With the new technology taking over the world, people are constantly getting introduced to new things. The time when people only used a desktop or a laptop to access websites is long gone. Now, everybody wants everything on their phones. If your product or services are meant for regular use, your customers want it right on their phones.
Besides, everybody is living a fast life. Everybody has too much work to do and the 24 hours of the day do not seem enough. So with a quick lifestyle, technology needs to keep up.
One thing that has helped with the advancements of everything and has made it a lot easier is the mobile application. A lot of websites are now moving forward with building mobile application designs to ensure that their customers have the easiest experience browsing through their products and services.
What is Mobile Application Design?
While mobile apps are important for your customers, so is the Mobile Application Design. Having an app is not enough, it has to be presented in a way that is appealing to the customers. Everything that the mobile app features must keep the customer’s experiences on priority.
Along with creating the best mobile app possible for your customers, you must also focus on the mobile application design. While, there are many intricate details that you must follow when you build an app. But mobile application design holds equal importance.
The whole concept of Mobile Application Design includes both the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). The app designers are responsible for the “looks” of the app. They pick out the right colours, fonts, types of buttons and widgets that it must have.
Mobile Application Design is everything that you see. For example – if XYZ app is red in color and uses Algeria font, it’s planned by the application designer. The way the products are shown, the “sort” option, “add to cart” option, everything is planned and designed by the app designer.
What are the Mobile App Design Guidelines?
While there are no hard core rules that you must follow for Mobile Application Design. It is your application and you can design it in whichever way you want. However, there are certain things that you must keep in mind to ensure that your customers are comfortable in using the app as well.
Below are some mobile app design guidelines that will help you in designing a user-friendly mobile application design.
Easy Navigation
When you are building the mobile application design, you must ensure that everything that is appearing on the screen is relevant. The idea is to not stuff the space. Adding unnecessary details in the app screen only takes up the space and further reduces the overall speed.
However, you always have the option to add a screen tour video that can assist your users. But its best to avoid too many or unnecessary features. Make a list of things that are necessary and then think of yourself as the user.
Simple Design
While designing the mobile application design, your creativity is likely to bloom. You’d want to go as creative as possible. With the changing trends and rising expectations, it’s hard to not want to be creative with your designs.
As a designer, you must be able to balance your creativity and the simplicity in the mobile application design. Your audience would love animations and graphics around but if everything is too animated or too complicated to understand, they won’t like it. So its important to keep the design creative yet simple and easy to understand by the users.
Stay Consistent
The new audience wants change. They want uniqueness to the app. Staying consistent with your design, introducing new features or putting some unique features from time to time ensures that your users enjoy using your app.
Interactions
Having an interactive mobile application design is crucial. Let your customize the app and what it shows as per how they like it. The only thing that matters is to make sure that your users are happy. So incorporating interactions and customizations will ensure that your user spends a longer time on the app.
Improve the Search Feature
The goal of your app is to ensure that the user buys your products and services. But if your app’s design is not good enough or difficult to use, then the user is likely to get frustrated and leave. This makes it important for you to keep the search feature within the app. This eases the navigation aspect of the app.
The search features make it easy for your users to search for the products that they are looking for without searching through millions of others.
What Tools Should I Use for Mobile App?
Now that you have understood the mobile app design guidelines, it’s time to start the mobile application design journey. Below are some of the best mobile app UI design tools that you can use to create the perfect mobile application design.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop has been a favourite amongst the designers for many years now. It is compatible with both Apple and Windows. Before buying the software, it offers you a 7-day free trial period. It costs $9.99 per month.
It is perfect to learn the basics initially, but learning the intricate details will take time. But it is an all-purpose software. You can create images, web pages and mobile application designs.
Sketch
The sketch is another app that is famous and loved by the designers. It is used across the world. However, the only limitation it has is that it can be used only with iOS. The good part is that your entire team can build through the software.
You can avail the 30-day free trial. After that, it costs $99 per year.
InVision
It is a modern design software, built by the designers, for the designers. It is compatible with everything available. While you can work on this software for free with one prototype. You would need an investment of $99 per month to have access to unlimited prototypes for one team.
Avocode
Avocode does not really tick mark all the criteria for the UI Design tool. But it is very useful in working with the designs. It is easy to learn and master. It allows you to drag, drop and share any design you want and import the design prototypes across layers. You can easily cover the workflow from prototype to code in this software.
It costs $14 per month individually and $90 per month for teams.
3ds Max
3ds Max is a very trendy design tool that has been going around the designers for some time now. It is super expensive and costs $1,545 per year. But you can avail the 30 day period before making the purchase.
It allows you to create amazing 3D animations. It also offers a huge library of 3D content that you can use in your creations.
Mockups
Mockups is yet another powerful tool that you can use to create mobile application design. It is compatible with all software and costs $199 per year. You can download a free version but the features will be limited.
This tool lets you build and link interactive features and pages in your design. It is good for creating prototypes and testing them.
Mobile App Design Templates
With mobile application design, you are free to do anything you want. You can pick whatever design you want with the features you want. But in the end, it always comes down to the users. So below are some of the mobile app design templates that have been around for some time. And the users have responded well to them.
MaterialX
It is a tremendous and simple mobile app design template. It is mostly for Android but you can easily create it for multiple platforms. It is clear and uncluttered and matches every taste.
SuperView
This one is mainly for the iOS devices. It is nice and simple. SuperView is perfect for transforming web content to the app format. It is feature-rich. You can include marketing features, push notifications and social media logins.
xMusic
If you are looking to create a music library, xMusic template is the best. It is perfect if you want a simple media streaming app for your music application. However, it helps in keeping things simple and bringing it all to the basics.
Universal
It is the perfect template for the ones that are just starting to get into the mobile application design. It is the super basic version of mobile app design templates. It can pull together a variety of websites, music players, social media and much more.
Universal is an all-rounder.
Mobile App Design Inspiration
Mobile Application Design is always all about creativity. But it doesn’t hurt to have some mobile app design inspiration from other people. You always have the freedom to have your version of the design and mix & match it with everything around you.
Below are some of the perfect mobile app design inspirations for you to kick-start your journey!
YONO Mobile MP3 App
While it been a long time since we heard about this app, the mobile application design is perfect. The design has the right colour scheme for a music streaming app. The design is a beautiful contrast of red and black. Along with this, they have also used colour gradients in the buttons below.
Life App
This app is to remind users to water their plants regularly. Apart from the function what makes it unique is the background. The background includes images of the plant leaves with green and black. The content is in white which makes it soothing to look at.
NightOwlCoffee App
This is a food ordering app and is filled with distinctive illustration features. It shows a cartoon coffee with shades of yellow and red. The background is white which further enhances the other color elements.
Nykaa
It is a cosmetic and beauty shopping app. The background is pink and shades of pink. But the content background is white in color which makes the whole app look eye-catching.
Conclusion
Mobile Application design has a lot of potential and always depends on how creative you can get. The more intricate and interactive your design is, the better it will look. At the same time, you must also make sure that your creativity does not complicate things for your users.
