make better apps - guide for better ux

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#RCApps How To Make Beautiful Apps People Will Love

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Page 2: Make better apps - Guide for Better UX

Table of ContentsIdea

Research

Flow

Interface Design

Accessibility

Testing and Feedback

Page 3: Make better apps - Guide for Better UX

Introduction

Whether it’s sending an email, creating a reminder, playing music, or watching a video, a good app makes the process quick, easy and fun.

With over 2 million apps in the App Store, design, usability, presentation and performance are the key components to standing out from the crowd.

This guide will give you the tips, tricks and resources to make a beautiful app people will love.

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IdeaConception of your app

It all starts with an idea. New or old, your idea is going to help make something easier for someone.

As a developer, you need to identify the primary goal of the app (your #appgoals) and stick to it.

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ResearchCheck if there are other apps similar to what you’re building. Download these apps, try them out and see what you like/dislike about them. Pay attention to the App Store listing and note the screenshots, description, language, and cost. Think about what would make you want to download that app - these are likely the same things users will notice about your app.

Once you’ve downloaded the app take notes on your experience with it. Here’s some key elements to focus on:

● Launch icon● Splash screen● Color scheme● Fonts● Icons● Help screens● Navigation

What works? What doesn’t? Write everything down and make a master list of dos and don’ts. Look at reviews in the App Store and see what people are saying about that app. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) app users aren’t shy about vocalizing their feelings. Now that you have your master list you have a frame of reference to check your app against.

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FlowWith your #appgoal clearly defined, you need to map out the actions a user has to take in order to achieve the goal. Your app might have multiple goals, but just focus on the primary goal to start with.

A good app enables a user to achieve the primary goal in 3 steps or less (unless you’re making a strategy gaming app!). Identify what these steps are and create the navigation flow.

Important Note: Do not confuse navigation with actions. What’s the difference? Primary navigation items are tied to a screen, whereas actions are tied to things you can do on that screen or within specific elements of the screen.

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Interface DesignA good interface is more than just a pretty, colorful layout. It can be simple and plain, as longs as it’s very user friendly. What should you focus on?

● Navigation bars● Tab and search bars● Activity views● Collections and controls● Like buttons● Pickers

Make it perfect by referring back to your master list to identify interface elements that you like versus what you don’t. Seek inspiration from different apps to see how they create components and datasets. Inspired UI and Pttrns are both good resources for examples of nicely designed components like those listed above. For examples of simple, yet elegant apps, check out Kindle and Spark.

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Color Scheme

Colors play an important role in giving your app a personality. Colors evoke emotions and, when paired right, can create a sense of harmony. Don’t shy away from using bold colors - even for business or productivity apps - as long as you don’t overdo it. Square Cash, musical.ly, Yahoo mail and Clear are some of the popular apps that use colors that most developers would typically avoid.

It is important to have a substantial contrast between your background and text colors, as well as between the elements using primary or secondary colors. This will ensure better readability and also gives your app a clean look and feel.

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Color Scheme(continued)

PrimaryYour primary color is the base color you’ll use for elements that are persistent throughout your app, such as the navigation and status bars. Oftentimes this is your brand color and helps users easily recognize your app’s screens by association, like with the Facebook and YouTube apps. Your primary color is also often used on calls to action, such as buttons or the tab bar.

AccentAccent or complimentary colors help define secondary actions and are also often used for adding style highlights.

SupportiveCertain types of apps will also require tertiary colors to indicate different states of a particular action, element or screen. As a rule of thumb, red denotes failure or error, and green denotes success or completion. While you might choose to use different shades of these colors, do not veer away from them completely. Users associate these colors with good or bad actions, and while using different colors might make you stand out, it most likely won’t be in a good way.

One of the most important aspects of choosing a color scheme it to make sure the colors you choose compliment each other. There are tons of resources to browse color palettes, including these three popular options: Adobe Color, Color Lovers, and Coolors.

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Typography

Font plays an equally important, if not bigger, role than colors in providing an enjoyable user experience and enhancing the accessibility of your app.

Fonts help set the tone of your app and also help associate your product with your brand and style. For example, overuse of bold and capitalized letters can create an unpleasant experience (imagine an app “yelling” at you with words in all caps). On the other hand, all lowercase letters could make the experience feel unfinished or juvenile.

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TypographyWhen choosing your font, it’s best if you find a font family with multiple font weights and options so you can easily keep your style consistent. If you’re married to a font that doesn’t have multiple options, look for font pairing options that go well with your primary font. Whether you’re using one font or several, make sure your font size, styles and weights are consistent for similar elements throughout the app. Your navbar title, buttons, labels, and text should be consistent from one screen to the next for a clean user experience.

As always, make sure you’re using fonts with proper permissions/licenses like OFL - Open Font License - that permit embedded use for apps etc., and check the terms of use for the specific font that you intend to use. Font Squirrel and Google Fonts are good sources to find fonts with these types of licenses.

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Custom IconsIcons help users quickly identify and make associations with elements and actions. Using icons for common actions, such as “delete” or “back”, as opposed to plain text, makes it easy for users to quickly identify the intention of an action item. However, it’s also good to have a label next to, or inside of, an icon if it isn’t completely clear what its purpose is.

IOS provides a standard set of icons you can use, but, more often than not, you’ll find that you need some icons beyond what you get in the standard set. You can get these with third party icon packs, but make sure you keep a close eye to them to ensure consistency, especially if you end up buying more than one pack. Icons8, Graphicriver, Creative Market and stock photography websites are all great resources for good icon options.

Interface Icons

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NavigationYour navigation can be flat/linear, hierarchical, or content driven based on your type of app and the intended user flow.

Flat NavigationFlat navigation is ideal to represent all content at the same level. This is great for apps where the actions go from one to another and/or back again - like a photo gallery where you use a swipe gesture to go from one photo to the next.

Flat Navigation

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Hierarchical navigations have nested actions. You might think - “Why would I hide my actions? I want my users to be able to access everything about the app from one place,” but this doesn’t always lead to good user experience.

Too many options can make the navigation unclear for a user and they could end up feeling like your app is complicated and not user-friendly. The navigation hierarchy must be clear to users so they understand where they are in the navigation and what options they have at that level.

The best example of a hierarchical navigation would be Amazon, or similar e-commerce apps. These have categories, subcategories, sub-subcategories, etc. that help users navigate the different sub-sets of content, as opposed to sitting all the categories at one level.

Hierarchical Navigation

Hierarchical navigation

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Content based navigation is little more complex in nature compared to the other popular types of navigation, but it provides a natural interaction flow for users of certain apps.

Games and mapping applications often make use of content driven navigation where users interact with elements on the storyboard to navigate from one view to another.

Both Apple and Google do a good job of doing deeper dives on navigation patterns.

Content Navigation

Content based Navigation

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WireframesCreating a mockup - even if it’s just a rough sketch of a wireframe on a piece of paper - will help you visualize how each screen will look and what elements are needed for each screen. Each screen should have one primary purpose and one or more actions for a user to interact with.

Draw each and every screen, including elements that are visible only when certain actions are performed (like showing an alert when a user tries to delete something, or an error message when the user puts in bad data).

In addition to helping lay out your design and identify gaps in its usability, this exercise will also help you program and organize your code better.

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App/Launch Icons

Your “Launch Icon” is equivalent to a company logo. It’s the first thing a user sees when they look at your app and the image they’ll associate with your app.

App Icon Template is a wonderful resource for photoshop templates to create your custom icon, and it includes actions to export icons in all of the required sizes needed for App Store submission.

If you’re not the artsy type, you can also get a designer to help create your app icon and splash screen on sites like Fiverr or Upwork.

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Launch/Splash ScreenThe launch or splash screen is a static screen that is bundled with your app, and is a great placeholder to keep users engaged while your app is loading. Though it might be tempting to show the launch screen for longer than necessary and/or to show it everytime the app is opened, doing so forces users to wait to access the app, interrupts the user’s train of thought, and makes your app seem slower than it actually is.

Keep your splash screen design simple and clutter free. Mobile patterns is a good resource of curated splash screen screenshots from popular apps that follow design conventions and apple guidelines.

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Onboarding ScreensWalkthroughs & onboarding screens help users:

● Get a quick overview of features in your app

● Provide a preview of how various views of the application look when populated with relevant data

● Encourage users to get on board by signing up or getting started with the app

● Prevent users from being deterred by an empty screen if there isn’t relevant data to show.

Smashing magazine’s article shows everything there is to know about onboarding screens, and UXArchive has screenshots of popular app onboarding screens. Check out Apple’s iOS design guidelines for a list of suggestions for making a user’s first launch experience a great one.

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Empty ScreensShowing an empty screen when there isn’t relevant information to show yet (like when the user hasn’t performed the action required to populate the screen) without any context as to why there is no data is confusing and could make the user wonder if something is broken or technically wrong with the app.

Instead, use this opportunity to engage your users with informative messages. Replace, “there isn’t enough data to show here”, with something positive and a call to action, like: “add friends to get updates in your news feed” or “click here to add your first picture”. Google’s guidelines has a nice overview of how to handle these screens to provide a killer user experience.

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AnimationsAnimation makes your app feel alive and dynamic. Using animation doesn’t just add to the aesthetics of your app, but it also makes it feel more responsive and fun to use.

When a user takes an action in your app they are anticipating a result or reaction. If your user presses a button and the request takes more than a fraction of a second to load, the wait is enough to make a user feel that nothing is happening. This could cause them to press the button multiple times or give up and exit out of your app all together. Visual feedback in the form of a spinner or loader lets them know their request is in progress and makes the process feel smoother and quicker.

In addition, transitions with animations makes the experience of going from one screen to another, or one portion of the screen to another, feel smoother and adds an element of joy. Apple and Google have great guidelines for using animation (and they both stress the added value of using them).

Send

Send

Sent

Initial

On tap/press

Processing request

Request complete

Sending

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Gestures enable users to easily interact with your app. When transitions are used to mimic the behavior of physical world, it provides natural interaction for a user. Navigating through a photogallery by swiping is so natural that even a 2 year old child can learn how to do it just by observing. Pinch zoom is a similar natural gesture.

Users have become accustomed to standard gestures and will often expect your app to behave same way. Apple has provided examples of some common gestures that add interactivity to your app. However, some apps take it too far and add gestures that users aren’t familiar with. If you use new or uncommon gestures in your app, be sure to provide helpful hints so your users know what to do. As with anything in your app, be sure to measure and monitor the activity to see how users are interacting with it. If they’re not using your gestures, or are using longer navigation routes to achieve the app’s goal, then these gestures aren’t adding value to your app.

Gestures & Visual Feedback

Tap Double Tap Long Press

Scroll

Zoom In Zoom OutDrag

Swipe LeftSwipe Right

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AccessibilityEven though you might envision your app as targeted towards one specific set of people, your app’s user demographics could end up being very varied. Pay attention to colors, shades, and the shapes of your icons to ensure people can easily distinguish between different elements and messages.

You should also ensure that your app follows guidelines that allow users to use display customization, speech, and similar features to make your app accessible - you can find more information on this in the guidelines for iOS and Android.

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User Study and FeedbackDuring the app development process and once you’re ready to launch make sure you have a system set up to capture feedback from users and potential users.

Encourage honest, unbiased reviews and really pay attention to what they liked, didn’t like, what they felt was challenging, and whether there were features they missed or ignored.

In addition to asking for this information from your user base, there are also services like UserTesting and TryMyUI that you can use to gain insights on user interactions with your app.

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Most Importantly: If you design your app for your users, you will make something that people will love.