The topic of app design can be rather tricky. When you start trying to think about what your target audience wants, how to put out the best possible product, and how to make it not only work but also be fun, things can quickly get overwhelming. But don’t worry! We’ve got some great information for beginners from Ilventofailsuogiro that will make designing an app less intimidating and more achievable.
Here are three quick tips for designing your first app:
1) Make friends with the App Store Guidelines
2) Think about the process of downloading
3) Test on as many devices as possible.
The first tip is to make friends with the App Store Guidelines. They can seem overly-restrictive, but they are actually there for a good reason. Apple has very high standards for its products’ quality and if your app doesn’t meet those standards, it will be rejected from the App Store. Additionally, most app design firms have a set of guidelines that their clients must follow so as not to waste time and money on an app that won’t be accepted.
So how can you go about learning the App Store Guidelines? Read them! You can find all of the guidelines on the Apple Developer website, but here are some specific sections to pay close attention to: Objectionable Content, Performance and Functionality, and User Interface.
There is one more section that you should read:
The Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). This section has a lot of information that will help you understand how users interact with apps and how to design your app so that its user interface best matches those interactions.
Build your app
Once you have read all of the guidelines, the next step is to actually build your app. This will help you understand what your app is doing and how it behaves. The best way to get this information is to test your app on actual devices. The more devices you test on, the better your app will be in terms of how it behaves for different mobile operating systems (iOS, Android, etc.). If you’ve already built your app, it’s still important to test on other platforms, including other mobile operating systems. This will help you better understand what your users are experiencing and how you should change the functionality of your app to improve its user experience.
App Store Competitives
The third tip is testing on as many devices as possible. We often hear that the first million sales don’t matter because this is just an experiment, but in fact these sales can make or break an app! Testing on different devices will help you learn what makes your app more or less popular with different people. You can go to App Store Competitives for iOS and Google Play for Android to see which apps are successful with certain types of users (e.g. female, younger, etc.). Once you identify an app that’s doing well with the users you want to target, you should make sure to test it on as many as possible. You might want to set up a fake account as this helps your users download the app and provide feedback (Sony, for example, used this tactic for PlayStation 4).
Start designing your app
Once you’ve finished testing on as many devices as possible and understand what makes one app successful and another unsuccessful, it’s time to start designing your app! This can be especially daunting since there are so many apps out there and we all compete with other designers who have already created their own apps. It’s hard to stand out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. You just need to think of an idea that will allow your app to stand out from the already-crowded Play Store and App Store.
User experience (UX)
What makes some apps successful and others unsuccessful is the user experience (UX). If your app is easy and fun to use, your users will like it and they will continue using it. To begin building an app, we recommend creating a persona diagram which allows you to build a profile of your ideal user. This helps you better understand who you are designing for as well as how these individuals communicate with each other as a group. We recommend you use the persona diagram to identify your users’ habits, their behaviors, and how they prefer to interact with your app.
Persona diagram
Once you have created the persona diagram, it’s time to start building your app. And that means it’s time to start designing! You already know what is important for your users so build an interface that meets those needs. The most important element of any mobile interface is its visual design so Apple has some great information on how to best design each screen.
As you are designing the screens, it’s important to test on multiple devices so you can see what is working and what isn’t on different platforms. Most likely, you will discover that your app isn’t working properly on some of the different operating systems and you will need to make a change.
Once your app is finished, it’s time to put it on the App Store or Google Play. It can be a bit overwhelming at first because there are so many apps in the store, but don’t worry! Most successful apps have been successful for a reason. The best way to optimize an app for success is by testing your app on different platforms and finding out what makes you more popular with different types of users.