Intuitive mobile app design is at the heart of an effective build and facilitates successful development. Designing an app is the creative process of weaving striking, on-brand visual elements together into a functional, interactive platform that provides an excellent user experience (UX). 

Design encompasses various aspects of an app, including its layout, interface, and overall presentation. It’s how users encounter and understand your application; and 94% of consumers say digital design is the primary factor that drives their impression of a brand.

Aesthetics can be subjective, and depend on the nature and purpose of your app, but there are some best practices to keep in mind when mapping out your design. We’ll establish some fundamentals for app design and how we develop functional, intuitive layouts and interfaces. 

What is mobile app design?

For us, mobile app design is the process of defining and solving problems—it’s that simple.

The process by which we uncover and address those problems, though? That’s a lot more complicated, and highly custom to each and every client.

While planning a layout, interface, and theme for your app are key components of the design process, so is integrating these elements into a functional platform. The biggest challenge, then, is marrying the visual and functional aspects of an app in an aesthetically pleasing, operational manner. 

While “design” may seem more obviously tied to tasks like picking complementary shades and graphics, it’s just as much, if not more so, an exercise of technological skills and behavioral prediction; we’re as much masters of the color palette as we are arbiters of the interface.

From ideation and user interface (UI) to tweaks that improve UX, design is a crucial component along every step of the app-building journey.

Design as a cornerstone of the app development process

From altering your logo to overhauling your app’s layout, design works into the various aspects of app creation. In particular, design plays important roles during:

• Ideation – Ideation is when apps go from a thought to a possibility as developers and designers begin brainstorming. This is where we determine the problem you want your app to solve and how to implement a solution. At this stage, we’ll start to envision a layout that can support the ultimate goal of the app, imagine how users will navigate it, and establish a structure to guide the development team’s evolving ideas.
  
  
• Wireframing – Wireframing involves developing a mock layout for an app, usually without color, images, or stylization. We use this opportunity to illustrate how users will explore and experience the platform. Wireframes often include branding elements, a roadmap of navigable pages, and body content to give developers an overall feel of what the final design will look like.

• UI and UX development – With a wireframe as our roadmap, we create striking, vibrant interfaces that support the app’s purpose while keeping branding and UX consistent throughout the platform. We’ll put colors and styles to the black-and-white wireframe and communicate our vision for interactive functionality to the developers, who will bring those features to life through the app’s code.

• Updating and maintenance – Even after launch, design is never done. Based on real-time user feedback and a client’s evolving needs, we’re constantly envisioning new functionalities, and will then create the pages, roadmaps, and components for these future possibilities.

With design at the forefront of the development process, our clients can deliver an intuitive and enjoyable UX to their end users. They can also earn the trust of mobile users, as well, with 75% of browsers judging a digital platform’s credibility based on its aesthetics.

So, with design as a crucial component in the development and reception of apps, the question remains: what makes an app functional, visually appealing, and intuitive for users? This is the question we’re constantly answering as each new project unfolds.

What makes a good mobile app design?

The purpose, capabilities, and branding of a platform affect its overall design, meaning there are no cut-and-dry guidelines for functional and appealing apps. A Quick Response (QR) scanner may only need to open directly to a phone’s camera. Alternatively, a more complex social media app may require multiple navigable pages, a plethora of functionalities, and a cohesive overall theme. 

Regardless, there are some basic criteria that make the design of certain mobile apps better than others. To create intuitive, visually pleasing apps with exceptional UX, these are some of the factors that top our priority list.

#1 Easy to use—without instructions

While some people pore over a new appliance’s instruction manual or deep dive down a YouTube rabbit hole to learn an intricate process, many users open an app and expect to hit the ground running. If there is an onboarding tutorial upon first download, this can help optimize the users’ experience, but you can’t rely on it to do the heavy lifting. 

For all the inevitable “Skip tutorial” button pressers, an app must still be intuitive.

We deliver ease of use by:

• Clearly showcasing the core features of the app in a layout that aligns with their intended usage and preferred order of operations

• Designing uncluttered screens that draw the user’s eye to the desired action

• Maintaining a consistent logic of feature placement so that the user can learn quickly and subconsciously predict the correct next move

In a digital world where 25% of apps are used just one time between being downloaded and deleted, an immediately intuitive and accessible experience is everything to us. 

#2 Takes edge cases into account

Most app developers spend the bulk of their time on the most common use cases and user flows (understandably so). But if an app isn’t useful and accessible to everyone who wants it, in whatever way they want it, it isn’t doing its job.

In the early phases of mobile app design, we spend significant time and attention on identifying, then accommodating, all potential edge cases.

What does that look like? 

Let’s look at the app Counslr, which connects college students with mental health practitioners. Our infrastructure included appointment scheduling and on-demand sessions, direct messaging, and new patient intake forms. We might predict that most students book approximately one appointment per week and occasionally message their counselor in between sessions. But we also have to think about potential users like these:

But we also have to think about potential users that have busy schedules and change appointments constantly, or students who message their counselors all day every day, or entire student populations that prefer on-demand sessions only over scheduling in advance. An app design has to support the most extreme ends of the spectrum, rather than catering to the median only.

In other words, we can’t just plan for people to use an app the way we want them to; we have to plan for all the ways they possibly could.

#3 Easy on the eyes

Aside from cluttered, confusing displays being a headache to look at, they’re also bad practice for app design. Phone screens are already small, and crowding them with excessive text or too many visual aspects can make important information imperceivable. To keep displays clean and organized:

• Minimize content to what the user needs to see
• Use few interface elements
• Employ progressive disclosure to reveal more information after users interact with various aspects of a page

Along with decluttering, choose complementary, rather than conflicting, colors to contrast against each other. Color offset, the practice of using distinct and easily distinguishable colors for background, foreground, actionable, and textual elements, is a key app design practice recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to increase perceptibility.

#4 Can scale without setbacks

When we’re partnering on an app build, we’re not just looking at immediate need sets. We’re planning for future possibilities to ensure our current project aligns with those coming down the pipeline. 

Good mobile app design is largely an exercise in future thinking. We’ll incorporate any additional platforms or forecasted features into our process roadmap, even if we don’t plan to build them for months or even years. This way, we can guarantee that our initial digital product will support the company’s larger vision, and that we can integrate those extra features as efficiently as possible.

What is the best way to design a mobile app?

The “best” way to design an app is the way that caters to the client’s vision, needs, and end users. 

To deliver optimally functional and aesthetically pleasing apps, our team at Utility employs several different workflow processes and design strategies in response to specific development cases. 

#1 Identify problems and success metrics

Before crafting stunning apps, we have to determine their ultimate purpose. Each problem or opportunity we identify is also accompanied by a clear, trackable metric—how we can definitively test for and prove feature functionality and app success.

With pliability, we knew our client partner wanted their users to primarily share their workouts on Instagram to increase brand awareness rather than over text or another private messaging app. By identifying this goal and a corresponding KPI early on, we could incorporate this into our testing process and ensure the design supported this desired outcome.

#2 Evaluate currently available solutions

Designers don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. Before building new aspects, we consider what existing solutions on the market may be applicable to a build. Looking to established industry solutions has several advantages, including:

• Cost-efficiency
• Speed
• Familiarity, as employing aspects or ideas from popular apps means users will already be accustomed to using them

For pliability, Utility plans to incorporate a feature that exercise and mobility specialists frequently employ when dealing with clients: a mobility test. Allowing users to measure their stretching capabilities will provide them key insight into the suitable poses and routines that pliability has available for them. .

#3 Create a design system or component library

To follow through on our commitment to creating scalable, and flexible, digital products, we create comprehensive design frameworks that serve as the foundation for our eventual build. 

This means we can implement directional changes much more easily and efficiently (even major ones). When ROMWOD rebranded to pliability, we had already begun building out their platform. Without a component library, we would have been redesigning their assets and app pages from scratch; instead, we could simply skin the entire library and add the new design elements, including the updated color palette, icons, typefaces, and more.

A visual system also allows us to build across multiple platforms, app types, and future features without doubling (or tripling, or quadrupling) down on design work. When we added pliability’s mobility test, we were able to reach back into our component library and incorporate existing assets and design choices. 

Then, we added routine segmentation, which breaks down each routine into separate actionable screens. Users are now able to swipe to the next position, view detailed descriptions of poses, and generally control their exercise routine with greater precision. When working on this added feature, we were also able to move more quickly through the design and dev phase, thanks to our early efforts to ensure scalability and brand consistency.

#4 Implement solutions, test, and retest until success

Design can be a labor of trial and error. Often, the best way to determine if an aspect or layout is the best fit for an app is to develop it, test it, tweak it, and attempt new ideas as needed. Our team’s workflow often involves: 

1. Deciding upon and developing a design
   
   
2. Testing the solution repeatedly, starting as early as possible

3. Redesigning any aspects of the solution that don’t meet expectations or don’t yield our defined success metrics

4. Re-testing the new solutions, and testing additional features as they’re developed

5. Repeating this process until the solution passes our KPI tests with flying colors

Optimize your next app’s design with Utility

At Utility, our app design practices focus on providing intuitive, beautiful platforms that transform the end user’s experience by solving specific problems. Whether you’re planning a social media or e-commerce platform, design and UX are central to attracting users and ensuring consistent use.

With decades of industry expertise and experience across myriad popular app types, we can help you decide on a design that delivers exactly what your users need. Schedule a call with Utility to learn how we can build the functional app that you’ve always envisioned.

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