While every business seeking a dominant mobile presence, innovation, and creative brilliance are bound to be the factors to make an app stand out from the others. Well, in recent times, a number of innovative approaches surfaced making the mobile app UX better and more engaging. Here below we are going to introduce 8 latest and innovative design approaches for making awesome app UX.
1. Contextual UI
How can a mobile app engage visitors better? Well, before any other aspect, your app can instantly engage the user by taking care of the user context or the particular situation he is in. Thanks to advanced device sensors in the high-end smartphones of our time knowing user context has become easier.
You first of all need to identify the user location, then the surrounding he is in while using the app and what would be the most useful help that you can ensure through your UI in that particular situation. So, the contextual UI must address the various combinations of elements like location, identity, activity and time in regard to a particular user situation. Delivering the right content as per your location is an example of such contextual UI.
2. Age responsive design
We all are aware of the responsive design and hardly anyone can argue about the highly adaptive role it plays for various device screens. But, responsiveness is also about addressing personalized aspects and preferences. This is why age responsive design is gaining popularity. If your app belongs to a niche addressed for audience across the age groups, it may be crucial to design the app age-responsively. It is important because younger people may not interact the same way elder and middle aged people would. Already advertising on the web is tailoring their contents and design elements for the age of the specific audience. From button sizes to typography to simplicity of navigation menu to color scheme, there can be changes in many elements as per the age of the users.
3. Failure mapping
To understand the user touchpoints while interacting with your app UX designers often make use of journey maps and user flows. But if you consider the flaw of such maneuvers you must admit that they allow you knowing the ideal users, not too many others who do not interact the way you predicted.
Non-ideal users are important for the app growth simply because the unprecedented user growth will result in a great number of new or novice users. How can you address the problems faced by these novice users? Well, you can only know the glitches in their experience by mapping the instances of failed interactions. By modeling non-ideal scenarios of uses you can better anticipate the possible flaws and accordingly can address them with UX design.
4. Designing mini interactions within microinteraction
Microinteraction has been a buzzword throughout 2015. These are small task-oriented interactions that by subtly making our experience better create a strong impression about an app or brand. For instance, the ‘Like’ in Facebook almost became synonymous to the platform. Even within these small Microinteractions, there can be tiny hidden parts that together give a microinteraction its shape and UX value. For example, when two mobile devices are connected by clubbing together using Bluetooth, it is microinteraction. But the interaction to toggle on the Bluetooth setting is a mini interaction within that microinteraction.
5. Making use of Haptic feedback
Smartphones are continuously being enriched with better and richer functional capabilities of high-end mobile devices. The typical sense of touch with tactile feedback in response to any input is called haptic feedback. For example, when using a virtual keyboard the individual keys may deliver a tactile feedback as and when the keys are pressed. Well, by making use of this enhanced interaction driven technology you can add value to certain user interactions and overall user experience. Such value addition can also help in converting business. For instance, upon coming over a ‘Buy Now’ CTA button on a product page a little vibration can be experienced which in turn can make the user alert of the action intimidated by it.
6. Utilizing tracking in typeface
Boosting readability is important more than ever since nobody has the patience to read anything minutely. Whether it is about apps or the web, we mostly scan content and try to grasp the key deliverables with a few glances. This is why tracking is important in a typeface which is basically all about consistent spacing among the letters of a word. The general rule goes like this – bigger the tracking is used, the better the readability of the word is experienced. Tracking coupled up with a variation of typeface can do wonder in enhancing readability.
7. Functional animation
The animation is preferred to grab attention, right? Well, while the glaring effect of the animation is equivocally agreed upon, it can as well serve a functional purpose for your app. So, besides looking stunning and brilliant in look with animated effects playing a significant role in your app, you can also make positive use of it by allowing it to deliver superb user experience. How can animation be used for functional ease? Well, there are many ways to do it. First of all, it can be used to adorn menu items, secondly as a feedback element and thirdly as an intuitive character in a storytelling design like that of parallax.
8. Designing for onboarding and off boarding as well
Every designer is quite expectedly serious about Onboarding experience of the user and they are likely to be so since the initial impression is crucial to let people stick to it. Well, if onboarding can be described as the sunrise, the sunset moment must be an offboarding experience which is equally important to create a good last impression. Often the user takes away this end-of-the-journey experience and it influences further user engagement. So, a designer should equally focus on onboarding and off boarding experience of the user. From a great start and then going through the unfolding of services and offerings and finally offering an impressive finishing touch – the whole user experience should be equal to a cinematic experience.
Author bio: Zabeer is a renowned app designer who is working as a head of app designing team at leading mobile app development company IndianAppDevelopers, He always searching innovative ways for designing applications with great user experience.