The unstoppable popularity, growth, and penetration of mobile apps from all walks of life have given birth to many digital trends. Thanks to mobile apps, the websites now tend to become smarter and more performance savvy and mobile websites are increasingly embracing an app-like look and feel. From UI design to the feature set, mobile apps are setting big trends.
Despite the trendsetting role of mobile apps, only a handful of apps across the niches are now tremendously successful, and a few thousand apps survive and grow as a business. For the vast majority of apps, survival is still challenging. Many apps fail because they just stopped evolving in respect of user experience, design, and features. Particularly, some lethal UI design mistakes have played a big role in pulling back the success stories of many apps.
Here we slain the most common mistakes committed by the app UI designers all over the globe.
Forgetting the Difference Between Web UI and App UI
Many UI designers fail to understand that the web UI and mobile app UI are organically different. If you think that a responsively designed web UI will look similar to an app UI, it would be wrong.
While a web UI mainly focuses on fitting the mobile viewport across diverse screen sizes and providing easy access to the navigation buttons and website features, the mobile app UI offers a more stripped-off and minimalist design focused on solving the user problems.
While a web UI design only needs to focus on the responsive design elements, the mobile UI design should consistently focus on meeting the platform-specific design guidelines across both iOS and Android. Mobile app UI always gives priority to the personalization of the content, and certain features as mobile devices are very personal. In contrast, web UI is more genetic and give priority to only preference.
A Lot of Cognitive Distractions
If you look at the mobile app usage patterns and user habits, you can easily spot their decreasing attention span over all these years. As every individual user on any regular day is exposed to a multitude of digital interfaces, whether at home, at the workplace, or anywhere in between, they already have less attention. This is why any app that causes a lot of visual distractions or clutter is likely to enjoy less traction than other apps.
To make your mobile app free of cognitive distractions or unnecessary visual resources, embrace a minimalist design approach focused on key app features to solve the user problem. Mobile app UI design should also stay clear of unnecessary design elements to give the users a sense of professionalism and ease of accessing useful features.
Not Designing a Great Onboarding Experience
Do you know most of the mobile apps that are downloaded and installed every day, only a handful of apps join the thriving club of apps with steady user footfall and business conversion? This mainly happens because after landing on many apps, the users get confused and get around without finding the feature or content they need.
To address this, the app UI designers need to provide a very meticulously designed mobile onboarding experience. A great mobile onboarding experience will guide first-time users about particular features and functionalities and how to use them in different contexts. An easy onboarding experience can quickly uplift the user experience of your mobile app.
Not Designing for Thumb
It is already well known that the vast majority of mobile users now handle the smartphones single-handedly, and they scroll with their thumbs or access other important links by stretching their thumbs a little.
Now, app UI designers make sure all the major CTA buttons, important links, and the scroller are located within reach of the thumb. This is how the thumb-friendly design came into practice.
Not Opting for Lazy Loading
As the visual assets and high-quality files always tend to create a bigger load on the server requests and consequently, they can delay in the server response, it is important to keep this load in check or go for features like lazy loading. Apart from minimizing the footfall of the visual assets, the designers can use lazy loading features to prioritize the content that is in need.
Thanks to the lazy loading feature, any apps get the direct benefit of quickly loading user-requested elements and contents while keeping others in the pipeline.
Absence of Brand Elements
Many business apps look entirely different from their business websites. This inconsistency in design is a silent killer of the brand identity. Your mobile app can be the frontrunner for highlighting your brand, and for this, you need to ensure complete design consistency.
A business app should use a consistent color scheme, fonts, and the overall look and feel pertaining to the brand. Once your mobile app and other areas of digital presence provide visual consistency and a distinct style, the brand value comes in the front of UI design and thus helps in business conversion.
Conclusion
There are several other UI design mistakes committed by the mobile app designers that take a toll on the user engagement and business conversion. But here we mainly focused on the most persistent and lethal design mistakes across the mobile platforms.
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Author Bio: Nathan McKinley is Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC, a specialized mobile app development in Chicago, mobility solutions partner, aside from being a Business Developer, he writes and shares articles on Mobile App Design and Development through his 5+ years of experience that he accumulated by being in the tech market.