For some, the thought of creating a mobile app from scratch sounds like an uphill task full of corny, complex coding activities.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! Before developing a new mobile app, you need to design it first. It’s critical to plan every step, and at some point, you might want to retreat and examine what you’re building.
If you’re in a customer-first business (every business is), then you need a mobile app. It’s no longer an option, but a necessity.
Global app downloads surpassed 218 billion last year. Businesses that made the mistake of not creating a mobile app will continue to suffer in the coming years too.
Key Takeaways
- Mobile app necessity: Having a mobile app is crucial for businesses to stay competitive and meet customer expectations.
- App usage statistics: Users spend 90% of their time in apps compared to web browsing, highlighting the importance of mobile apps.
- Business benefits: Mobile apps enhance customer engagement, brand awareness, and can significantly improve a company’s bottom line.
- Strategic alignment: A successful mobile strategy aligns with overall business goals and user needs.
- Competitive advantage: Companies like Asda have seen significant success by integrating mobile apps into their business strategy.
Having a mobile strategy is essential, because this research shows that users spend 90% of their time in apps as compared to surfing the internet.
It’s great to have a mobile responsive website backed by a solid mobile marketing strategy with major resources being allocated to cross-device reach. In today’s competitive era, not having a mobile app has severe implications.
A mobile app helps businesses reach more customers, improve marketing strategies, provide value to the customers, increase brand awareness, increase customer engagement and loyalty, and create one or more competitive advantage(s). Plus, mobile apps can improve your bottom line.
When average user spends more time looking at a mobile phone than watching television, or using desktop or laptop, what excuse does your business have for not having a mobile app?
The question remains, where and how to start?
There are two phases of any mobile app design.
- Mobile app design strategy
- App design process
The following guide will cover both phases in detail with additional resources, mobile trends, and tips.
Mobile App Design Strategy
It starts with a strategy. It defines the future and the path to reach your destination.
The issue, however, is with creating a mobile app design strategy. You simply can’t create an app just because your competitor has one. Your competitor might have a different business objective and mobile strategy which are quite different from yours.
Developing a mobile strategy links back to the company strategy and has four stages:
i). Understand the business strategy
ii). Business mobile app strategy
iii). App strategy
iv). Product management strategy
Let’s explain each stage in detail:
1. Understand Your Business Strategy
Understanding the overall business strategy should form the basis of your mobile app design. Misalignment between company strategy and the mobile strategy might be suicidal.
Recent statistics from the Harvard Business Review shows that 70% of employees don’t have enough information about their company’s strategy or their perception of strategy is much different than the actual strategy.
There are several benefits of creating and executing a mobile strategy that’s derived from (and supports) the overall company strategy.
- It maximizes ROI as much as 74%.
- Reduces training needs.
- It leads to customer satisfaction.
- Decreases integration requirement and bugs.
- Improvement in quality, value, productivity, employee efficiency, and customer engagement.
In its simplest form, a successful mobile strategy is the meeting point of business goals, mobile opportunities, and user needs.
How Do You Define A Mobile Strategy For Your Business?
It should, technically and logically, start from the understanding of the company’s strategy, market conditions, competitors, customer journey, threats and weaknesses, and where stakeholders want to see the company in the future.
Starting at the highest level will make things easy and well integrated.
To get started here is a short checklist that will help you understand the business strategy. This checklist will show you the current standing of your company in terms of its strategy, and where it wants to be in next five years.
Follow these steps to fully understand your company’s objectives, current standing, competitors, and why and how mobile strategy will fit in.
- Your business’s mission statement, its competitive advantages, objectives, and where you want to see it in next 5 – 10 years.
- Define customer journey on the mobile. What the app will do? Will customers be allowed to buy from the app directly? Will they be able to check the status of their order?
- Create competitor profiles. Who are your competitors? What do they do. What are their strengths and weaknesses in terms of mobile strategy and app? Identify what they do differently, and what they offer on mobile.
- Define the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT) of your business. It will show all the areas of success and opportunities. It takes time but it’s worth it.
Livebackup.com, a company that offers solution on how to backup iPhone data to Computer, uses a mobile app strategy to trounce its competition.
In the same vein, Asda successfully launched a mobile app with a powerful mobile app strategy which aligned with the company’s long-term objective of having stores without walls.
The successful mobile app strategy showed results beyond expectation.
- More than two million app downloads.
- More than 90% of the mobile sales are attributed to the mobile app.
- The app users are two times more likely to become repeat customers.
- The buying frequency for mobile is 1.8 times higher than desktop and laptop.
Parse wanted to improve the speed and scalability of high-throughput and MogoDB clusters. They used Amazon Web Services (AWS) since it’s the only cloud service that handles their requirements. Parse used the following architecture on AWS.
| Aspect | Before AWS | After AWS |
|---|---|---|
| End-to-End Latency | 400 milliseconds | 100 milliseconds |
This resulted in reducing the end-to-end latency from 400 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds.
Some other important questions to be answered during this phase include:
| Question | Options |
|---|---|
| Type of app required | Hybrid app or Native app |
| Development approach | In-house or Outsourced |
| Platform to target first | Android or iOS |
Finally, start promoting your new app at this stage because you now know what it is, who is it for, and what it will do. This is the right time to create early buzz and engagement.
The UX research, wireframing, and prototyping are about how the app works while the UI design is about how the app looks.
| Aspect | Focus |
|---|---|
| UX Research, Wireframing, Prototyping | How the app works |
| UI Design | How the app looks |
Once the UX has been tested, tweaked, and several prototypes have been tested and finalized, you have to move to the UI designing phase.
At this stage, you have to deal with the visual representation of the concepts, color schemes, fonts, shapes, buttons, font size, images, forms, illustrations, animation, etc.
You have to test multiple designs to see what works best for your users. The color schemes, skins, themes, and all the visual elements have to be tweaked several times to find what works.
It’s somewhat similar to A/B testing with difference being that in case of UI design, you have to make the judgments yourself. You cannot bring customers on board at this stage.
Luke Wroblewski conducted a research that shows native app users spend 18x more time than mobile internet users.
| Aspect | Native Apps | Mobile Internet |
|---|---|---|
| Time Spent | 18x more | Less |
| Monthly Unique Visitors | 3.3 million | 8.9 million |
Native apps and mobile internet will grow in the future.
Native apps will grow at an exceptional rate and the designers will work on creating apps with better UX and UI to increase the average time per user.
Comparison of Micro-Interactions and Micro-Mini Interactions
| Aspect | Micro-Interactions | Micro-Mini Interactions |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | A single task that has a single interaction with the app, product, or website, such as commenting on a blog. | Transformed micro-interactions into smaller single-time interactions. |
| Examples | Commenting on a blog. | Apps like Yo and Knock Knock. |
| Future Trend | Already in use. | Expected to storm the internet in 2017. |
Chase Buckley believes that these micro-mini interactions will storm the internet in 2017.
The design of your app will vary from device to device. You need to understand how different screen sizes and device types impact the way your app looks on the screen.
| Device | Operating System | Design Considerations |
|---|---|---|
| Apple iPhone 6 Plus | iOS | Consider screen size and resolution for optimal display. |
| Samsung Galaxy Note 20 | Android | Ensure compatibility with Android-specific design elements. |
| Android Tablet | Android | Adapt design for larger screen and potential landscape mode. |
| iPad Mini | iOS | Adjust for tablet interface and user interaction differences. |
Android apps will have different designs than iOS apps available on the Apple App Store. But you need to also think beyond iOS vs. Android or mobile phone vs. mobile web. There will even be design differences for devices using the same OS.
The colors, mood, and on-screen elements will essentially remain the same from device to device. There will just be subtle variations in the design depending on the screen size, OS, and device manufacturer.
We’ll pair you up with a team of highly skilled individuals comprised of a project manager, designer, lead engineer, quality assurance manager, and software developer.
The project manager (based in San Diego, CA) will be your point of contact to ensure you have full visibility into the process and progress of the architecture and design of your app. The designer will bring your ideas to life through a beautiful user interface and a seamless user experience.
A senior software engineer will handle all aspects of the application that require security, scalability, and reliability. They’ll even handle potential compliance with federal and local laws.
Once you’ve been paired with the perfect team, we’ll go through a system analysis to dissect the process, procedures, and workflows of your application. This gives us a full understanding of the ideas you’re trying to implement. Our strategic consultants will challenge your ideas to make sure your app is robust and resilient to any future market challenges.
Next, we’ll go through a competitive analysis. We take the system that we now understand and look at the market landscape.
This allows us to be inspired by proven practices and raise the bar so that you can be a leader in your industry.
Once we fully understand the functional requirements of your app and understand the competitive landscape that we’re up against, it’s up to our designers to come up with a beautiful user interface and seamless UX through clickable prototypes and user journeys.
After a world-class experience has been established for the app users, we then set our eyes toward the backend control panel. Our team works diligently to provide you with the tools required to manage your mobile application. We also provide you with the resources needed to understand your user behavior and app insights.
All of this will be built on top of BuildFire’s cutting edge infrastructure.
This allows you to take advantage of our authentication services, databases, analytics servers, push notifications, and so much more—so you won’t have to incur any additional costs.
Once we meet and beat your expectations, we’ll deliver all of the documentation that we’ve compiled, alongside a clickable prototype for you to share with partners and investors.
As a final step, we break down your project into phases and milestones that provide you with a go-to-market strategy focusing on performance and agility.
Conclusion
Mobile app design can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
To nail the design of your app, make sure you follow the design guidelines explained in this article. Rather than trying to tackle this on your own, contact our team here at BuildFire. We can handle all of the design elements, and more, while providing consultancy services for your app as well.
Our mobile app designers and app developers will double as strategic partners for your app development project. It’s time to take your design to the next level. Let’s build something great together!
| Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
| Project Manager | Ensures full visibility into the process and progress of the architecture and design of your app. |
| Designer | Brings your ideas to life through a beautiful user interface and a seamless user experience. |
| Senior Software Engineer | Handles all aspects of the application that require security, scalability, and reliability, including compliance. |