In today’s digital world, smartphones are central to our daily lives, with mobile internet traffic making up nearly 60% of all internet traffic. With this increasing reliance comes a greater expectation for seamless and intuitive mobile experiences. Creating a successful app isn’t just about having a brilliant concept; the design and functionality, particularly the Mobile User Experience (UX), are crucial for success. Unfortunately, many apps struggle to retain users, with one statistic showing that the average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first three days after installation. To combat this trend and build strong user relationships, providing an exceptional mobile app user experience is key.
What is Mobile UX Design?
Mobile UX is the subjective experience a user has with a mobile app. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, it’s the design of user experiences for hand-held and wearable devices, focusing on accessibility, discoverability, and efficiency to optimize on-the-go interactive experiences. It involves delivering intuitive, effective, efficient, and discoverable interactions via mobile devices. UX designers are tasked with crafting products that are not only enjoyable to use but also deliver a pertinent and impactful experience. In mobile UX, the focus goes beyond visual aesthetics to encompass emotional responses, objectives, and obstacles users face.
Why is Mobile UX Important?
Simply put, a good mobile UX is essential because it directly influences user satisfaction, engagement, and retention. Users expect a fast, smooth, intuitive, and engaging experience, and if they don’t get it, they are quick to abandon a brand. Poor navigation or page design can prevent users from finding content or products, impacting engagement and revenue. For instance, shoppers encountering negative mobile experiences are 62% less likely to buy from a brand. A well-thought-out mobile app UX helps strengthen brand awareness, increase engagement, build customer trust, and ultimately make it easy to buy from you. It’s also worth noting that Google’s mobile-first indexing means a poor mobile UX could impact your app’s SEO, making it harder to be discovered.
The goal of mobile UX designers is to design the experience users have before, during, and after using the app. This experience should align with principles like those in Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb:
- Useful: Fulfilling users’ wishes and needs.
- Usable: Being as easy and self-descriptive as possible.
- Desirable: Evoking positive emotions and appreciation.
- Findable: Making navigation easy and allowing users to find information quickly.
- Accessible: Ensuring disabled users can use the system and get the same experience as non-disabled users.
- Credible: Building user trust in you and your product.
Key Differences: Mobile vs. Desktop UX Design
To provide the best possible experience, it’s vital to understand how mobile and desktop UX design differ. You shouldn’t follow the same design principles for both.
- Size: Desktops have large screens, allowing for lots of information on one page. Smartphones have smaller screens, requiring designers to prioritise important information and structure content in a single column, relying on users to scroll down. If you simply shrink a desktop design to a mobile size, it would look awful and confuse users.
- Orientation: Desktops are typically horizontally oriented without the option to change. Smartphones allow users to change orientation, with most users preferring portrait mode for reading and scrolling, and landscape mode for videos or games. Layouts should adapt seamlessly to both.
- Navigation and Input: Desktops primarily use keyboards and mice. Mobile devices rely on touchscreens and gestures like scrolling, sliding, pulling down, and tapping. Designing for touch requires larger tap areas and considering one-handed use. Numeric keyboards should be offered for appropriate input.
- Environment and Context: Desktop use is often for more serious tasks like work. Smartphones are used everywhere – at home, in restaurants, on the go. This means designs need to consider factors like sunlight visibility, potentially requiring high-contrast colours. Thinking about the user’s context – where they are, what else is happening – is crucial, gained through user observations and research.
- Multitasking/Split Screens: While desktops commonly support split screens, this is less common on smartphones. Designers should try to keep users within the app by offering necessary functionalities, rather than forcing them to switch to other apps which risks distraction or annoyance.
Top Mobile UI/UX Best Practices
Drawing from the sources, here are essential best practices to elevate your mobile designs:
- Understand Your Users: This is the foundation of great mobile UX. Conduct user research to understand your target audience, their goals, motivations, pain points, behaviors, and preferences. Create user personas and scenarios to guide design decisions. A deep understanding of user context and behaviour is key to differentiation. This requires getting out of the building (GOOB) to see how users behave in their actual environment.
- Adopt a Mobile-First Approach: Prioritise the mobile experience when designing. Simplify the user interface by including only necessary features, removing clutter, and streamlining navigation paths. This ensures the app performs well on small screens and provides a strong foundation for scaling up.
- Implement Responsive and Adaptive Design: Your app should work seamlessly across various devices. Use responsive design so content, images, and text scale appropriately and the layout adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. Adaptive design goes further by tailoring content or features based on user context (e.g., showing a shorter text on mobile and offering a ‘read more’ option, or making a call to action more prominent).
- Design Touch-Friendly Interfaces: Since users interact with touch, ensure your interface elements are easy to tap accurately. Use buttons of a sufficient size (e.g., Apple recommends 44×44 pixels, Google 48×48 pixels) and provide ample spacing between touch targets. Place interactive elements within the thumb’s reach, designing for one-handed use where possible, especially for important controls. Session replay and heatmaps can help identify areas where buttons are too small or too close.
- Maintain Consistent Visual Design: Consistency enhances user familiarity, builds trust, and makes your app feel professional. Use a consistent colour palette, typography, and iconography throughout the app. Employ a clear visual hierarchy using headings, subheadings, and differentiating button styles. Ensure icons are consistent in style, avoiding mixing filled and outline icons, except potentially for the selected state in navigation. Consider colour principles like the 60-30-10 rule, where 60% is a dominant neutral colour, 30% a secondary supporting colour, and 10% an accent colour for important elements, though this is not a strict rule for all apps.
- Balance Typography: Balanced typography improves readability and scannability. Pay attention to font sizes, line heights, colours, and contrast. A general rule for body text in the digital world is a line height around 1.5 times the font size, but for larger font sizes, a smaller multiplying factor like 1.2 or 1.3 might be better to avoid excessive spacing. Ensure sufficient distinction between text elements to guide the user’s eye through the content. Use clear typefaces that work well in different sizes.
- Simplify Navigation: Keep navigation simple and intuitive, using standard patterns users are familiar with. Use a clear menu structure, limit the number of items, and provide a search function if needed. Minimise the steps required to complete tasks. For bottom navigation, prioritise the most important and frequently used screens or actions, limiting the number of tabs to three to five (maximum six) to avoid clutter and choice paralysis. Differentiate active and inactive states clearly through style, colour, or opacity. Avoid traditional top navigation elements like back buttons or logos in the bottom navigation bar, aligning with user expectations from other apps. Ensure bottom navigation is placed above the device’s home indicator safe area to prevent accidental triggers.
- Ensure Accessibility: Design your app to be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This involves testing with users with various disabilities (blind, low vision, colour blindness, deaf/hard of hearing, motor disabilities) in addition to using checker tools and guidelines. Use high-contrast colours, ensure text is adjustable, provide alternative text for images, and support screen readers and assistive technologies.
- Optimise Performance: Users expect apps to load quickly, ideally within a few seconds. Optimize load times by compressing images and media files, minimizing resource usage, and simplifying page layout. Techniques like lazy loading can load resources only when needed.
- Provide Feedback and Interactivity: Use animations and micro-interactions to make the app feel responsive and engaging. Provide visual or haptic feedback when a user performs an action, such as a button changing colour on tap or a quick vibration. Loading indicators or success messages inform users about the results of their actions. Differentiating active states in navigation is a form of visual feedback.
- Test and Iterate: Continuous testing and iteration are essential for improving the user experience. Conduct usability tests with real users to observe behaviour and gather feedback. Use analytics tools like session replay and heatmaps to track user journeys, behaviour, gestures (taps, swipes, scrolls), and identify issues on different devices and orientations. Iterate on designs based on these findings and analytics data. Accessibility testing is crucial, often involving technical checks to ensure elements are correctly tagged and accessible.
- Reduce Friction and Offer Selection: Streamline user flows and minimise necessary actions. Leverage mobile-specific features like autocomplete. Where possible, offer users a selection of options instead of requiring manual input, which can be faster and reduce errors. Avoid forcing users to leave the app to complete tasks like registration or finding information, as this increases the risk of them getting distracted or not returning.
- Ensure Consistency in Alignment and Spacing: Consistent alignment creates clear visual patterns that users can easily follow, reducing cognitive load and making complex information easier to understand. Define a rule for spacing, margins, and padding and stick to it consistently throughout the project. Grid templates can help organise elements and ensure consistent positioning.
- Use Conventions Wisely: Following widely accepted icons, design elements, layouts, and gestures simplifies page design and improves usability, as users are already familiar with these patterns from other apps. Ensure that typical symbols are used in their usual manner to avoid confusing users.
- Turn Empty States into Opportunities: Instead of leaving empty screens blank, use them to guide, engage, and encourage users to take action. A well-designed empty state can provide helpful text, illustrations, and clear calls to action.
- Prioritise Security: Users are savvy about data security, especially in sensitive domains like finance or healthcare. Your mobile UX must make them feel safe when handling personal or financial data.
- Foster Community: Adding a community component to your mobile app can drive engagement by allowing users to interact with like-minded individuals. This taps into the human need for social interaction.
Becoming a great mobile UX/UI designer takes practice and learning, but by understanding and applying these core principles and best practices, you can significantly improve your designs and create apps that are not only functional but also delightful and engaging for users. Continuous learning and iteration based on user feedback are key to success.