In the present day, user experience is regarded as the first priority, right after the functionality of a software solution. User-friendliness is an extremely featured concept, which basically helps designers to advance their visuals toward the sweet spot, and make every interface good-looking and simple to understand.
The sad truth is that only 1% of app or web platform users feel that vendors meet their expectations, including design preferences. It means that there is vast space for improvement in that matter. Many designers and product owners are curious about how to design user-friendly applications, since it’s obviously a trend. Let’s review some tips to consider that enhance user experience and what mistakes to avoid.
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Contact usWhat is a User-Friendly Application?
In a broad sense, user-friendliness means that a software solution is intuitive, simple, and easy to exploit by its target audience. This concept sets requirements regarding how a user interface should look and how it’s supposed to interact with the software.
The friendly user interface of the app is ensured through means of UI/UX designing:
- UI design — The aesthetic experience design focuses on visual touchpoints like solar palettes, imagery, and more. It serves to delight users aesthetically.
- UX design — The structural product design focuses on pain points that users encounter. UX design is responsible for ensuring the effectiveness and simplicity of a mobile app.
In a broad sense, user-friendliness is the combination of UI and UX approached in the right way.
What Design Ideas to Choose to Make a User-Friendly App
Let’s take a look at the best design approaches and tips that will help you to make a user-friendly mobile app.
Understand Users First, Design Later
Among all the stages, developers most often neglect market research. However, it’s the right call to conduct the fully-fledged target audience and competitor research, so you can create and analyze user persona to understand their pains and preferences better.
Research helps to find out what design approaches may work the best in a particular niche or for a specific business model. The same is true for competitor research, since repeating after bigger players is already a solid way to keep up with the market tempo. Any bit of information that helps to understand app users better is worth considering, and the derived knowledge is worth implementing.
Make Design Useful
Your priority should be to ensure that the user can achieve their goals with your app in the most simple way possible and as fast as possible. It’s so because, in the real-world environment, users tend to delete applications that fail to show their usefulness in the very first minutes. So, ensure that the app delivers its value first and only after should you think about its aesthetic design.
Integrate Whenever It’s Possible
The best advice that will save tons of your time and money is to integrate every app functioning aspect that is possible to integrate. It primarily concerns payment gateways, maps, social media, and other matters that can easily be added using third-party SDK and APIs. How do you design a user-friendly application at a low cost? Just don’t reinvent the wheel and use already existing and widely featured options.
Deliver Small Appealing Features Users Appreciate
Right after you ensure that your app actually delivers value, you should focus on enhancing the aesthetics of the software, so it’s interesting to use on a daily basis. Stellar designs are paid off if utilized wisely. Consider implementing in your app reward systems with badges, interactive but optional interface elements, additional customization opportunities, and more. These always do the trick if the app suits their concepts.
Listen to Your Users
In order to discover how to make a user-friendly app, you should apply for the most important opinion — the opinion of your target users. Incorporate feedback channels wherever possible, so it’s easy for your users to leave reviews, suggest an improvement, or just share their user journey with you so that you can understand their pains better. Lend an ear to your users to advance yourself toward high user-friendliness.
Mix User Touchpoints In
How to design a user-friendly app that will be in use for a long time? Just incorporate touchpoints that will prepare users for utilizing your app. From this point of view, such features as push notifications or smart suggestions are exactly what your target users require.
For example, when a taxi arrives, the app sends the appropriate notification to a client that requested transportation services. Such a form of push notifications comes in handy all the time. As for smart suggestions, they work exceptionally great for e-commerce and similar industries, where users have to choose between a vast number of choices, which may be somewhat frustrating.
Don’t Neglect Industry-Best Design Practices
This advice may sound obvious since designers always learn from solid cases, improve their skills over time, and look at how to make an app interface better. But that’s the point. Some practices are for specific usage, while others were in vogue years ago. Not to mention that the more knowledgeable the designer is, the more they tend to mix in some personal preferences overlapped with experience in previous projects. That drives the design away from its nature and makes it less user-friendly and more inappropriately fancy, complicated, or just inconvenient for a particular target audience.
The best solution here is to step away and attempt to see the bigger picture. Try to find out whether those colors and fonts you selected are your personal preference or does it what your target audience would like to see. When the opposite seems to be a bad call, follow the well-established rules and policies since most designers keep using them, which leads to a certain degree of standardization in what every app developer does.
Examples are the direct manipulation principle, 3D heuristic principle, seamless transition rule, and more.
What Mistakes to Avoid When Making the Design for User-Friendly Apps
Now, let’s proceed and learn the frequent mistakes to avoid while making a user-friendly app.
Don’t Lose Sight of Accessibility
When thinking about colors and fonts and their sizes, make sure you keep in mind the concept of accessibility. The utilized elements should be neutral, equally pleasant, and easily scannable by all types of users of all age groups. Otherwise, some of your potential buyers will just close the app right away after taking a first brief look at the interface.
Remember that even if you allow some customization options, two-thirds of the users are not willing to get involved with any settings. And, probably, every user wants, primarily, to get the value and only after that plays with fonts and colors. So, remember high accessibility all the way.
Be Mindful About Icons
The truth is, icons are not actually decorative elements, serving as the indication of options for choosing. They are used to ensure interaction and encrypt content that requires a whole written sentence to describe and save some space on the screen. So, don’t use them just to duplicate the text, for example, on a button. Use icons to complement a text or replace it when it’s appropriate. Or, as an option, to help distinguish similar items or elements from each other.
Don’t Forget About Device Compatibility
It frequently happens that designers focus either on desktop or mobile-first approaches. This way, they completely neglect the vast range of devices that may also be used to access the developed software solution. There are methods to ensure that the design is automatically adapted as per particular screen size. But designers and developers should do solid work first for this to happen.
Develop and stick to clear, solid wireframes. These are design blueprints understood by designers and developers. Low-fidelity and then high-fidelity design wireframes help these IT engineers to communicate over the software appearance and achieve better outcomes with minimal to no device compatibility errors. Also, wireframes are helpful in other design aspects.
Avoid Feature Overload
How do you create a friendly app that is easy to use from the start? The most basic rule is to avoid overloading a user with a bunch of functionalities when they launch your app for the first time. If your app is about selling online store items, then a catalog and a shopping cart are all that a newcomer should observe. After that, gradually introduce to users other features — search and filter, smart suggestions, affiliate programs, discount programs, and other additional options. You may think of the app as an MVP if you’re concerned about how not to overwhelm users.
Consider Weelorum for Your Mobile App Development
If you need a user-friendly, well-thought-out design for your app, you need to contact a reliable team of developers and designers to handle this sort of work. Weelorum is a vendor of IT services, and we have been around for years delivering outstanding software solutions for various purposes to numerous businesses.
We bring these and other advantages to your project:
- Clear communication
- Work toward your business goal achievement
- Industry-best expertise
- Flexible labor resources
- Niche-relevant experience
- Affordable pricing with no hidden charges
- Solid development approach
If you want to learn more about our expertise, take a look at our portfolio with some of our detailed case studies.
Final Thoughts
It’s pretty easy to develop a fancy-looking app with multiple features. Integrate tons of redirects, animated icons, exclusive fonts, and color gradients. However, it’s not the best way to guide users toward their regular flow or help them use offered functionalities. Sticking to a user-friendly design is as simple as making the interface as usable as possible and avoiding frequent mistakes.
FAQ
What does user-friendly mean?
In design, user-friendly means easy to understand and easy to work with.
How do I make an app interface that would engage users?
Stick to the best UI/UX design principles, avoid common design mistakes, and don’t neglect target audience research.
What are the most important features of the design of user-friendly apps?
These are a well-tuned design for users to understand and a strict minimum of functionalities that are easily accessible.
