Gaining the title of Top Mobile App Designs Company in USA is no easy feat. It requires dedication, hard work, skills and an enviable team of experts. So how would you define top app designs? App design comprises of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). UX focuses on the actual functionality and usability whilst UI encompasses the overall style of the app (including fonts, colors, and general layout). Mobile app design is the process of designing mobile applications. Mobile apps can be used in so many different ways and for many different purposes, but all of them need to be optimized for engagement, accessibility, usability, and general user experience, in order for them to be successful.

Optimizing a Mobile App

The worldwide lockdowns due to Covid 19 forced technology users everywhere to spend longer hours on their cellular and other devices to stay in touch with the outside world, or kill time. Developers too got onboard the development wagon churning out app after app to keep up with the demand for newer and more engaging apps, as users spend most of their online time on mobile apps. On average a user spends 85 percent of their time on smartphones on mobile apps. Building an effective mobile app is the best way to build brand loyalty and engage with your mobile customers. The Apple App Store has 1.96 million apps and Google Play Store has 2.87 million apps available for download. Out of all of these people only download and use around 5 apps regularly to spend that 85 percent I mentioned above. This means that the competition to create one of those 4 or 5 top rated app designs that make their apps so popular, is extreme. Here are some tips how to do so: Design an app that develops your branding. Be consistent with the message that you want your customers to receive about your business.

Your app needs to add value for customers. Make your app so easy and useful for your customers that they willingly download it and engage with you further.

Remember using bright and inviting images is very helpful, especially for the image that appears in the search results. An alluring aesthetic invites customers to click on your app and give it a try.

Optimize your content for mobile which adjusts to various phone screen dimensions, so users easily read content. Emails should load and download quickly and be easily scanned through and read. Videos should be compatible for cellular devices and run seamlessly.

Your app should use keywords wisely to get searched up and looked, put up a thorough, optimized description of your app using keywords. This will inform the app store that your app matches the needs of the customer typing in a search query. If you describe your app well you will reach the target market of your choice and manage to engage them.

Don’t think that once an app is ready and deployed the work is finished. Listen to user feedback and keep making efforts to make your app more efficient, useful, and attractive to your audience. Bugs can and will arise despite massive testing; fix them. Monitor complaints about problems, and work on them immediately. Update your description, help, and comments to let people know what issues have been addressed.

App Consistency

The simplest design principle to follow in order to create good apps is consistency. That includes: visuals, typefaces, fonts, buttons and labels consistency across the app. When we speak of functional consistency, the Interactive elements of the app should work in the same way. Consistency in design ensures design elements such as consistent navigation, consistent page layouts, or consistent control elements are uniform i.e. they look and behave the same way. Designers look for a way to leverage the usability by creating uniformity, because as repeat user experience evolves, consistency helps to fine-tune it and maintain it.

Visual consistency

Visual consistency is a kind of sublime tutorial of how an app works—it helps users navigate and easily find their way around an app. Once a user knows where to look for actionable, navigational, instructional and intuitive elements, and what various visual elements lead to, they are more likely to feel confident using your app. Consistency lends familiarity to the interface, a busy user would rather stick to a known easily navigable app than spends precious time relearning a similar but different one. Recently, some users tried to leave Facebook en masse, due to policy changes, and looked at several different options as their new, primary social media app. Most returned to Facebook because of its simple, easy to learn and use style, and easy search operations, rather than relearn a new app. It also helped Facebook that most of these prodigals had their friend bases firmly embedded in the app. Visual consistency comes from making sure the different design elements in your app can be perceived the same way. Fonts, sizes, buttons, and labeling increases learnability of your product and ensures that your users are not confused navigating around your product.

Typefaces and Fonts

A typeface is a set of characters of the same design. These characters could include letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and symbols. Some popular typefaces include Arial, Helvetica, Times, and Verdana. For example, Helvetica is a typeface, while Helvetica 10 pt bold is a font. In mobile app design, fonts play an important role in your users’ experience and are one of the most critical elements of UX design, and can make UI great or horrible. If your content is lost to your users because of unreadable typefaces, you have lost your viewership within seconds. A customer that moves off your app has seen enough on it to choose to abort mission, often for always. Even a rudimentary understanding of typography helps you choose the best fonts for apps. Here, are some great ones we’ve rounded up the best ones you should use for your next mobile app design.

Buttons

Buttons are an essential component of mobile apps, but seem to be one of the most difficult UI design elements to lock in. It is often so simple that it can easily be overlooked, although any Top Mobile App Designs Company in the USA will keep a watchful eye on even the smallest of elements. Broken links, unresponsive or unclickable buttons and lack of visual feedback are notable button botches, good app developers avoid like the plague. Designing optimum buttons that provide helpful, actionable feedback and respond to user interaction in one touch is not that difficult if you focus on developing consistency through:

Purpose
Look and
Shape

Button Consistency through Purpose

Focus on core UI design principles for your button’s purpose. No matter what design you choose for its look, from the Three-Dimensional and Skeuomorphism to the Flat and Floating Action Button trends, user accessibility should be your priority.

Button Consistency through Look

The size and shape of your button are important visual markers. If a user can’t identify your button or clickable element, how will they interact with it? Android’s Material Design principles recommend that all touch targets be at least 48 x 48dp, and have at least 8dp (or more) spacing between them, for balanced information, density, and usability.

Button Consistency through Shape

Shape depends on the purpose of design. In android UI design, flat and raised material buttons should have a height of 36dp, a minimum width of 88dp, and a 2dp corner radius (flat) with a default elevation of 2dp (if raised).

Labelling

Mobile phones have a very limited screen space, whereas adding labels to everything would harm the aesthetic design, not placing enough will create confusion. Labeling icons improves their usability. There are so many different users of mobile apps, and not everyone will have the same technical skills. If a somewhat non-technical user finds desktop app icons daunting, they are just as likely to find unlabeled, mysterious icons on a mobile app formidable. It does not matter how popular and well-known your platform is, the discriminating factor here would be user ability and discernment. The older generations often find navigation through their phone and apps intimidating even with label, you can imagine how lost they would be if their labels looked and acted differently throughout the app. Of course most Millennials and Generation Z users (who are also called Digital Natives or the iGeneration born between 1996 and 2012) are familiar with technology. The iGeneration in fact has often used technology from childhood, so for them experimenting with an app on a phone to see what happens is second nature. Overall labeling icons improves usability just as much on a mobile as on a desktop platform, however if you are able to escape with unlabeled icons on a mobile platform, it is solely because of your user audience, and definitely not because of the platform.

UI

UI buttons have evolved extensively in aesthetics over the years, but the use of color and contrast will always be required to guide users towards taking action. Color creates uniformity and familiarity helping users to identify and interpret your app’s content and to interact with the right elements.

Use of Color in UI

No matter what your choice of color schemes, it promotes recognition of UI elements within your viewers when they use your app. Your color choices should match your brand, that’s a given. But they must also help users navigate buttons and even predict the actions behind each click.

Contrast

Contrast is used to create a choice between different buttons, making it easier for your audience to decipher between actions and helps them navigate through your app with ease. Not having the right elements could confuse and slow them down, and quite possibly resulting in click offs because of an underwhelming UX.

White Space

Padding is the white space around content or components that allow the user a breather for the eyes. It enhances visuals with negative space and keeps them from being overwhelmed by an onslaught of text, images or colors, hence providing better UI. UI button design rules for contrast are to use high contrasts for positive actions, medium contrast for negative actions, and low contrast for neutral actions. This engages into clicking with positive actions that have the highest contrasts; conversely the lower color contrast for neutral or negative actions de-emphasizes them.

Creating Internal Consistency

When your app combines both visual and functional consistency in your product design, you will enhance the usability and learnability of your product. Thus even when you introduce new features, functions and pages users will learn to access them easily as long as you keep the internal consistency. To summarize the above, a user finds an app more satisfying when it is usable and easily learnable. If elements have a consistent look and function in a similar way the user intuitively learns how they will respond. A consistent design, allows users to apply previously learned methods to newer content, buttons, interface changes in your app quickly. Thus they can focus on going on around the app executing an action rather than learning how the product UI works every time they switch the context. People instinctively find consistency attractive, it engages our senses of security and ability. If your users find themselves floundering helplessly all over your app, you can be sure you will have a lot of click offs, just out of frustration, when avoiding that outcome is pretty easy. Keep your design flow methodical.

Top Tips For Creating Top Ios App Designs

Carefully create your color palette

Your color schemes and how you deploy it will affect the user experience and usability of your iOS app design, so tread carefully here. It actually helps to limit your color palette to your brand logo colors throughout your design. The colors you use should work harmoniously towards a more intuitive UI. Using consistent colors exhibits various UI elements to help users recognize the functions of your app’s interface. Use color in the following ways:

Display interaction. Tint colors are saturated ones that have a white or a lighter appearance. These help users distinguish static elements from interactive elements. Or, use entirely different colors for interactive vs non-interactive UI elements.
Work on both light and dark screen appearance settings. The iOS system automatically adapts colors for both appearances, as per their semantic color system. Avoid creating your own light and dark appearance settings for your iOS app design, appearance settings, as these could clash with the system-wide settings on the user’s device.

Use iOS custom typography where possible

Although it is not set in stone, it is often recommended to use the two iOS custom typefaces. These are the San Francisco (sans serif) and New York (serif) which Apple created keeping both scalability and adaptability as a focus. Of course developers can and do use other typefaces, especially if they can make a brand pop and create vibrant text. Just ensure that your typography is always legible throughout your iOS app, as poor readability is the first click off reaction in user experience. If you do choose to use the recommended typefaces, you can use them both as paragraph text or for functional text (for navigation or instructions).

Choose elements that optimize iOS haptics

Haptics employ the user's sense of touch to enhance interacting with on screen interfaces. They also boost touch gestures and interactions like scrolling through a picker or toggling a switch. On supported iPhone models, add haptics to your app creates an engaging user experience. Let users feel confident and comfortable by using standard UI elements compatible with iOS haptics such as date pickers, sliders, and switches.

Top Tips For Creating Top Android App Designs

Follow Google’s Rules

Both Apple and Google have created their own sets of guidelines for mobile app design for iOS and Android platforms. When following these developers can exponentially improve the look and feel of your application on the respective platform.

Use of Variable Fonts

A variable font is a single binary with greatly-reduced comparable file size. It is simply put, a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts. It has a smaller disc footprint and webfont bandwidth and contains many different axes that can represent various styles, including condensed, italic, optical size or other more creative or custom options. Google Fonts offers a filter that displays only variable fonts, and a table for developers with the axes and their default, minimum, and maximum values.

Make it Responsive

Ensuring you make your app look great on every Android device, watch, smart TV, Smart appliance and wearable in the world, is difficult but not impossible. Creating a solid, responsive UI immediately enhances mobile app design. Developers must ensure all design elements fit to the screens, regardless of the device users are using. This helps make it easy for users to perform actions, thus engaging them and encouraging them to spend more time on your app. Focus on the following ways to keep your apps responsive:

Keep all design elements from layouts and text blocks to images and media flexible. When every item is fluid you can easily reposition, resize, and reflow them and they will still have an optimized display.
Add at least 4 breakpoints into your design; these will sort different screen-sizes into classes, specifying a width at which your UI will change. Breakpoints mark your transition into different screen sizes, allowing your UI to adapt and adjust to every specific device based on the percentages assigned to each UI element.
Design with the smaller screens and views first. This creates a longitudinal dsign, with different elements displayed vertically. Remember that is sometimes difficult to decide what comes first, or would look good together. Once your elements are in place, and larger screens become easier to develop.

Keep it Accessible

July 26, 2020 was the thirtieth anniversary for ADA - Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Android is used by many devices by many different users, some of whom have a disability to some degree, whether visual, hearing, motor, cognitive, or situational. Monitor your app and add enhancements such as Accessibility Scanners that suggest accessibility improvements for Android apps without requiring technical skills. Testers or users will simply open your app, touch the Accessibility Scanner button and find items that may require accessibility improvements and then go ahead and make those changes so you engage your audience to the maximum potential.

Monitor Loading Speeds

A majority of users will not waste their online time waiting for a slow app to download or open. Enhancing speed also enhances user interaction. A slow platform helps a visitor exit: fast. Optimize your app speed regularly. The ideal loading time for a mobile app is around two seconds, your conversion rate declines by 7% for every additional second that the app takes to load. A slow app results in frustrated users: 48% of customers will uninstall or stop using an app if it is slow, according to studies. Your app could be slow for the following reasons:

Sluggish server speeds
Non-optimized encrypted connections
Faulty library and software development kit
Delayed request/operation processing between the app and server
Too much data
Network latency
Your app is obsolete and not supportive

Understand Design Patterns

Google has classified 5 major multi-device layout patterns using fluid grids and media query adjustments to guide responsive design. These include: Mostly Fluid: The mostly fluid design pattern stacks columns vertically on smaller screens, allowing the main content to reflow. It is based on fluid grids and contains a multi-column layout with larger margins on the bigger screens. The layout will not change unless you’re dealing with an exceptionally small screen and usually only requires one breakpoint between small screens and large screens. Column Drop: This is another popular multi-column pattern that drops columns along the way as the screen gets narrower, until eventually all of the columns are stacked vertically. Even when layout changes the overall size of each element tends to stay the same, and choosing breakpoints depends on the content and changes for each design Layout Shifter: This is one of the most responsive patterns, and comprises multiple breakpoints across several screen widths. This helps in how content is moved about, instead of reflowing and dropping below other columns, it uses different layouts on large, medium and small screens, but does require extensive work. Tiny Tweaks: As the name suggests, Tiny tweaks just makes minute changes to layout, such as adjusting font size, resizing images, or moving content around in very slight ways. It works well on single column layouts such as one page linear websites and text-heavy articles, however only few apps actually are that simple. Off Canvas: Off canvas pattern places less frequently used content such asap menus or navigation off screen. It only displays these when the screen size is large enough. On smaller screens, content is only a click away, off-canvas uses the little space in the left margins to hide navigation options until someone taps on them to expose them fully or slide them out. Conclusion

Top User Friendly App Designs

The UI design makes or breaks a mobile application. It makes a brand reachable and interesting and appealing for users, creates smooth navigation in the app, and increases the entire ROI of the application. When working with a Top Mobile App Designs Company In USA, you can rest assured that your app’s UI design will be client-centric, engaging, aesthetic, and successful.

UI design is always evolving and is not just limited to how an app looks. The app’s internal infrastructure must prepare UI design guidelines that organize, structure and label an app’s content sustainably and accessibility. 2020 is now in its last month, almost over and the latest UI/UX design trends for both iOS and Android apps are yet to come. Here is a list of top mobile UI/UX trends that will boost conversions further in 2021.

Rounded Corners have developed from modern smartphone devices. Both Android and iOS apps feature rounded corners. Once a device’s curved corners are mirrored in its UI design, UX will be enhanced as rounded corners are smoother on our eyes and help process data
Voice Interaction whether through the ever-popular Siri, from Apple, Alexa of Amazon, Bixby, from Samsung, or Google Assistant, the AI-enabled virtual voice assistant of Google command their terms to UX design trends. Voice-powered applications deliver precise and fast query results, they are also more feasible, and create a tailored user experience.

Optimized Animation is an important part of a better user experience. Animated moves and motions deliver lots of data in a simple, fun way – they confirm actions, explain state changes, and add rhythm to interactions.
3D and Faux-3D Design have been used extensively over the recent years but mostly, only in entertainment and games. The development of device processing strength, allows 3D elements to be used in regular functional apps. Adding 3D and Faux-3D elements in the mobile app experience enhances engagements exponentially.

With years of experience under our belt, a team of experts across the board, Appedology creates mobile apps that provide a great UI UX for businesses to utilize at their best. Our top app designs have showcased many prominent brands and with our developers constantly honing their skills we ensure our claim to hard earned respect in the app design and development field remains long standing. If you have a mobile app idea you would like to discuss, call us now.

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