Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Blog Summary: Find out the world of mobile app design in our detailed article. Learn the key steps to create stunning and user-friendly mobile apps while considering critical factors that affect design costs. We’ll also explore the must-have tools that allow designers to create exceptional mobile experiences.
“Change is inevitable.”
This saying perfectly relates to mobile app design as it always remains the talk of the town. Customer behavior and the introduction of new technologies play a decisive factor in determining mobile application design. Besides, mobile app’s contribution in the digital era has been dramatically increasing, which is another reason for the demand for app design to be user-friendly and intuitive.
According to recent stats by 42matters, there are approximately 2 Million mobile apps active on the Apple Store and over 3 Million on the Android Play Store. Since millennials are the maximum end users, it has been found that this group of people accesses a mobile application 50 times a day on average. The stat advocates how attention-worthy the design of mobile applications is.
Now that you know the mobile app dominance in the industry, and we expect you already have a mobile application, let us share why it is necessary to shed light on mobile app designing.
Mobile application design is the process of creating apps that help attract users and compel them to use them. The visually appealing interaction design ensures users remain satisfied and hooked. A poorly crafted mobile UI often hampers the experience, resulting in abandoning the mobile app.
Below benefits of the mobile application design process:
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Designing a mobile application is a daunting process that demands careful planning, creativity, and technical expertise. Whether you already have a mobile application or want to create one, following a structured approach for your mobile app architecture is essential to ensure your app’s success.
Our mobile app developers and designers will collaborate to understand your app requirements and then proceed with the development and design. You can go through the following steps to understand what the requirements will be. Post that, you can connect with our team and present what you are looking for.
First things first; it is important to understand the project requirement before starting to give a digital platform shape. We always discuss with clients and understand what they are actually looking for. This way, we ensure we remain on the same page.
The discussion includes:
Our mobile app designers brainstorm to ensure whatever the client has visualized for their users gets delivered. The trends of mobile apps match the market aspects. From colors to typography and fonts to layout, our design team takes care of it.
Wireframe design for mobile apps decides the user flow and feel of your mobile application. That’s why you must rely on experienced app designers for this task. The wireframe can be refined and built as an interactive layout that explains the brand story.
The wireframe shares interface app design elements that are visible on the application. It includes icons, lines, boxes, words, and descriptions. Wireframe is a decisive factor since it helps you understand the page and make decisions. This is quite a crucial phase in mobile application design since it assures you with the final product.
Several tools like Adobe, Sketch, and Omnigraffe are highly leveraged to build wireframes. When creating a wireframe, designers reserve a specific time for it to understand and derive optimum results.
Every step is essential and interconnected. Once the wireframe is ready, designers immediately move to the prototype development. In this step, the interactive model of the wireframe is created to visualize how a mobile application will look and feel. Our mobile application designers are well-versed with all types of technologies required to transform sketches into virtual life.
Using any of the tools, you can build a prototype of your mobile application with fake data and information. The main objective of the prototype is to ensure your developers have a sense of idea about the UI and UX of the mobile application that needs to be built.
The mobile app development company can help you with your requirements from designing to development and deployment to make it available for your target audience. Just share your idea with us and witness a virtual shape of your idea.
Visual design is another phase of the mobile app design that brings the pieces together to create the look and feel of the final product. It is a critical phase because it ensures mobile applications are identifiable, functional, and stable. This way, the product remains functional upon fixed rules, conventions, and expressions by Android and iOS platforms, including navigation bars, UI components, and other personalization.
Visual design is the last step after which the development phase starts, irrespective of platform type. Our mobile app developers quickly start writing the code for mobile app development using prototypes. Parallely, we even start testing whatever progress has been made in the development. A large application is broken down into pieces to ensure rapid development.
Once the mobile application is developed, it’s time to deploy the application. Consider user feedback and modify accordingly to maintain the application. Also, you must add new functionalities periodically to upkeep your mobile app.
With emerging mobile app design trends, changing user preferences, and technologies, your application must meet the requirements. Moreover, there should be customer support to answer their queries and ensure a seamless experience.
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When embarking on the design journey of an app, it’s important to adopt a user-centric approach. We begin by delving deep into the needs, preferences, and pain points of your target audience. Extensive user research and continuous feedback loops are invaluable tools to help us in sculpting a user-centered design.
In building a stellar app, simplicity and intuitiveness are our guiding principles. The interface is a user-friendly haven, where navigation is seamless and tasks are accomplished with ease. Moreover, a responsive design is non-negotiable. Your app must gracefully adapt to various devices and screen sizes, offering a consistently delightful experience on smartphones and tablets alike.
Users do not like to engage in mobile applications that overwhelm them with information, and that’s one of the mobile app design principles to consider. App designers understand this concept and ensure building an app with minimal human effort. They guarantee swift navigation without much to do.
In a technical language, it is called cognitive load on the users, which can be of two types:
In this scenario, the user acknowledges current information while accomplishing the task. One of the best examples is taking action on the CTA button without switching app screens.
It includes making the user experience fruitful and goal-achieving. Besides, it also means reducing visual clutters, including mismatched color combinations, overwhelmed information, and inappropriate font placement.
No matter if it is Android or iOS development, there has to be a user flow through which users easily navigate. Optimal engagement ensures user retention.
It can be achievable with the following things:
Make sure your app lets users take action with minimal taps — for example, one-click checkout in an eCommerce application, or allow users to run mobile applications through voice commands without actually having to type on the screen. One-tap navigation and one-tap booking are a few other examples of swift user flow.
When accomplishing a task requires a user to switch to multiple screens, as a mobile app UI principle, there has to be a sneak peek into what’s coming next. This way, your user won’t be bored and will be excited for the next screen.
Make sure your application has one action per page to grab the user’s attention. This way, the user interface will be intuitive and the user might perform any action. For instance, you can place forms, CTAs, or demo calls to interact with your users.
Make sure you offer your user with limited information so that they do not get distracted or overwhelmed. Be specific with the information you plan to offer your users. Avoid cluttering your page and let your users focus on the information important to them.
Mobile application design should be thumb-friendly, meaning the screen should be navigable through the thumb. Make sure the mobile UI elements are easily accessed through the user’s thumb. The ideal placement of actionable items should be bottom so that both right and left-handed users can access it.
A responsive mobile app always remains close to the user’s heart. It is possible if your app provides feedback, the more users will likely interact. Not offering feedback to users makes them think that the app ain’t responsive and the chances of abandonment increase. This may even lead to a negative user experience.
A mobile app UI design should be built considering the user experience in mind. Our design teams ensure firstly creating beautiful designs and making them interactive enough to engage users. Usually, top or bottom bar navigation is preferable by users due to its easy-to-remember feasibility.
Users tend to wait for the next screen if it is built with some insightful information. If you might have come across the Zomato food delivery application, you may have seen a temporary skeleton screen, providing information about dishes or food. This way, users don’t abandon but remain hooked on the application.
You should never commit the mistake of keeping your app page blank. It ruins user experience and makes your app vulnerable to abandonment. Just like a skeleton screen, an empty screen should consist of an error message at least so that users know they need to close an app. Leaving users with no clue of what to do next makes their experience frustrating.
Onboarding users to your app becomes more prominent when you show how the app will be useful to you right from the start.
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With the introduction of mobile application design tools, drawing wireframes and prototypes on paper has been eliminated. The tools do it swiftly without much to and fro. Besides, with the use of design tools, the work becomes easier to share. If you hire us to design your mobile app UI, we ensure that you share the work in real-time and work on your feedback.
A top competitor of Sketch and quite a versatile tool, unlike Sketch, dominates the designing industry. XD offers wireframing, prototyping, and a lot more than Sketch. Besides, the swift and agile nature of Adobe XD makes it a more efficient and mobile UI designers’ favorite tool. The only pitfall of Adobe XD is it works only on Windows 10.
Modern UI/UX designers prefer Sketch, a Macbook-based design tool, to craft visual interface elements for mobile applications. Sketch is mainly known for building interactive prototypes and is even dominant in wireframing and prototyping space.
Moreover, this design tool exports assets quite rapidly and doesn’t reserve too much space in your system. Lastly, the design tool is quite affordable and requires renewal every year.
Another best tool for creating responsive designs is Figma. With its easy learning curve, flexibility, and cloud-based app functionality, Figma is one of the investment-worthy tools. It transforms designs into animations and does a lot more than expected.
Push animations, structural animations, and button interactions are just a glimpse of Figma’s potential. Figma is a smarter, faster, agile designing tool that app designers leverage to bring mobile app ideas to life.
An unbeatable UX design tool on the list for creating wireframes and prototypes is none other than Justinmind. You can download it to ensure swift collaboration among designers. Using Justinmind, you can execute everything like adding videos to HTML and online widgets to documents to interactive maps with the help of the widget library.
Marvel is famous not only for uniting multiple superheroes but also for executing collaboration, design, and prototyping. And what’s astonishing is this mobile application design tool easily integrates with multiple platforms like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch.
Plus, you can upload from cloud storage like Dropbox and Google Drive. Marvel even allows you to leverage animation features and brings some creative mobile app ideas to your platforms for your users.
A more advanced mobile UI design tool is not only for designing but also for communication and collaboration. Not only you but your team can also work parallelly on this super-duper design tool. Edit and build in real-time; that’s what the USP of this Fluid UI is. This design tool enables the creation of prototypes, presenting designs, and working feedback in real-time.
If user experience is what you prioritize, then Axure RP is what you must not miss out on. A designing tool for mobile app interfaces guarantees the creation of anything from scratch and ensures a complete design to meet user requirements.
Apart from prototyping, Axure RP allows the building of wireframes, flowcharts, UI designs, idea boards, graphical documentation, user journeys, personas, and mockups.
A design tool with ample prototype templates makes designing tasks much easier. Besides, the designing tool even allows you to import UI components from other tools like Sketch and Adobe. Moreover, when introducing the flow of your app to your users, you can even leverage the timeline feature to create cool animations.
There is no fixed mobile application design cost because several factors contribute to determining one. The factors may include functionalities, icons, and texts. Besides, the complexity levels, geographical aspects, and market trends are also decisive factors in calculating mobile app design costs.
Platform plays one of the crucial factors in determining the cost because the platform allows users to download your application. Android is more expensive than iOS due to its various formats and resolutions.
The cost to design a mobile application may vary depending on geographical location. The United States market is comparatively more expensive than the Indian market. Mobile app developers in the USA charge more heavily than Indian developers. Therefore, it is always beneficial to hire mobile app developers from India than any other country.
On average, the hourly cost of US mobile app developers ranges around $150 – $160 for Android apps and $140 – $150 for iOS applications. On the other hand, the Indian mobile app developers cost only $20 – $30 for both Android and iOS applications.
Another mobile app design cost contributing factor on the list is application complexity. The simple application requires less investment to design while the complex ones demand more time and resources.
Here are the main categories for app complexity:
Since mobile application design is a continuous process, you will definitely require an extended hand to create attractive designs. Make sure you invest comparatively equally in designing as you do in development because first impression matters. Beyond serving what users want, you must also promise them a delightful user experience.
If you’re looking for UX designers, don’t hesitate to contact us. Our creative team of designers not only meets your requirements but also suggests to you what’s going on in the market and what’s trending. Leaving no stones unturned, our creative heads promise you an engaging and attractive user interface.
Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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