5 Tips for Improving Your App’s UX Design

Just because your app has a great design doesn’t necessarily mean that your users will be ecstatic about using it. App UX design is just as important as the visual presentation of the app. Without optimizing for user experience, you’ll frustrate your users with redundant tasks, unintuitive user interaction, or useless functionalities. Here are some great tips for improving your app UX design.

Tip #1: Optimize functionalities and make it clear what users should do

As an example, if there is a functionality to pull out a tab to access a navigation menu, it should work without any issues. It should not be too sensitive where a single tap pulls it out all the way nor too tough to the point where users need to really work on it to bring it out. It’s also important that you clearly explain to users what they need to do to take some kind of action. If they need to pull out a tab, clearly tell them to tap on the graphical cue, hold it, then slide it out. Don’t assume that users know what to do.

Tip #2: Design for intuition

You want to design your app in a way that makes it intuitive on what to do next or what to do to achieve some kind of objective. It should be obvious and natural on what to do to get what a user wants out of your app. There are numerous examples where app developers have designed an a function in their app that seemed obvious to them but only ended up confusing users. Sometimes the problem lies in developers getting too cute or fancy with their app only to have a certain feature end up as a point of frustration for their userbase.

Tip #3: Create great user onboarding

User onboarding is the process of getting users to start using your app. This is typically done through a set of tutorials when the app is launched. Some developers actually use pop ups that come up as new users start interacting with the app while some link to online videos that carefully teach users how to use the app. There’s no reason why you can’t use both if you want users to quickly become familiar with your app. Just make sure that you really focus on building a strong user onboarding campaign or you may risk the user abandoning your app.

Tip #4: Optimize for different screen sizes and landscape viewing

Many developers know that they need to optimize their app for iOS and Android. However, they often neglect optimizing their app for various screen sizes and optimal landscape viewing. You need to understand that there are various screen sizes for both tablets and smartphones which significantly impact how your app is presented. Many tablet users also use landscape viewing quite often. For these reasons, you need to put in the extra effort to see how your app is viewed across all screen sizes/platforms and redesign it for the best experience.

Tip #5: Focus on Your Core Functionalities

When it comes to user interaction, there will primarily be a few functionalities that users engage with the most. That’s why it’s a smart idea to start by focusing on all your important functionalities first before you go through the rest of the list. App UX design is a long process of redesigning, so you want to focus on what’s going to be the most positively impactful for your users.