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You don't want to create a mobile app with poor UX, leading to the application being uninstalled. It's, therefore, essential to ensure that your app is intuitive, usable, and enjoyable.
This article will teach you everything about mobile UX and how to improve the app experience on mobile devices. Your app's user experience is the primary way customers interact, build relationships, and exchange value.
What Does Mobile App UX Design Mean?
Let's begin with a definition of UX. experts define it as a broad concept. "User Experience includes all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company and its services.
An actual user experience is more than just giving the customer what they ask for or a checklist of features.
The Interaction Design Foundation defines mobile experience design in the following way: "Mobile UX Design is the creation of user experiences on hand-held devices and wearables.
Dedicated UX designer create solutions, usually applications, to meet mobile users' unique needs and limitations. Designers optimize mobile interactive experiences by focusing on accessibility, discoverability, and efficiency.
Mobile UX is a broad topic, and designers must understand the user's behavior to optimize UX. They must collect and analyze data:
- User behaviors.
- User Needs.
- Users' pain points.
- Motivations of users.
It is essential to consider the context in which mobile app users interact. Mobile app users are motivated to reach specific goals, but their attention spans and environment vary.
You're correct if you believe that optimizing the UX of mobile apps is a difficult task. Collecting user data and understanding their behavior when using your mobile app is challenging. There's some good news: improving the UX and design of mobile apps pays off.
Your users will likely return to your app if they find it easy to use, intuitive, and memorable. Suppose your app is easy to use and allows users to complete a specific task (buying a product, getting information, reading the news).
In that case, they will stick with it or even recommend it. Your business will also be successful if your app is a success.
How UX Impacts User Retention And Growth
Your app's user experience is the primary way customers interact, build relationships, and exchange value.
Consider the following statistics as context:
- Companies can expect a return of 100 dollars for every dollar they spend on UX design.
- One in four mobile applications is only used once.
- After a negative experience, over 30 percent of consumers would abandon a brand that they liked in the past.
- Eighty percent of mobile users said they would only use an app up to three times.
- As subscription-based apps grow, there is a need to improve the app's UX.
Your user experience is influenced by various factors, including the infrastructure of your app and the interface you provide to consumers.
You can also consider the communication channels you use to interact with your users.
We'll go through a list of comprehensive tips to improve your user experience. This will help you grow your user base and retain existing customers.
These strategies aim to resolve issues with your app and optimize it to meet your users' requirements. This will lead to better retention, Growth, and profitability.
Limitations That Make It Challenging To Improve The Ux Of Mobile Apps
There is one significant limitation when you are working on mobile app optimization. Usability testing on mobile.
Why Mobile Usability Testing Is Difficult
Mobile usability testing involves observing participants performing a task within an app. Usability testing aims to determine how users interact with an app, whether it's easy or hard, and where improvements can be made.
It isn't easy to conduct usability tests on mobile devices. The small screen makes it difficult to see all the participants' gestures and movements on a mobile device.
According to Study, there are some common issues in mobile usability testing:
- Participants must hold the device in their hands. Can it also be propped on a desk or table?
- What is the best way to display it in the observation room? How will you show the screen in the observation area?
- How can you record how the user uses the app?
To get accurate results, you must simulate scenarios where people use smartphones. It's nearly impossible to test usability in these three scenarios.
You won't get an accurate picture of how users use your app and their experience or what they think about its usability.
15 Ways To Improve User Experience To Maximize Growth And Retention
Optimize Onboarding
The onboarding process begins your user's journey through your app. A good onboarding experience can positively impact your app's experience.
You should reevaluate your onboarding flow if you are experiencing short-term retention problems, a common problem for many apps. Onboarding should lower the learning curve, increase the adoption of features, engage users with your app, and highlight the essential elements.
Widespread onboarding flows include progressive, function-oriented, and benefits-oriented flows.
Conduct UX Research
Researching UX trends in an industry that changes so rapidly is vital. This includes both what's popular across the board and what's hot in your app category.
Understanding the UX trends and the broader ecosystem is essential to stay on top of user expectations. UX trends for 2023, for example, include AR, VR, motion design, and animations.
You'll need to look at what your competitors do to understand the UX standards. Food delivery apps, for example, are expected to allow users to track the progress of their orders in real-time.
This is often done by integrating a map that shows the delivery's location.
Reduce Friction
App users are impatient and can easily be thrown off the app experience if they need more support. In-app friction is the concept of decreasing how much effort users exert to complete a task or achieve their goal.
By analyzing your data, you can identify friction points within your app. Friction may be caused by problems completing a procedure, like an inconvenient check-out process. This can be achieved by reducing the steps required to complete a task.
Look At User Trends
You can improve your UX by analyzing high-level trends. Analyze trends in app installations, uninstalls and session counts, durations, and more.
Finding out when and where users stop taking action or lose interest can give you a clue as to what your UX needs to be improved.
It would be best to look at metrics such as Daily Active Users (DAU) or Monthly Active Users (MAU), which measure the number of users who use your platform daily and every month.
These metrics can indicate how effectively your app retains users over time and what you do to lose them. These metrics are Key Performance Indicators for many mobile-first companies.
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Collect Direct Feedback
The best way to determine what UX improvements are needed for your app is by getting feedback from customers about the UX elements they're happy with and unhappy with.
By collecting user feedback, you can more directly address their problems, improve specific features, and make them feel heard.
You can ask users for feedback on different aspects of the app, including its usability and User experience design.
Imagine you are a game app. In-app surveys can collect feedback from users on three new levels in your game. In-App Surveys are a shorter version of traditional surveys embedded directly into the app.
These tools allow for direct, targeted communication with customers. They also enable you to collect data to optimize your products.
Customize Your App Experience
You can elevate your strategy by personalizing your UX according to the explicit preferences that your users have expressed or based on other data about your audience.
The number of data points collected by companies across their tech stacks is increasing, and so are the expectations from users for personalization. You can personalize the user experience using data relevant to a customer's purchasing stage, general preferences, specific behaviors, and personal information.
Play On Human Psychology
Motivating users at critical points in their app journey will help you to engage them better. You can implement a variety of psychological marketing techniques in your UX.
These include creating scarcity or curiosity, offering incentives at critical milestones, and creating a sense of urgency. These tactics have been proven to influence the mind and instill habits.
Your gaming app, for example, can activate a user's dopamine system with strategically timed rewards in-game. Sending push notifications that count down to a limited-time offer can make your eCommerce app feel more exclusive.
Implement New Design Elements
Keeping your UX up to date is essential. Your app's experience will only evolve if you periodically improve your design.
This includes adding new components to your app, changing the layout and logos, etc. You can add new design elements to your platform, such as buttons, updated menus, logos, brand colors, and more.
Test Your Success
Test your app with real users to ensure it is usable! Remote testing is the process that allows you to get feedback from users after they've used your product.
Setting objectives, defining tasks to be completed, preparing test documents, identifying test participants, conducting your test, and analyzing your results are all part of usability testing.
Review Apps Using Comb Through
Your app reviews are a great way to understand how your users feel about your product. You can use reviews to supplement any direct feedback that you collect.
This will help you understand what aspects of the app are most important to users. In the thoughts of your fitness app, users may have requested improvements to your food-tracking feature. Reviews can highlight areas that need to be improved, added, or fixed.
Troubleshoot Crashes
App crashes are one of the most critical issues you should be tracking. App crashes can cause users to abandon your platform.
Android users, for example, can only tolerate a daily average crash rate of 0.25 percent.
You should monitor and address crashes as soon as your app goes live. App crashes may occur for many reasons. Some of the most common reasons why mobile apps crash are memory management, insufficient testing, handling errors and exceptions, compatibility issues with devices, excessive code, media optimization, and more.
To minimize these inconveniences and keep your users happy, you should have your team's address the causes of crashes in the app.
You Can Scope Your Competition
Suppose you want to stand out from the crowd in your app category. In that case, knowing what your competitors are doing to improve their user experience is essential.
What new features have your competitors added? What are the new features or elements they have introduced? Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors will allow you to position yourself on the field better.
You might be a banking application and notice that your main competitor has added a two-way messaging feature for customer service.
Your product team will be able to assess if this feature is worthwhile and take appropriate action.
Assessment Of Performance Issues
Your app's performance is the foundation for all aspects of your mobile experience. If your users become frustrated by performance issues in an app, they are more likely to leave.
The performance of an app includes stability, responsiveness, and speed.
According to studies, 59 percent find it annoying when an app takes over 2 seconds to launch. App crashes are responsible for 71 percent of app uninstalls, and users abandon apps that take too long to load.
Mobile app performance is affected by factors such as the app's loading time, ability to run under different conditions, and crashes that happen when user activity spikes. Your app should be monitored constantly to optimize or fix issues that arise.
Leverage Push Notifications
Mobile push notifications can't be replaced by any other channel. They are essential to a brand that wants its users to feel connected.
This channel can be used creatively to enhance the user experience. It connects brand touchpoints and rewards engagement while incentivizing sales.
Examples include transactional messages like delivery updates, shipping notifications, and appointment reminders that directly improve the customer's experience or marketing messages like limited-time promotions, seasonal sales, or subscription upgrade prompts.
Implement In-App Messaging
In-app messages can be used by companies to improve user experience. These messages are displayed in-app and reach all users rather than only those who have subscribed.
Apps within-apps are a great way to communicate to users the value and benefits of an app. For example, the Spanish construction management application Ogun relies on in-app messaging as the core of its onboarding process.
How Do You Evaluate A UX Designer?
It's time for you to evaluate and test the Best UI UX designers that are a good match.
How do you go about this? Interviewers tend to go with gut feelings, although everyone has their method. This needs to be corrected. There are better ideas than using your instincts or biases as the primary selection criteria for a UX Designer.
You should instead develop valid selection criteria to improve the accuracy of the evaluation and, ultimately, the selection.
Follow these four steps to objectively evaluate UX Designers you are interested in hiring:
- Know Precisely What You Are Looking For: Specify your project's specifications and design requirements.
- Assess Hard Skills: Which skills are essential to the success of the project?
- Discover Soft Skills: What personal qualities does the designer possess.
- Test The UX Designers: Are they able to create a design solution that meets expectations?
You should also include the skills and qualities necessary for your project in your criteria. The UX designer can quickly adapt and contribute to your project if you do this.
What to Look for in a UX Designer:
Design Skills
What are you looking for? Does this UX designer have the skills to do the job?
What can you do to find out? Ask questions, review portfolios and design exercises.
- Experience.
- Problem Setting Can the students identify, question, and prioritize problems?
- Process centered around the user. Does their design process take into account user insight?
- Idea Generation. Can they quickly come up with high-quality ideas?
- System thinking. Does the team understand how its solution will fit in with users' lives and needs?
- Appearance: Does the design suit the audience?
- Innovation: Is their design original and new?
Read More:
Mobile UX Best Practices to Enhance App Experience
People Skills
What are you looking for? Would you like to work with the designer?
What can you do to find out more? Interviews, cover letters, and emails back and forth.
- Communication: Is the person a good speaker and listener?
- Collaboration: are they able to work well in a group?
- Contribution: To culture Do these values represent the company?
- Leadership: Are they proud of their work?
- Mission: Have they done any research on your company before the interview?
UX designers with these skills should be considered for any job. Here are some questions you can ask UX designers in interviews to get the information you require to make a final decision.
- What is your design process?
- Describe any challenges you encountered on a project.
- What was your approach to the problem?
- Give examples of your user research and usability tests.
- How do you deal with criticism from your clients?
- What does it take to be an excellent UX designer?
- What tools do you use for evaluating your designs?
What Should You Expect To Pay For A Designer's Services?
It's not a simple question. Factors to consider include geography, expertise, and the type of engagement you seek.
We'll give you some information to help you understand what price ranges are available.
Freelancers
You can charge anywhere from $10 per hour to $100 or more. According to Upwork's median, UX Designers earn between $25 and $39/hr on their platform.
You can find designers there with all kinds of hourly rates. Toptal, another freelance platform, does not publicly disclose its designer's rates. However, you'd expect them to cost more than Upwork.
The hourly rate would be at least $120. Fiverr is among the platforms that offer the lowest prices per project.
In-House Designers
In the US, an in-house designer's salary could range from $50 k. to $175 k. per year. According to a survey, Switzerland pays the highest average salary for UX designers (102,614 dollars per year), and Morocco pays the lowest (1,006 dollars per year).
Agencies
It depends on many factors, just like it does with freelancers or in-house designers. In Western countries, most agencies charge a monthly rate ($8000 for full-time junior designers and above; $10.000 - $16.000 for senior ones) or an hourly fee (typically $50 and up).
Prices vary widely across the world.
Avoid These Mistakes When Hiring A Designer
Merging Multiple Roles
Many companies need to merge multiple job roles into one. Hiring a single person to do various jobs, such as UX, UI, and marketing, can be tempting.
However, hiring a "technical rockstar" to perform multiple tasks can prove counterproductive. It can be harmful to your product. You can strike it lucky with a multi-talented designer who can perform multiple roles.
Most of the time, you will end up with a novice, who is someone who dabbles only in UX design. Hire UI UX designers rather than a sub-par designer.
You will save a lot of money and time by making this move.
Prioritizing Specific Skills
The constant technological changes mean the demand for specific skills is also changing. Hiring a UX Designer based on one skill is dangerous.
Avoid it. When hiring, you need to be open-minded and use a holistic approach. Instead of basing your decision on the designer's specific skills, you can assess their critical thinking.
How do they solve complex problems? Can they translate complex business requirements into great UX designs? What is their design process like? When hiring a UX designer, you should assess these skills.
The importance of critical thinking, intuition, and problem-solving skills will always remain. You can be confident of this.
Overestimating The UX Portfolio
It's crucial to know what you should look for when looking through the portfolio of a UX designer. Many companies and recruiters judge a UX Portfolio based on its quantity.
This includes the number of UX samples and the designer's case studies. Hiring a UX Designer is a costly error. Why? Refrain from assuming that a UX Designer with only 3 to 5 samples is less qualified or experienced than someone with 10 to 20.
They're not. The skills and experience of a great UX designer can be demonstrated by a few case studies. Focus on the content of the portfolio instead of the assumptions.
The UX portfolio must clearly show how the designer has contributed to the final product and project. When evaluating a UX Portfolio, you should consider the following:
- Problems clearly defined.
- Initial User Research Findings.
- Wireframes.
- User Testing Insights.
- Final Designs and Solutions.
- The skills used in the project.
- Key metrics.
Focus on depth and quality when evaluating a UX Portfolio.
What To Expect From A Quick Turnaround
A UX designer's ten years of experience does not mean they can finish a project in a single night. You shouldn't be expecting it and should not expect that to happen.
A great UX design should improve the user experience and increase conversions. Rushing a project or the UX designer will only help if you intend to ruin your product. Allow enough time for the designer so that they can do their job.
Talk to the designer to find out what deadlines are expected. This will help to avoid any confusion and disappointment later.
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Create A Product That Is Visually Appealing And Provides A Fantastic App Experience
You're now armed with UX expertise and a tool to help you improve the UX of your mobile app. What is the main lesson of this article? Avoid letting your mobile application fall into the Norman door category.
Your application should be clear to your users. Do not give users any reason to uninstall your application. Use analytics to make better decisions. Observe the behavior of users in your app and improve it based on their actions.
Optimize your mobile app UX constantly to keep users happy and loyal.
