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It wasn’t too long ago that mobile apps were created for general productivity and information retrieval, including email, calendar, contacts, stock market and weather information. In what can be termed as a quantum leap, mobile apps have come to encompass every conceivable function in the span of a few years. Much like any other form that sees rapid development, app developing comes with it’s own idiom. The ideal app requires a melding of perfect functionality, great UI, flawless design and positive user feedback. How does one achieve this fie balance? Well, here are a few tips that will help you on your way.
Know your user
It is essential to design for the right user. Basic processes such as user research, surveys and interviews, will help you create personas for those most likely to use your app. This gives you the ability to create specific goals for your users and tailor your app’s workflow to suit their needs.
Usability
While this might sound rudimentary to the app designing process, it is important to keep in mind that usability means everything. If your audience can’t easily use the app, they won’t be motivated to download it from the App Store. Essentially, usability makes a product useful, which is the first step in being desirable.
Affordance & Signifier
The affordance is the end function. Signifiers point towards affordance. Too much to take in? In simple words, lets say for example that blue, underlined text indicates that clicking on it will take you elsewhere. Be sure to use signifiers correctly so users don’t need to ponder about what each UI element does.
Learnability
The ultimate goal is to have your users innately know how to use an interface. This is where design patterns come into the picture as familiar patterns help a new user easily acclimate to an app.
One size fits all
It’s clear to anybody that fingers are much thicker than pixel-precise mouse cursors, so you should pay attention to finger-friendly design. More specifically, allow enough space for users to tap with a fingertip. If your buttons are too small or placed too closely together, users can’t tap them accurately, which only leaves them disenchanted. Another important factor to keep in mind is that we hold our phones in different ways, sometimes one hand, sometimes two hands and two thumbs etc.
Aesthetic beauty is relative to it’s platform
Keep in mind that a beautiful Android app might not necessarily make a beautiful IOS app because aesthetics are relative to their own platforms. Before you design your apps, take a look at how your target platforms work, and implement your branding around their specific parameters. Also remember that even if your app renders differently across platforms, with Appcelerator, you’ll still be able to use a single code base and have a very high percentage of code reusability.
Code reuse
There are far too many misconceptions about code reuse with Appcelerator. Expecting 100 percent code reuse isn’t reasonable because it not only means you’d have very little control over your app’s UI/UX, but also your app would look the same across all target platforms. Naturally, some people think this is the ultimate goal of a cross-platform tool, but that’s incorrect because that’s the goal of a Web browser. High reusability, however, is desirable with your app’s logic.
Know your target platforms
The best way of knowing what’s available to your app, and what you should and shouldn’t do, is by reading each platform’s user interface guidelines. Unless you use the operating systems you’re targeting on a daily basis, and you feel like you thoroughly know their behavioral and visual similarities and differences, it is best you take time to read the guidelines in full.
Test frequently
Since your cross-platform app will have both cross-platform and platform-specific code and components, make sure you test often. Don’t spend days working on the Android version, then finally run it on iOS and discover the object positions are off, the fonts need adjusting, or the app simply crashes on load. Test often and identify the chinks in the armor.
Be your user
Your user is the most essential consideration when it comes to building your app. Be a user of the target platform and know how the platform works. Be a user of your app so that you can experience it for yourself. Look around, examine other apps, compare and analyze as honestly as you can.
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