For several years now, mobile applications have ceased to be the prerogative of large companies and brands. With the increase in mobile traffic, when it fights desktop traffic on an equal footing, and sometimes even beats it, the application becomes almost as much a must-have for a business as a personal website or an online store. No one will be surprised by their own application at the city roll delivery service, at the regional taxi company or at the fitness center chain. Therefore, the relevance of competent and modern design is reaching a new level.
A mobile application can solve different problems, depending on who it is created for. Usually they are developed either for their own employees or for clients. Consider the first case first.
Following the trend of business automation, you can order a special application for your employees that would perform strictly defined functions and take into account the specifics of your business. Mobile versions of sites often do not work fast enough, and access to them is inconvenient – you need to open a browser on your phone, enter the site address. Another thing is the program, which is located right in the phone. It saves employees time, and the time saved = money saved for the business. Modern mobile application design is a necessary and important part of the program that needs to be given special attention.
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How is mobile app design development going?
Design development is a long and laborious process, but it is definitely faster than website design development. On average, the whole process takes from two weeks to a month, and further improvements can take about another month.
The whole process can be described in several stages:
- Defining goals;
- Drawing sketches;
- User-flow design;
- Drawing sketches for all OS (wireframes);
- Selection of colors;
- Development of application design and prototypes;
- Testing;
- Preparation for development.
Setting goals
Define the goals of what and why users of your application need. Think about how to implement this from the design side.
Sketches
Create sketches of sketches for the android application development services, to further bring these sketches to life. Work out in advance on paper the approximate appearance of the application and the functionality that will be in it. This will avoid unnecessary work when fully rendering screens.
User flow
When you decide on the functionality that will be in your application, you need to create a diagram of how this functionality will be connected. Most conveniently, it will be to implement this scheme in the form of interconnected blocks of different screens with a description of the functions in each of them.
This scheme has its own name – user flow. The main purpose of creating a user flow is to work out the logic of the application’s functionality, how, what and why should work.
Wireframes
Wireframes – drawing sketches for all screens on all operating systems (iOS, Android). It is necessary to create a skeleton structure of interconnected application pages, to determine the location of buttons, icons, pictures and shortcuts. It is advisable to draw it at the stage of sketching.
Most often, designers use ready-made templates from services like UI Stencils. This saves them a decent amount of time sketching wireframes.
In the Pop application, it is possible to create a clickable prototype with a link between buttons screens, if you or your designer is working on wireframes after creating the application design.
Selection of colors
User loyalty to the application will greatly depend on the color scheme. Colors should be pleasant and soothing. That is, in essence, they should create a comfortable atmosphere for the user inside the application.
Good designers take color palette ideas from sites like Color Hunt, patterns on Pttrns and Mobile Patterns, and ideas for their projects on Behance or Dribble.
Development of application design and prototypes
For a full-fledged design development, Adobe Photoshop was previously used. However, with the development of technology, most of the designers of mobile applications abandoned it as unnecessary. Nowadays, Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD are used most often.
When creating a prototype, use MVP technicians, add the most needed functionality to your application, make a clickable prototype and test it. This will help you get rid of unnecessary elements in the application and reduce costs accordingly.
It is also important to work in conjunction with the developers. Remember that not everything that you would like to do in the application is possible. And if it is possible, it is not a fact that it is profitable enough.
When you have a clickable prototype of the application ready, it’s time to move on to the last, but no less important stage of design development – testing.
Testing
Make sure all functionality is implementable. Provide access to prototypes to employees of your company or a client. Assess the need for everything that is at the moment, if necessary, get rid of the excess or add a new one.
If at the stage of working out the sketches everything was done with high quality and all the points were approved by the customer and the developers, then the edits will not be needed and it will be possible to start development.
How much does mobile app design cost?
The price of creating a mobile app design varies up to a lot of different factors. It’s counted individually in all the cases. So it’s always up to the discussion of the exact client and the company. Good cooperation brings great results.
The design of a mobile application itself includes a fairly wide range of tasks. In addition to the visual and technical design, the study of user behavioral factors, analytics of competitors, the development of additional functionality, and so on are carried out.
The design of a mobile application is always in the center of attention. It sould be always discussed in details.. Even great functionality is easy to miss if the app looks bad. Convenience, comfort, friendliness and benefit – these are the associations that users should have. Our task is to make it that way.
