According to Wikipedia, “User Experience (UX) involves a person’s behaviors, attitudes, and emotions about using a particular product, system, or service.”

You might have done all the hard work and used all your creative guns to build a unique mobile app, but it’s still unlikely to achieve the success you desire without an immaculate UX design.

It’s no hyperbole to say that UX design plays a predominant role in deciding the fate of any mobile app in the world. So, if you want your mobile app to stand out in app market, it’s paramount that your mobile app is easy to navigate, simple to operate and offers unique benefits to users. A nice UX design translates into the brilliant layout of every element of your mobile app, meaning every button is right at place where it should be.

The Takeaway: If users find your app difficult to utilize, they will quickly move on to many other similar options available in app market.

The question now arises: What practices a mobile UX designer must pay heed in order to create an ultimate mobile UX design? The answer to this lies further in the blog, explaining you 10 best practices a mobile UX designer should adopt to not let their mobile app go devoid of users. Here are the top 10 practices mentioned below for awesome mobile UX designs.

1. Be In Line With Apple And Google Guidelines

As a matter of fact, iOS and Android dominate the market of mobile phone operating systems, with more than 98% market share combined. As a mobile UX designer, it’s important that you follow Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines and Google Material Design for Android as long as they keep reigning on the mobile OS market.

Your UX knowledge may prove precarious for your mobile app, if you show no willingness to adhere to the guidelines since they have a lot to do with design.

2. Define Your Business Strategy

First things first! It’s imperative for the success of your app that you define a clear business strategy based on your target audience and the current market situation. Knowing what your competitors are offering can help you learn what extra and unique features you can offer to your potential customers to turn into your loyal customer. For a new startup, the Lean Startup Methodology is the best to follow since it paves the way for getting users to your app.

3. Pleasant Mobile Onboarding Experience

An awesome onboarding experience is vital for the future of your app. App users have a high likelihood to come back to those apps that enable them to swiftly achieve what they want in an efficient way. So, it is very important that you demonstrate a new user what all amazing things they can do with your app without facing any hassles and spending a lot of time. One of the best strategies to provide users a nice onboarding experience is Progressive Onboarding, which gives users explicit directions on how to easily go about your app. Make sure the onboarding process is highly interactive, so users face no difficulties from moving one step to another.

You need to keep these factors in mind to provide app users a smooth Progressive Onboarding experience:

• Various benefits your app offers to users
• Simple login process
• Where users are most likely to head to
• Use of colors to enable easy navigation
• Keeping things relevant

4. Personalization of UX

We all know that our past visit preferences lead to customization of our desktop screens. We also know that this happens because of cookies. Since more people now prefer to access the online content on their smartphones, developers are feeling the dire need of migrating this customization to mobiles too. However, they need to remove roadblocks to make it successful on varied screen sizes. Developers know very well that being able to record the past visits of users via their app will open countless avenues to improve the UX of their mobile app.

Big data has created a lot of hype already, since it gives chief managers the much needed business intelligence to take informed decisions. So, if a customer purchases a product on regular basis every month, you can offer them special deals at the end of every month. Such a knowledge about customer’s purchasing history and other in-app behaviors increases the chances of revenue generation by many folds.

5. One UX for Two Platforms

Create one common UX first for two platforms. Here it no way means that your design has to be similar across platforms. The idea is to make the first UX design the basis of the second. So, if you follow either iOS or Android guidelines to create a common UX, you end up saving a lot of time that you would otherwise take to create the UX for the second platform. This fact is also appreciated whole heartily by highly qualified active members of various programming forums and all UX designers are strictly following it to achieve better design results. Since time is money for clients, the strategy of one UX for two platforms could make a significant contribution to client satisfaction.

6. User Interface for Different Screen Sizes

Many UX designers stumble when it comes to deciding on the ratio of UX elements of an app for multiple screens, across multiple devices and screen resolutions. For a solid UX design, you must figure out elements of your app’s user interface that are fit for different screen sizes. It’s recommended to keep on iterating your initial design until the application’s user experience becomes seamless for multiple screen sizes. Never shy from making changes in the code, if the requirement arises to make the user interface sufficiently flexible. Text fields, actions buttons, date pickers are some of the examples of UX elements in question.

7. Attractive Typography

Helvetica Neue and Roboto are default fonts of iOS and Android, respectively. The problem UX designers often come across with these fonts is that their tinkering is not possible at an earlier stage of app development. Besides, standard typography doesn’t go well with unique custom elements. Thus, the best way out is to work on typography at the UX stage.

You should begin with setting a typography style for header, titles, subtitles, lists, text, etc. Your next step should be setting kerning between them. Tracking and leading for each element can be set when required.

8. Give Preference to Full Version Over MVP

MVP stands for minimum viable product, meaning creation of the smallest possible experimental product to figure out the likelihood of the the app to become popular among users. MVP concept has become very popular among many app development companies since it just not saves them time and money, but enables them to develop the first version of a product faster as well. However, only going for MVP product brings a plight for developers when it comes to planning the app’s further architecture. Thus, it would be wise to also invest in a full version of UX. Doing so helps the development team gain insight into all features and mechanics planned for next releases.

The worst repercussion of not investing in a full version of UX is that your app begins to face problems when the product is already on the market.

The Takeaway: MVP product can do more harm than good when compared to that of a full version since not only the cost to fix app issues at later stages of development comes out to be very high, developers also have to make arduous efforts to fix them.

9. More Emphasis on Gestures

Touch is no longer enough. Gestures, like swiping and pinching, have emerged as new trends in mobile app UX. With swipe gestures, your app users can share and delete in the blink of an eye. Moreover, you can walk an extra mile to figure out what other gestures your target customers are using in other apps so that you can incorporate them in your app too. Providing gesture functioning to users will make them comfortable from the very beginning and give rise to a pleasing onboarding experience.

Apple has already announced the use of 3D touch technology in iOS 9. App makers would like to pay attention to this since the pressure-based technology will bring a gamut of shortcuts for app users. For example, pushing hard may expand the menu to navigate, or tapping on the camera icon for a little long may give users an option to operate in selfie mode. Many app developers have 3D touch technology on their cards, which could prove very beneficial for iPhone 6s and 6s plus users since it will save them a lot of time they otherwise waste on performing some of the most used app tasks.

10. App UX Analytics To Gather Qualitative Data

The next important practice is to move from quantitative data to qualitative data. In contrast to traditional analytics tools that only provide information on number of new users, engagement, user retention and geographic breakdown, modern analytics tools provide qualitative data and deep insight into the user experience.

Use of App User Experience (UX) Analytics from day one will empower app developers to monitor the user behavior in a much better and effective manner from the very beginning. By examining the user behavior, you can refine the UX and make the required improvements in the areas your app users are facing troubles the most.

You can also record all touch gestures of your app users and aggregate them into a visual “touch heatmap“. This will help you a great deal in understanding the parts your app users focus the most, so that you can remove the features that largely go unused. Besides, you can also figure out which gestures are not responsive and fix them to further enhance the UX.

That we know how pivotal a mobile UX design is to have users keep coming to your mobile app, you must take cognizance of the aforementioned practices. Although these practices keep on evolving time and again to further raise the bars of user satisfaction, it’s important to understand what your next significant step should be to catch maximum eyeballs to your app. If you have any experience of mobile UX design or looking forward venture in mobile apps, your views are highly welcome in the comment box below.