Best Practices for Mobile App UI Design

Benny Alexander January 11, 2018 0 comments

High quality mobile app design depends largely on the user interface. We’ll show you how to step up your mobile app UI design game.

Do you want to beef up your mobile app UI design?

Design and user experience have never been more important. And designers have to constantly adapt to changes in order to meet user needs.

That’s why it’s important to stay on top of the trends and best practices.

What Will Shape your Mobile App UI Design?

It’s impossible, of course, to predict the future.

But we’ll look here at four of the best practices putting the emphasis on user interface for 2018.

1. Ditch The Clutter

Whether mobile or desktop, good UI design is about delivering relevant information and avoiding the “noise” of irrelevant information. So you need to declutter.

It’s just good practice across the board.

But it’s especially relevant to mobile app UI design. A cluttered interface is bad enough on the desktop. On mobile devices where there’s the additional challenge of limited screen space, clutter is the kiss of death.

Show only what is necessary on the current step of the flow. For example, if you’re offering choices, revealing just enough information to enable the user to make the initial choice. Provide details on the next screen(s).

2. Get to Talking

With the popularity of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant, it’s obvious that Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are hot and they have challenges.

They’re allowing users to move away from clicking and tapping – edging ever closer to a screenless experience. Simply put, they make our lives easier.

So it’s important to put some energy into VUIs in your mobile app design.

This isn’t to say that traditional graphic user interfaces, or GUIs, are on the outs though. At least not for 2018.

This is partly because it’s not always proper to use voice response – particularly in places where it’s socially unacceptable.

But there’s also still a lot of room for improvement in the conversational systems itself. VUIs don’t quite yet have a grasp on understanding how human conversations flow.

3. Avoid Hidden Navigation

You’ve got your perfectly uncluttered UI design in place, complete with cool features for a rich user experience.

But nobody can find that content or those features.

Don’t hide your navigation. Hidden navigation such as gesture-driven is largely ineffective because most users can’t find it. And avoid hiding menus on individual pages.

Keep your navigation open and consistent.

You never want someone using your app wondering, “Where am I?”. So, Always help them to know the current location obviously. Let them not get lost in your jungle of features between screens and forms.

And finally, resist the urge to be clever and edgy when it comes to navigation. Simplicity is the best practice here.

4. Humanize the Experience

This is a basic and fundamental best practice in all UI design. It will probably be just as relevant in 2028 as it is in now in 2018.

Human-centered design matters. That’s because digital experiences have become directly related to user emotions.

Users expect to interact with digital products in the same way they do with one another. So designers should aim to design digital products that meet those expectations.

To humanize the experience in your UI mobile app design, put the focus on satisfying fundamental human needs such as trust, security, and transparency. Save the bells and whistles for other projects.

Kick up Your Design

No matter how tempting it might be to flex your design muscles, remember that your mobile app UI design is ultimately about interacting with your users.

We hope this article helped inspire you and if you have anything you’d like to add, get a conversation started. Feel free to comment below!