10 Awesome Mobile UX Design Strategies That Work

The success of your app depends on a combination of various factors, but user experience is the topmost of them. In fact, the majority of successful apps invariably have a great UX. But, UX is not also a single button element; there are various elements that in a combined manner make a great UX possible.

If you know what others in your industry are doing in designing the UX of their apps, you can easily set a standard and can improve them further.

Here we have introduced 10 of the most effective and time-tested strategies for UX design that assuredly deliver results in terms of user engagement and business conversion.

1. Understanding audience before a design strategy

Do you know your audience and if yes, to what extent? Understanding the market and audience is the first step when creating a design strategy for your mobile interface. Design strategy should be a result of rigorous user surveys and market research in the segment and audience where you are likely to have your audience.

2. Addressing with the right information architecture

The design process must address the environment in which an app is used and the type of audience it serves. The information architecture is built accordingly to ensure optimum functional output as per the audience demands. Consulting with the stakeholders is needed to understand the usability of the app and accordingly, a strategic roadmap with information architecture is created to deliver up to the user expectation.

3. A strategy for evolving UI design

UI is the big and almost central factor in making the app UX shine make a mark. The typical UI elements include a wide array of aspects, starting from the diverse screen sizes to the virtual keyboard to typographic elements. With constant updates, both iOS and Android continue to transform the UI design and their respective impact on users. Taking advantages of new features and design elements with every new update, developers are also continuing to push the barrier for more ease of use and versatility. Naturally, designing UI is still the principal mover for a killer app on any platform.

4. Connecting emotionally with colors

Colors have always most profound impact on UX design just because they clearly drive emotional response if used in a proper way. Moreover, some colors pushing users towards more actionable steps helps business conversion as well.

Colors are not just to make aesthetic elements but they should be used precisely for psychological effects on the users. Colors can drive emotional responses, ignite certain feelings and different colors actually garner different user reactions. Some colors rank really high for driving people to click on CTA buttons and you can make use of them to drive business conversion from the app.

Different colors garner different responses also as per the culture, ethnicity, and region of your audience. For instance, the color ‘red’ refers to happiness in China and you can find liberal use of this color in their websites. In the Middle East, often emerald green is the color that drives most emotional responses. So, the color scheme should depend on the demographic character of your audience as well.

5. Minimalist design

Minimalist UI design devoid of unnecessary ornamentation has been at the forefront for some years. Minimalist design became so much popular because a mobile app always has to be functionally superb at the core. A nice looking interface that underperforms or not optimized for mobile access will not make an impression. Often clutter in the design is held responsible for making the app suffer from lack of performance.

The principal focus area of this design approach is to provide the user only the needful. This, in turn, will obviously add to the functional ease and simplicity of the app making user experience better. Secondly, as you reduce a load of information for the user to consume and memorize, the app easily stays longer in the user memory.

6. Mobile first impression

The first impression is often the permanent impression for your web presence and that is truer for mobile optimized design. Actually, offering a really impressive onboarding experience with the mobile UX plays a crucial role in new user acquisition and retention. So, what should be the objective to ensure a great first impression with mobile UX?

The first time someone lands on your app should have a clear idea of the value of your app. What they get from the app and how easily and satisfactorily they can achieve that through the app should be made clear. Your strategy for creating onboarding experience must correspond to this.

Progressive onboarding is a great strategy that unveils various attributes of the app in an interactive way, just as the user progresses by actually using the app. If the app involves very detailed workflow and several sections with hidden functionalities, then this onboarding strategy comes as the best option.

7. Great content and strong capability to connect audience

We all know that content is still the king as the majority of users browse devices mainly in search of contents, be it text, images or video. So, there is nothing to choose before unique, relevant and high-quality content. Secondly, it is extremely important to connect the users to let them use your content. Proper placement of text and images is crucial to ensure engagement from users. So, like frequent content updates you should always give a fresh look at the design elements that showcase the content.

8. Promoting usability through interaction designs

How much and to what extent you can make users interact with your app? Does the app offer a lot of scopes to interact with the app or its content? Or, while using your app users just need to remain inactive most of the time? Remember, more you make users build a habit of interacting, doing this and that, better you can guide them to click CTA buttons that generate leads or converts business.

9. The shift from customization to personalization of UX

Just think of the days when desktop sites used to customize screens as per the user preference known from earlier visits. That was the early example of customization. Customization went into mobile as well but as this is done mainly through browser cookies, addressing diverse screen sizes is not always possible.

So, the web services and apps gradually moved towards personalization, a more individual approach to deal with preferences. The app recording the behavior of past visits by the user analyzes the preferences through analytics and accordingly makes room for addressing the taste and preference of user wherever possible. This approach gained tremendous response as people always like to be addressed as per their taste, preference, and interests.

10. Evaluating mobile UX metrics

Thanks to robust analytics tools now evaluating the UX metrics has become easier than ever. Understanding the key metrics and quantitative data concerning app usability and flaws is crucial now to make an improvement plan before it is too late to catch the tails of unsatisfied users ready to churn.

The most sophisticated UX analytics tools are there that allows insightful user and session data in a number of ways. From user recordings to touch heatmaps, all such features in UX analytics tools will let you see the potential loopholes in user experience.

Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing website development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lure him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics. Check out their latest WordPress plugin – Save Contact Form 7.