Whenever a mobile app user taps a button, there’s more going on than just tapping a button. For starters, why are they tapping that button — what objective do they hope to accomplish? And will they succeed; does the button do what they think it does? Why did they choose that button, that task, or your app to begin with? And how do they feel about the process; are they enjoying themselves? 

With the fierce competition of the mobile app market, more and more app makers are looking into the minute details to improve their products. We hear the terms “UX” or “user experience” thrown around, but what do they really mean? How do you design a user’s “experience” the same way you design a menu or icon? 

In reality, user experience (UX) design is a lot less abstract than people think. We may not be able to predict every user’s exact response, but countless studies have revealed the design techniques and best practices that actually work. 

In this guide, we’ll share the fundamentals of mobile UX design you need to get started, so you can design the ideal app experience, catered to your specific users. But first, let’s talk a little about what UX is, and why it’s crucial to modern app development. 

What is UX? The Difference the User Experience Makes 

Essentially, UX is about “designing” a plan for the user’s actions, feelings, and attention in the same way you might design a product’s functionality. The nuances of digital apps go deep, even when considering just its appearance. Design choices like color, size, shape, and placement can all influence user behavior — for better or worse. 

UX design uses these nuances to influence how users interact with your app. At the bare minimum, UX design ensures users can find the controls or pages they want. But at an advanced level, where you anticipate the user’s needs and play into their preferences, you can effectively use UX design to increase conversions and encourage specific actions. 

You’ve probably experienced both good and bad UX design yourself. Have you ever used an app that felt intuitive, like the controls were so effortless that you could focus all your attention on the app itself? What about the opposite — have you ever used an app that was so frustrating and time-consuming, you gave up before accomplishing what you intended? 

That’s the significance of UX design, and in the modern app market it can mean the difference between success or failure for new companies. UX design improves more than just usability as well — it can enhance your branding and customer loyalty as well, not to mention let you target specific goals like getting more social media followers or selling a particular product. 

But discussing UX in general can be confusing. For a field that focuses on the details, it helps to explain what those details are. Specifically, UX design deals mostly with these areas: 

• user interface (UI) — the controls, including buttons, gesture controls, and voice-commands. 

• navigation — the app’s information architecture (IA) and structure, like a “site map” for mobile apps

• visual design — the real meat of UX design that influences where the user’s attention goes, allowing designers to encourage certain actions over others

• audio design — although a secondary concern, sound effects can help communicate function, confirm an action is complete, or simply improve the user’s enjoyment

• onboarding — subtle ways of showing new or inexperienced users how to use the app (without overwhelming them or boring them)

• loading times — no one likes to “experience” a slow app

• emotional response — how the user feels when using the app; ideally, you want the user to enjoy the experience as much as possible

The skill of UX design originated with desktop design, but the shift to mobile devices in recent years has complicated things. Now that you understand the basics of UX design, let’s look into how mobile app UX in particular is different from standard or traditional UX. 

Mobile UX vs. Traditional UX: What App Designers Need to Know 

Whereas backend app design is determined by technological capabilities or innovation, UX design is determined by the preferences of the users. For one thing, that means good UX might sometimes seem impractical or counterintuitive from a technical perspective. 

An even bigger issue is that, because UX design follows user preferences, it’s subject to change over time. As usage of mobile devices is quickly overtaking desktop usage, the UX best practices for desktop apps are falling short on mobile apps. What we see emerging now are definitive UX practices exclusively for mobile devices, branching apart from desktop UX. 

Particularly, mobile UX design adds these concerns: 

Screen conservation 

Mobile devices have smaller screens than desktops (obviously), but from a design perspective that means less space to fit everything you need to. This is believed to be the impetus behind the minimalist design trends of the mid-2010s, in particular the hamburger menu, which consolidates the wordy menu bar into a tiny, “bite-sized” icon. 

Touch and gesture controls 

The goal of interface design is to give your users all the options they need in a way that’s easy to use. For this, touch and gesture controls are a great advantage — not only do they conserve screen space, but also they usually feel more intuitive. Have you ever tried to “zoom in” on a real photo with your fingers because it just “felt right”?

Screen orientation

Most mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, include two different orientations: vertical  and horizontal (or, if you prefer, portrait and landscape). For a lot of apps, this means you have to design twice as many layouts to accommodate both user preferences. 

Screen sizes

The iPhone 12 Pro Max has a different screen size than the regular iPhone 12. Both have different screen sizes than the iPhone 11, and all three have different screen sizes than what Samsung offers. When designing mobile app UX, you have to factor in all the different display sizes to make sure nothing is cut off, moved, or squashed together. 

User environment

Traditional UX is designed in a vacuum — no one is using their desktop computer at a noisy bus stop with constant distractions. Mobile UX design, however, caters more towards the on-the-go experience, typical of mobile devices. Among other things, this includes an emphasis on efficiency and simplified workflows to mitigate distractions. 

Mobile UX Best Practices: How to Design the Perfect App Experience 

Understanding the theory behind mobile app UX design isn’t enough to reap its benefits. If you want to apply UX design to your mobile app, below we outline some of the basic best practices and techniques anyone can use. 

Visual cues to guide actions

Easily the most practical use of UX design, you can arrange the visuals and composition of your app screen to help guide user actions. This technique involves manipulating the order in which elements get seen — you can prioritize certain elements to make sure they get seen first, or put others to the side where they can be safely ignored. 

The priority of what gets seen is known as visual hierarchy. By controlling the visual hierarchy, you can better control how your user experiences your app and encourage certain actions over others. It’s very useful if you want to draw more attention to your calls-to-action, and less attention to your legal disclaimers. 

This technique is a favorite among profit-centric apps, but you can also use it to help the user as much you help yourself. It’s a great aid when onboarding new users and teaching them how to use your app. Placing the most common buttons and navigation options at the top of your visual hierarchy makes it more likely that new users will find them when they need them. 

There are quite a few different ways to manipulate visual hierarchy, but some of the best include: 

• size — bigger elements get noticed first; it’s that simple

• spacing — the more negative space (a.k.a. white space or empty space) around an element, the easier it is to notice; try distancing other elements away from the one you want to get noticed

• contrasting colors — take advantage of color opposites to make certain elements stand out; a common practice is to put call-to-action buttons in the opposite color of the background

• composition — eye-tracking studies reveal that similar people scan documents in similar ways; in Western countries, where we read left-to-right and up-to-down, the upper-left corner is the most common place people look first 

The deeper you get into graphic design, the more of these techniques you’ll discover. But if you’re just getting started in UX design, familiarize yourself with the ones above first. You have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk. 

Navigation

Navigation, or how users get from page to page, is one of the trickier aspects of digital design. What seems intuitive and obvious for one user might be confusing for another. For example, if you’re searching a shopping app for “women’s shoes,” do you first check the “women’s” section or the “shoes” section? 

Good UX means helping everyone get to where they want to go. You don’t want to alienate certain users just because they have a unique way of organizing things. Rather, you want to include multiple pathways to the same source, so users can choose whichever is most comfortable to them. 

But first, conduct some usability tests to see how your target user groups think. A simple card sorting test among testers who fit your target demographics should reveal everything you need to know. This kind of concrete evidence always beats guessing. 

Interface design

How you design your controls, including gesture controls and voice commands, can directly impact your app’s success or failure. Would Tinder have achieved its heights without its characteristic swipe?

If you’re using traditional visual controls (like buttons), you want to pay attention to the look of the controls. Will new users recognize them as controls, or mistake them for background decoration? 

It helps to use pre-established visuals that users will recognize from elsewhere, for example, using a heart as a Like button, or a magnifying glass for the search menu. This is a great boost for onboarding, since the user can draw on their previous knowledge instead of learning new controls

However, it’s also important to be original and stand out. If you’re going to use conventional icons, try to give them a stylized twist, like using your branding colors or a particular artistic style. Of course, that leads to another problem — how do you stay consistent with your icons across your entire app? The answer lies in our next tip...

Component library

Component libraries are like style guides for design assets. They’re internal documents that consolidate all your design choices for the repeatable elements used in your mobile app. 

Let’s say you create an amazing animation for menu expansions, and you want to use it for all your menus in the future. You’d put a sample of the animation in the component library, along with some guidelines on how to use it. Then, the next time you need to add the animation for menu expansions, everything you need is right there in the component library.  

Component libraries have two main advantages. The first is that they ensure consistency, which in turn improves onboarding (if you use the exact same component later, the user will remember how it works without having to learn something new). Consistency also works well for branding if you have more than one app; loyal users will appreciate seeing the same elements on a second app so they don’t have to learn new ones.

The other advantage is time. Using a dedicated component library cuts down on design time — you don’t have to waste time looking up how to do something or inventing a new solution because the old solution is readily available. This goes double for design teams: if one designer creates an asset, the other designer can use it without having to worry about discrepancies. 

Color theory

Color theory posits that each color has a unique emotional connotation, and that viewers experience similar emotional responses to the same colors. In other words, you can influence how your users perceive your app and your brand by what colors you associate yourself with. Do you want to come across as a fun and casual app or a serious and professional app? The colors you choose can determine which way you lean. 

For quick reference, here’s a basic outline of which colors mean what: 

• red — passion, urgency, power

• orange — friendliness, energy, enthusiasm

• yellow — happiness, cheerfulness, attention

• green — nature, growth, stability 

• light blue — invitation, openness, serenity

• dark blue — competence, security, trust

• purple — creativity, mystery, extravagance

• brown — dependability, ruggedness, old-fashionedness 

• pink — cuteness, femininity, youth

• white — cleanliness, sterility, virtue

• black — sophistication, fear, dominance

• gray — formality, gloominess, neutrality
  
  

Remember, there’s no best color or worst color — the “best” color for you depends on your brand identity and the preferences of your users. 

Flair

Not all of your design choices have to fulfill a practical goal. Sometimes, adding fun just for fun’s sake is enough. If the goal of UX design is to create a mobile app that people enjoy, elements like cute animations, sound effects, or static images don’t need further justification. 

Often, such decorative elements can serve a dual purpose as well. Take the classic example of page animations — a lot of mobile apps use cutesy animated transitions when switching from page to page as a way to entertain users and flex their visual skills. 

But these animations aren’t just cosmetic; moving from one page to another can be jarring or distracting, so using an animation helps smooth out the transition so the user can stay focused on their task. And if you’re going to use an animation, you may as well make it look good. 

Again, the trick to this technique is knowing your audience. If you’re a serious brand with a serious app, a cartoonish animation would do more harm than good. That’s not to say serious brands should avoid animations, but rather they should use animations with the style that matches what you’re going for. 

You don’t have to do it alone

These are the basics of UX design, the starting blocks to give your mobile app a little extra something. But what if they need a lot of extra something? This guide is just the tip of the iceberg; true UX design runs deep, drawing on knowledge from graphic design, development mechanics, business finesse, and even human psychology. It’s not something you can master over a weekend. 

If you’d like to take full advantage of your mobile app UX, your best bet is to hire a professional. At Reveal Lab, our designers know the art of UX design inside and out, so you don’t have to! Read our customer reviews to see how we deliver, and when you’re ready drop us a line for your free consultation.