User experience alone is the most important thing to shape the success of a mobile app. If the mobile user experience doesn’t ensure ease of use and user satisfaction, it lacks the essential ingredient for success in the app market.
On the other hand, user experience is far from a static element. It continues to evolve and get better over time. The UX design practices, tools, and approaches that deliver sophisticated and smooth user experience change over time. So we can ask what are the best UX design practices now. Well, that’s what we are going to explain here below.
Best Practices to Optimize App User Experience
Smooth User Onboarding
The actual objective of user onboarding is to showcase the real value of an app to the app users. This objective is achieved by showing users how they should use the app to get what they want as effortlessly and quickly as possible.
In addition, the goal is to ensure that the user doesn’t feel confused and get troubled while going from one app screen to the other. It has been seen that such confusion and troubles drive away new users. A great user onboarding experience can prevent this from happening.
When it comes to enhancing the user onboarding experience, you can embrace several strategies and ensure that they return to the app again and again. One of the effective onboarding measures is creating a short and effective tutorial to show the user how the app works.
This is called progressive onboarding and suits better apps with complex workflow and many functionalities that users need time to explore.
To make the onboarding process smooth and satisfactory, it is also important to reduce the steps in completing initial activities such as account creation or signup. It is advisable to offer multiple options such as social media login and guest login options for signup.
Offer a better Search Feature
Most app users switch between apps too often, and hence they find it boring and cumbersome to find what they need by scrolling or by going through different menu options and categories. This is where a great search function optimized with intuitive filters can improve the user experience.
The in-app search feature should be powered by advanced data architecture, smooth navigation design, and several filters as appropriate for the respective niche. A powerful search function helps users get what they want as quickly and as effortlessly as possible.
Use Micro-animations in Transitions
Micro-animations used in transitions ensure seamless moving from one app page to another and give feedback to the users whenever they finish any action.
Let’s have a look at the best practices to help implement the animation.
- Only implement animations before user action.
- The objective of the animation should be to make users understand the effective ways to carry out an action.
- Use animations in areas where it is relevant but don’t overuse them.
Make Appropriate Touch Targets
App users find it frustrating when they tap on a button appearing on the device screen and fail to respond. Often these results from the undersized tap targets or tap targets not properly placed at an adequate distance from one another.
Ideally, tap targets in an app should be sized a minimum of 7-10 mm or just the width of an average fingertip. Apart from the size, tap targets should be placed close to the thumb zone to allow single-handed use, and there should be enough space between multiple tap targets on a screen.
Personalization of User Experience (UX)
Most app users give a lot of value to personalized user experience because it directly addresses their individual preferences and constraints. Business brands allowing users to personalize menu or notification settings get more traction than those offering a “one size fits all” kind of user experience.
When it comes to e-commerce and media apps, personalized user experience basically means highly personalized recommendations based on user preferences and previous buying or viewing history. In the case of banking or fintech apps, personalized, quick-access menu options are very popular.
Clutter-free Design
A user interface design completely free of visual clutter has already become trending across all sorts of apps. These days, it has almost become an established practice to design an app without visual clutters and distractions. Reducing cognitive load and keeping design thoroughly oriented to relevance has become key to app success.
To ensure a clutter-free app design, leave a lot of negative space or white space around the key content and buttons. This will help engage users better. In this respect, it’s also important to keep a smooth user flow, maintaining a seamless transition from one user action to the other.
Ensure Maximum Loading Speed
The last but not the least of all considerations is to ensure optimum loading speed for your app. This can only be achieved by optimizing the information architecture, limiting server requests through powerful local caching support, and optimizing media files.
Among other important measures that you need to take, compressing the app code, using fewer quality plugins, minimizing app features, and using a CDN network are highly important.
Effortless User Input
While using an app, a user needs to input various kinds of data to fill in the form fields. For a smooth and seamless user experience, reducing user inputs is extremely crucial. For app signup, you can use social media and guest login options to make users avoid filling out forms. Make sure there are advanced features such as predictive text assistance, spell and grammar check, suggestive answers autocomplete, etc. for filling up all forms.
Conclusion
Creating a mobile user experience that easily stands out from the rest is extremely important for modern apps. Apart from addressing the ground realities, all these best practices can also give an app a more professional flair and look and feel optimized for the users.
Author Bio:
Juned Ghanchi is a CMO at IndianAppDevelopers, a leading mobile app development company in India dealing with Startups to big enterprises.