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16 Mistakes Every Mobile App Developer Commits While Building UI/UX

Are rules really meant to be broken? Well, that certainly should not be the case when it comes to mobile app UI design. You, as a developer, might want to bring in creativity within the UX elements like animations, gestures, and aesthetics design. However, ensure to keep the conventional norms intact, while doing this.

Sometimes, a plain ‘functional’ app works wonders due to its blunder-free ‘simple’ approach, as compared to a jazzy app that appears stylish, but does not make sense as far as the usability goes, or even difficult to understand because of too many complexities. If your app does not follow the basic ground rules, then no matter how good your app looks, users will not able to access even the fundamental features.

We selected a bunch of different apps, and tried to analyze the loopholes that could possibly make the mobile app developers life a living hell. What we found is a set of 21 different points, which if avoided completely, can help your app to win hearts rather than beg for mercy. Let us look at what those 21 blunders, most developers make.

Disregarding the context completely

Have you ever thought about your target audience, and tried to comprehend their demographics? There are so many key areas to look at, such as age group, gender, lifestyle, device type, indoor/outdoor presence, online/offline use, timezone of surfing web, and many others. Not taking these contextual factors in account, lets UI designers to face a great deal of low usability.

Keeping design confined to just yourself

Many designers are reluctant to show off their apps early on before release, to the colleagues, subordinates, or even to the social circles, due to one or the other reasons. This leads to your app released to end users straight away, without having any knowledge on whether the app is perfect or not. Since, your app haven’t been tested by a group of beta testers, there are high chances that end users come up with many bugs or errors, which you might have averted if you had float across your app to close ones beforehand.

Doing it all by yourself

Thinking that you can do everything by yourself, without taking any internal or external help, is a completely wrong notion, most developers struggle, destroying their app just because of their ego. Any app, simple or complex, do need a third perspective, technically or non technically. There are people out there who are technically more sound, or have used more apps than most other people. Neglecting their perspectives, could result in worst outcomes for your app.

IoT is often not taken into account

Whether you agree or not, Internet of Things (IoT) such as, smart watches, smart TVs, smart fridges, smart washing machines, etc., is quite certainly the future, and will stay for long. Not creating your apps in that direction, with voice, motion, or sensor based capabilities, will let your competitors outperform you in future with a progressing technological world.

Making use of small fonts

Remember, smartphones have already got small screen sizes. If you offer font types difficult to grasp, or size that is difficult to read, users would not be willing to use the app, even if the app contains a lot of images or multimedia to deal with.

Screen tapping is not responsive enough

User fingers do vary in sizes, and so do thumbs. If your app do not have tap targets large enough accommodating every single finger or thumb area, then you might lose out on a major section of audience. In addition to large tap targets, if your app does not offer smooth tapping or swiping resulting in actions, your users might get frustrated on the first impression itself.

Designing a common app for iOS & Android

It is not surprising to see your app facing too many limitations, if you have a common thing designed for both iOS & Android. Both platforms have strikingly different ways to perform, as well as appear. More importantly, the user base for both OSes approach the respective OS from a distinctive mindset. Keeping all these things in mind, a common design in terms of UI/UX, will definitely show adverse effects, when it comes to using the same.

Taking up space beyond value

If your app consumes too much of phone, or memory card space, then it might be among the top ones to get deleted, when a user faces low phone memory, or low memory card space. Especially, when your app does not offer that much value, as compared to the space it occupies, it would top the list of “to delete apps”.

Asking for app permissions on start

Imagine, how would users feel, if your app starts asking permissions as soon as it is opened. People do not use apps for answering a dozen of irrelevant questions. It would be soon enough that they would get irritated, ultimately shunning an app.

A tiring long onboarding process

Users do not prefer to spend a hell lot of time in going through too many sign up/login steps, by filling up forms, and entering never ending details. A long onboarding process, is not only tiresome, but also extremely boring to deal with. In addition, absence of social logins, will make things even worse.

An app resembling a website

What’s the use of creating an app, which looks just like its counterpart website. A website is meant to read things, while an app is meant to perform actions. If your app does exactly the same thing as your website, then your users would not feel any need to keep your app any longer on their smartphones.

Ads placed with wrong positioning

If your apps UI are overlapped by unwanted ads, placed at wrong places, then it will annoy users right away. When ads disrupt the user experience, they no more remain a secondary thing.

Push notifications overloading users

Push notifications are sometimes relevant, and sometimes not required, depending on user preferences and mood. If your app forces push notifications to every single user without asking them, most might get a strong reason to uninstall the app right away.

Wrong selection of foreground/background elements

When wrong foreground, or background components selected, like colors, images, videos, audios, or more, users will leave unimpressed in their first glance, resisting users to go ahead.

Absence of ample white space

Spacing does play a major role, especially when it comes to a small screen appearance. If the app elements, do not have enough room or air to breathe, things could look messed up and clumsy. Proper whitespacing absent between app components, and around them, can make your app look crowded, and dirty.

Not taking the prototype seriously

A prototype is critical to understand where your app scores, and where it does not. The potholes can be scanned within a prototype, and accordingly filled. All the app issues, errors, or bugs appear in the prototype design. If not taken seriously, then your final app release problems, you never thought before.

Written By

Kathy Kim is working with Fusion Informatics- a web, software and mobile application development company. She is exploring their experience through informative article with others.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. Stella

    June 1, 2016 at 9:03 am

    Nice blog post, Kathy!

    Designers need to be clear with the agenda of the mobile application. Second there should be one project detail meeting with business analyst, project managers, and designers where designers need to come with their point of view on the basis of research. This will surely make designers more confident.

  2. Dhananjay Goel

    November 23, 2017 at 10:31 am

    All these points are very important to consider when designing and developing an app, the designer and developers must have a discussion to have a clear cut prototype of the App and should stick to it till the end

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