3 Designing Mistakes that can Drastically Bring down the Quality of a Mobile App

It’s next to impossible to avoid making mistakes in app development. An error free mobile app for developers and designers alike is like a dream that can never come true. But, there are certain errors that have the potential to bring down the quality of the app drastically. These are the kind of mistakes that lead to the failure of the app to make any kind of impression on their target audience; hence they need to be avoided at all costs.

There are certain designing mistakes that can be ignored by mobile app users and there are others that simply won’t be ignored by mobile app users. The mistakes given below are the kind that is the difference between the success and failure of a particular app. Let’s take a look at them.

Overdoing the Visuals

Designers eager to give proof of their creativity, many a times tend to go overboard with their visuals. They tend to ignore the best practices that have been underlined for designing mobile applications, in order to bring to their apps a completely new look and feel.

No doubt, there is a need to bring to the app the kind of visual appeal that will impress the end users, but this shouldn’t be at the cost of the usability conventions. This will just complicate the use of the app. Think about it for a second. If you are presented with an app that has overblown visual elements, isn’t it going to interfere with your user experience? Yes, it is and therefore focusing on an app that looks different is well and good, but overdoing it, just impacts its overall usability and functionality – A Big Mistake.

Forgetting Intuitiveness

Design that forgets all about making the app as intuitive as possible is another big mistake made by developers. Here again, the obsession with style, creativity and uniqueness, leads to the designing of controls that cannot be used comfortably by the end users. This is something that brings down the intuitive quality of the mobile app by a long way and has a detrimental effect on its usability.

When it comes to the control of an app, breaking convention never helps as users are always on the lookout for an app that offers controls that appear familiar. This is because they do not want to spend valuable time in trying to learn the controls of the app. There is a rule of app design that all developers must adhere to – Familiarity breeds Intuitiveness.

The idea is to offer users an app that has perfectly recognizable elements that allow users to make sense of the app functionality as soon as they lay their eyes on it. If the design of the app isn’t able to offer the kind of interface that a user can understand perfectly just because the designer wanted to make it appear as unique as possible, the app will fail to find traction amongst target users.

Ignoring Context

When a mobile app is being designed and developed, the design and development team should make it a point to explore the various contextual parameters that will determine app usage.

So for example, if the mobile app is a gaming app, it most probably will be used when the user doesn’t have anything else to do or is getting bored and wants some entertainment. Moreover, it might be used when a user might only be able to make use of just one hand for operating the app, and might usually be inclined to use it on the move. This is just an example of the contextual parameters that need to be understood by the designers in order to offer users a highly satisfying user experience. If this is not done, there is every chance that users won’t be able to make use of the app, the way they want to.  This is another big mistake that needs to be avoided at all costs.

In Conclusion

As can be imagined, it’s not just three designing mistakes that take the quality and consequently the popularity of the mobile app, all the way down. There are plenty of other mistakes that mobile app designers need to keep in mind. For designers, it’s imperative that they focus on doing the important things right, otherwise they will design the kind of mobile apps that have errors, which in turn will have a detrimental impact on the success of the app.