Mobile App Designs – There are many more cell phones in the world than laptops and desktops, and they create more Internet traffic. At the turn of 2018 and 2019, mobile phones pulled ahead, and this trend is unlikely to change in the near future. The graph shows only Internet traffic, but there are also native applications. Therefore, we can say that the mobile phone is the king of the digital world.
Android and iOS app designs – Therefore, having mobile apps is a must need of the hour for any business. These mobile design apps will continue to rule the digital realm. There are two main players here android and iOS.
Android vs iOS
Today we have a duopoly (from the Latin “two” and Greek “sell.” A situation in which there are only two sellers of a certain product, leading an independent policy from each other. – Ed. ). The two main mobile OSes are Android from Google and iOS from Apple. According to Stat Counter Global Stats, as of March 2019, their market shares are 75.33% and 22.4%, respectively:
While two dogs are biting at the bone, the third runs away with it, right? Not in this case. The situation of the other players has never been so deplorable. Two percent of the market is all that is left for them, and it will not be easy to lure developers to themselves.
Mobile app designer
What do designers of mobile applications need to remember – does it matter if you work with Android or iOS?
Build on platform agreements
Working with applications should be familiar and intuitive even to new users, so Google and Apple urge developers to unify the interfaces of native applications. And give recommendations on how to do it.
For Android, Google Material Design was written, and for iOS, the Human Interface Guidelines. Be sure to add these pages to your bookmarks, you will often return to them at work. Study them, get acquainted with samples of naming, design, and usability. Do not forget that these documents are regularly updated, so review them from time to time to be aware of changes.
Do not consider these documents as something immutable. These are just recommendations, not strict instructions. They will help you, but it is not necessary to follow them always and in everything. You can even mix recommendations and apply elements specific to one platform to another.
If you want to develop for iOS, and previously used only devices on Android, I advise you very much to go with an iPhone. You will switch, get acquainted with the apple interface and better understand its users.
Design and Toolkit
Creating a mobile application is not much different from developing other digital products. Usually, everything happens like this:
- Illumination, or just a starting point. It could be the idea of ??an innovative product (another Facebook killer!) Or just collecting customer requirements.
- Modeling. At this stage, user scripts and stories are written, and then they are presented in the form of block diagrams and low-fidelity wireframes are drawn with low-detail wireframes. There are many tools for creating such schemes together online. RealtimeBoard is very popular, now it is called MIRO. If you need something free, Freehand from InVision will help you out. When it comes to drawing wireframes, paper and pencil come to mind. Need something else? In the Marvel mobile app, it’s easy to take photos of your drawings and create interactive designs.
- Layouts (mocapas). Visual representation of your application. At the beginning of the digital design era, the ball was Adobe Photoshop. But he was not sharpened for interface design and gradually lost ground. According to the Avocode Design Trend report, in 2016 the good old PS lost the palm. Now the industry standard for creating layouts is the Sketch app. Thanks to his huge community, he has acquired extensions and plug-ins, as well as integration with a lot of third-party programs. The sketch is a simple but powerful tool.
- Prototyping. You can interact with an interactive prototype with the interface of an already finished application. It is shown to investors, customers and developers. The most popular tool is the InVision program. Very often it is complemented by Craft, it is a set of plugins for Sketch and Photoshop. It is worth mentioning that Sketch itself has recently acquired prototyping tools.
- Animation and micro-interactions 1. This step is sometimes skipped – for at least three reasons. First of all, for standard iOS and Android components, user interaction options are already predefined. Secondly, complex animation can significantly delay development. Finally – and this is also important – to create animation and micro-interactions, you need skills that not every designer has. But even here tools come to the rescue. For simple templates, Flinto and Principle are enough. If you are creating something complicated, choose Framer.
- Transfer to developers. To implement the project, you need to somehow redirect the design to the developers. This process is called handoff, and there are applications for that too. If your company has not chosen anything yet, you can play with Avocode , Sympli or Zeplin . All of them allow you to export resources, check design properties and much more. In addition, these applications are often used for communication within a team.
What happens with UX and UI design tools
Since the figure replaced paper, tools for UX- and UI-designers have developed more rapidly than all other design programs. And I see two main trends.
Firstly, the time for monopolies has passed: it is still easy to choose the preferred tool for each design stage, but everything changes too quickly. For example, designers are increasingly attracted to Figma and Adobe XD, which have challenged Sketch.
Secondly, the tools become self-sufficient, which means that you can cover the entire development process using only one software solution.
Features of mobile design: remember the limitations …
Somewhere I read that creativity does not exist without limits. When designing for mobile phones, pay attention to this:
Smaller display size
In fact, this means that fewer elements are placed on the screen. Familiar site navigation is also canceled. You need to display content differently and shorten the user path.
Touch Screen Design
Forget about the keyboard and mouse, now the application is controlled by touches and gestures. Clickable elements should be larger so that they can be easily reached with a finger.
Traffic and Performance Limitations
Beware of heavy files and multimedia formats, for which you need to download a lot of data from the Internet – this can fly into users a pretty penny. Make sure that the number of API calls sent by your application does not affect the overall server performance.
Don’t forget about the possibilities
Mobile applications have more device capabilities and they use them better than traditional desktop or web applications. You have a great chance to immerse users in the product, presenting software and hardware as a whole.
- Think of gesture navigation.
- Do not forget that almost all modern devices have a camera and a microphone – this is your alternative for data entry.
- Estimate how to rebuild the layout when the screen orientation changes: it should be convenient to control the application in any case.
And one more general advice. If you decide that the mobile application will become part of your digital strategy, immediately consider its role in it. The general direction of design depends on whether it will be the main entry point for your users or an addition to another site or service.
