Do you want to develop a mobile app that your customers absolutely love and admire? By the end of this post, you’ll be able to do so.
Mobile devices have become tools for connectivity. And mobile applications instill life into these smartphones. A Marketing Charts report showed that around 70% of digital media time comes from mobile apps.
But what drives people to use mobile apps? A MindSea research report indicated that 37% of consumers would use a mobile app purely due to its design and experience.
So, if you want to develop an app that wins your consumers’ hearts, ensuring superior UI/UX design is crucial.
Follow these effective mobile UX strategies to increase mobile app engagement and experience.
Increase Mobile App Engagement with These UI/UX Strategies
1. Seamless App Navigation
As soon as your users open the app, they should know how the apps work, the different sections, and how to use them. You don’t want your users to spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how to navigate to the other section.
Some basic design tactics, such as labeling buttons and providing clear menu categories, can help. Ensure the navigation buttons are visible, so your users don’t have to search for them.
Another effective strategy to increase mobile app engagement is to include a small tutorial when a new user signs up. The tutorial should quickly and clearly explain the main functions of the app.
2. Readability
People are using mobile devices to consume all sorts of content – news, magazines, blogs, and more. In response, several content providers like The NY Times, HuffPost, and BuzzFeed, offer mobile apps. Medium, a content publishing platform, is also a popular example.
If you plan to provide a lot of text-based content on your app, pay extra attention to readability. Mobile devices have significantly smaller screens compared with desktops and tablets. So, font size and spacing that might seem ideal for bigger screens may be too bulky and difficult to read on a mobile screen.
So, make sure the content you provide through the mobile app is well-tailored for mobile devices.
3. Declutter your App
The simpler your app UI is, the better the user experience it will deliver. App developers often make the mistake of incorporating as many features into the app as possible. While it will make your app feature-rich, it will also make it clunky and overwhelming. Thus, users will simply hit the ‘Uninstall’ button.
Hence, ensure that your mobile app design is minimal and elegant, with only the necessary elements. Also, keep in mind that mobile screens offer less screen space than desktop or tablet. So, you may not be able to display all the content on your mobile app that you did on your desktop site.
4. Reduce User Inputs
When users install your app, they want to access what you’ve promised as soon as possible. If you bombard them with lengthy forms that take forever to fill, you’ll have a hard time engaging them. Keep the onboarding process straightforward and user-friendly to increase user engagement on app.
5. Ensure the Design is Responsive
The screen of the Galaxy Note 20 is 1080 x 2400, whereas the size of the Samsung Galaxy S20 is 1440 x 3200. Hundreds of mobile phone models exist, and not all of them have similar resolutions and screen sizes. Therefore, your mobile app design must be responsive and compatible with all the major range of mobile devices.
In the same way, your app should be responsive to both iOS and Android devices. Unless you’re targeting a specific platform, ensure that your design is responsive and compatible on both platforms.
6. Use More Visuals
The users will surely love a mobile app with pleasing visuals and color schemes. No user enjoys a boring app filled with nothing but chunks of text. Try increasing engagement on app by instilling different combinations of colors, textures, and visual art.
If you must add text, make sure it’s small. Mobile app screens are not ideal for large pieces of text, so stick to light text paired with visual effects for the best experience.
7. Eliminate Long Scroll
If you’re offering a lot of reading material, long scrolls are fine. But in any other case, don’t make your users scroll the screen for extended periods. Since mobile screens are small, users could lose sight of the information above. So, keep the content on a screen limited.
If you need to add more content, try breaking it down into different sections and let your customers access it with lateral scrolling.
For example, if you want your customers to fill a form that’s slightly longer, you can divide the form into a few sections, like Contact Details, Billing Details, Preferences, etc. This way, the user can fill one section and then swipe right to move to the next section and swipe left to come to the previous section.
8. Finger-Friendly Buttons and Tap Targets
When accessing a desktop site, the user can simply hover over the cursor on a button and press the left mouse key. But when it comes to a mobile app, no such cursor is available. Users have to use their thumbs and fingers to tap the buttons.
If your buttons are too small, they’ll be difficult to press, thereby ruining the user experience. So, make sure your buttons are big and easy to tap.
Also, keep the thumb zone in mind. Most mobile users prefer holding their mobile phones with one hand and using only their thumbs for scrolling and tapping. Hence, be sure to place the important actions and buttons at locations easily reachable by the thumb.
9. Comply with OS-Specific Guidelines
Android and iOS, although mobile operating systems, are completely different. Each has a unique content layout, buttons, and way of navigation. If you apply Android design guidelines for iOS and vice versa, you’re risking user experience.
As a designer, you should always stay updated with the latest OS design guidelines. Also, try to keep things native. If you go for a hybrid app, you might save some time and effort in the short term, but you’ll compromise user experience.
Different mobile UI kits are available for each platform. Be sure to stick to them to offer unparalleled engagement and experience to your app users.
10. Don’t Forget About the Loading Speed
As a developer, you might be tempted to showcase your design skill and make the app too flashy. While it may look cool to the customers, complex apps take forever to load. And a research article by Think with Google showed that the app bounce rate increases with every second of dealt in load time.
Source: Think with Google
If your app takes 1-3 seconds to load, the bounce rate increases by 32%. The number skyrockets to 123% if the loading time is 1-10 seconds.
So, though your UI/UX design should be catchy and appealing, it should also load fast in order to increase mobile app engagement.
Wrapping Up
An app with unique features and functionality will get more downloads. But it’s the design and experience that’ll ensure they keep using it. By following the above mobile UX strategies, you can increase user engagement on app and provide your consumers with remarkable experiences.
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