Each business can use mobile app as a powerful tool to keep customers engaged, promote its products or services, and expand its customer base. A number of studies have highlighted that a large percentage of modern users prefer mobile apps to mobile websites. A company can further launch a mobile app to beat competition in both short and long run. Hence, the growth of a business is nowadays interlinked with the popularity of its mobile app.

But a number of studies have also highlighted that over 80% of all downloaded apps are deleted by users after one time use. There are a number of factors that make users delete mobile apps after using them once. Like its features, usability and performance, the design of a mobile app also affects its popularity and profitability in the longer run. Hence, it becomes essential for entrepreneurs to explore latest mobile app development trends. The Business owners should also think about whether to go for Native App Development or Cross platform app development.

10 Ideas to Make the Mobile App Design More Appealing and Engaging

1) Understand Your Users

You can always make the mobile app design more engaging by focusing on the users instead of the varying screen size of mobile devices. You need to combine a variety of tools to identify and understand the users like persona, user scenarios and experience maps. You can understand the expected behaviour of users by using persona as fictional characters. Likewise, user scenarios will help you to understand how a persona will behave. At the same time, you can use experience map to explore all possible conditions under which a single interaction will occur.

2) Incorporate Familiar Mobile Patterns

You can always make the mobile app design user-friendly by including familiar mobile patterns. The mobile patterns can be divided into two broad categories – gestures and combines. Gestures include the common options through which a user interacts with the touch screen like touch, swipe, zoom, pinch, and double-tap. On the other hand, animations keep the users engaged while adding context to the user interface. You need to ensure that gestures and animations are combined seamlessly to keep the users engaged.

3) Make Animations Functional

You can further enhance the app’s usability and user experience by making these animations functional. When the animations are used as functional elements of the app, the users will feel like interacting with a real object. Also, the functional animation will visualize the user actions directly and make the interactions more dynamic. You can even ask the mobile app developers to combine HTML5 animation and parallax design to make the mobile app design more interactive and dynamic.

4) Keep the UI Design Minimal and Simple

As highlighted by a number of studies, most users love user interfaces that look simple and minimalistic. Despite keeping the UI simple, you need to ensure that it looks good on devices with varying screen sizes, and allow users to access virtual keyboard on demand. However, you still need to check if the UI looks cluttered, and presents any irrelevant content or option to users. You need to ensure that the UI presents the user content or options that are both necessary and relevant.

5) Include Personalization Options

While designing a mobile app, you must remember that it will be used by people with varying preferences and abilities. Hence, a static mobile app design may not keep each user interested and engaged. To seduce users, you need to ensure that the app delivers personalized and distinct user experience. You can ask the developers to include a variety of in-app personalization options in the app. The personalization options will enable users enjoy personalized and exceptional experience based on their own preferences.

6) Explore Ways to Speed up User Actions

Most users nowadays love app that enable them to perform tasks in a quick and smart way. You can always make the mobile app design more effective by incorporating a number of simple options. For instance, you use include inline validation options in various forms to help users submit the required information accurately. Likewise, you can include a progress bar to make users monitor know the amount work already completed and yet to complete work visually. A number of studies have also shown the effectiveness of progress bar in increasing conversion rate of mobile apps.

7) Optimize the App’s Accessibility

You must remember that a user may access the app on his smartphone, tablet or phablet. Also, some users will have fat fingers, whereas others will have thing fingers. Hence, you must enhance the app’s accessibility through mobile-friendly design. While deciding the right mobile-friendly design, you must keep in mind the ways a uses will hold the mobile device. Also, you need to ensure that each user can tap the buttons without any hassle. The buttons must not be too small or bunched together too closely to enhance the app’s accessibility.

8) Include Creative Navigation Options

Many studies have shown that simple and clear navigation is essential to make the mobile app popular. But you still have option to choose from an array of navigation options – horizontal, vertical, vertical, hidden navigation, infinite scrolling and parallax scrolling. You can always opt for hidden navigation, infinite scrolling or parallax scrolling to make the app deliver richer user experience.

However, you must choose the navigation option based on the app’s usage and content. Parallax scrolling will keep the users engaged by making their experience intuitive. But infinite scrolling will enhance the user experience of mobile app with huge amount of content and data. Likewise, hidden navigation will keep the users engaged when they access an app with lots of content. The navigation option will keep the user interface clean by presenting and vanishing content at frequent intervals.

9) Take Advantage of New Colour Schemes and Typography

You must make the app look and feel different to keep the users interested and engaged. You can easily make the mobile app design appear exceptional by using the emerging typography and colours schemes. Each new version of mobile operating systems provided scalable typography and new fonts. You can use the new fonts to differentiate the user interface of the mobile app from others. Likewise, you can opt for a contemporary color scheme make the user interface of your mobile app look more vibrant and different.

10) Focus on Branding and Storytelling Continuously

Many companies have successfully reduced the gap between the real-world and virtual presence of their brands through storytelling and branding. These companies use their mobile apps to tell a good and engaging story that features the user as the hero. A good story will keep the user experience delivered by the mobile app personalized, local and relevant. A business can further take advantage of emerging technologies like mobile payment options to facilitate in-app purchase and achieve higher conversion rate. It can further combine the branding, storytelling and loyalty programs to extend its customer base. Hence, you must focus on branding and storytelling consistently to generate more revenue through the mobile app.

However, each entrepreneur must remember that the trends in mobile app design keep changing at frequent intervals. Hence, he needs to monitor and implement the latest mobile app design trends to keep the users interested and engaged. Also, he must get the user interface (UI), usability and user experience of the mobile app tested thoroughly to identify and eliminate all issues that make users delete the app.