platform-specific design guidelines and app development rules to achieve your app’s best native user experiences to make it completely usable.Tip 4: Bring Onboarding in App Design
When your app design or interactions are falling apart from conventions prevailing in the market, your users may feel frustrated to get acquainted with new and innovative features, functions, and interactions. In such a scenario, some guidance may help them ease their app journey and increase their conversion. The guidance may come through various onboarding techniques applicable in your app contexts. Therefore, tips, cursor tips, overlays, pinpointing arrows, and special buttons can provide onboarding in real-time contexts. User guides, image tours, videos, and illustrations or animation like other multimedia content are for in-depth onboarding. Thus, onboarding techniques engage first-timers and less tech-savvy users smartly and help them accomplish their user journey with the least hurdles.Takeaway:
The best user experiences can win your customers and make them loyal forever.Tip 5: Improve Findability in App Design
We know users come on your app to solve their problems or find their intended products or services to buy it. If your app is poor in findability to provide effective navigation, search feature, or useful links, they likely bounce back to your competitors’ apps. If your app has enough volume of content, products, or services to make app users confused, your first duty is to provide an in-app search engine to find it all with ease and quick results. Today we have faceted search, suggestive search, and filtered search functionality to leverage the latest technologies to deal with high-level complexities. Intuitive and easy navigation design, information architecture, and advanced search functionality can ease the user journey and improve app usability to a greater extent.Takeaway:
Install the best search engine with advanced search features and navigation schemes appropriate to your app niche to improve findability.Conclusion:
Now, we know that app usability is a deciding factor for app success. Moreover, we have seen some important UX design tricks and tips to improve app usability to some extent. However, UX design is a big container, and app usability belongs to it. As app owners or non-tech entities, we cannot decide which app UX design can help us improve usability. Therefore, technical help is mandatory, and the assistance of a UX designer can help us a lot. Fortunately, SysBunny has a team of app designers, UX designers, and Android app developers to help you with the required tech expertise and experiences. What you need is to contact our team and try to explain your requirements to get free consultancy and high-end app development results at a premium rate.About Post Author
