Improving Mobile App Usability: The Adverse Effects On App Performance

By Andre Matthew

Mobile application market is a growing every day. There are a lot of people working and investing in the mobile application market to gain a reputable position for themselves. Usually, when a mobile application is designed and developed, its functionality is first checked and then launched. Companies often only consider their own tastes and expectations before launching their mobile apps. However, many users may prefer not to use applications that they did not adopt for the first time. In order not to lose user loyalty, applications need to be tested and updated regularly.

Most of the current mobile applications on the market have interesting ideas and approaches. However, many are not successful. Why? The reasons for this are deficiencies in the design and poor usability of the apps. The most common stumbling blocks are:

• Text links that do not clearly stand out from the rest of the information,
• Buttons are too small to navigate with the fingers,
• Images are too large to load without problems even with poor network coverage or
• Texts are too long and therefore impractical to read on a small monitor.

Often usability guidelines from the desktop PC sector are applied, which often have the opposite effect on mobile devices.

Significantly stricter guidelines apply to mobile applications. On the one hand, the screen size of a smartphone is of course much smaller. This alone means that savings must be made in the level of detail of the display. On the go, the information needs of the users of a mobile device differs significantly from the information need at home or in front of the PC.

This different context of use and the accompanying different need for information must be taken into account when designing an app.

9 Guidelines to Enhance Usability of Mobile Apps

The following guidelines can be derived from these basic preliminary considerations on the usability of apps.

1. Pay attention to the User Experience

The user has already learned how to operate the user interface of his device. Then why not use standard elements from the respective operating systems for your own app interface? Content is an important part of your app. You can always hire a ghostwriter to enhance the content quality.

2. Only keep the necessary things

The screen of a mobile device is very small. So make full use of it, but don’t overcrowd it. Weight the information offered and adhere to the Keep-it-short-and-simple principle. Information that ends up on the app only for corporate policy reasons has no place there. This must serve the user and must not degenerate into an unused investment.

3. Emphasize interactive elements

So-called call-to-action elements must immediately catch the user’s eye. If phone numbers are displayed, the call should be set up automatically after a brief consultation. Don’t force your user to write down the number and then dial it manually.

4. Use high contrasts

Low contrasts are fatal for operation, especially in poor lighting conditions and reflections on the display surface.

5. Support users and give feedback

If your app is reloading something in the background, notify the user with a short message. Always try to give the user a helping hand, as he is usually impatient. How about an autocomplete action when searching?

6. Simplify entries

If the user has to fill out form fields, the user data stored in the smartphone should be offered to him for automatic completion.

7. Consistently use device-specific functions

You should use the functions of a smartphone where it makes sense. When calculating a route, the current GPS position can be automatically determined as the starting point. However, in order not to patronize the user, this default setting should be editable.

8. Test the app with users during the development process

The app should be tested as continuously as possible during its creation, taking into account the users and the criteria mentioned above.

9. Observe users and their operating behavior

It makes sense to observe users in their behavior under everyday conditions and situations and to incorporate the results conclusively into the app design. Following these guidelines can help you make your app more usable.

However, the guidelines cannot guarantee the success of your app. This requires precise knowledge of the future users, their context of use and their needs. No matter how usable an app is, it flops if essential user factors were neglected in its conception. The numerous insurance apps are excellent examples of this. Every insurance company has one, but usage figures are moderate.

How to Improve Mobile User Experience?

User Experience is the discipline that creates solutions for people to get the most efficiency possible with the least efforts while using a product or benefiting from a service. With the competition emerging in almost every sector, brands are constantly looking for ways to differentiate from each other and influence the customer. User Experience is the first step you can take to meet the customer’s expectations in the process of creating a new product or service. Therefore, it is an important element that should be considered in the first place for Mobile app Development.

A UX designer should be able to look through the customer’s eyes and test possible scenarios. Solving the problems experienced in these scenarios will be your biggest assistant on the way to obtain a useful product.

The task of a user experience designer is to make the product functional, safe, practical and enjoyable for people. However, apps with these basic features can offer people an experience that makes a difference. If you have a product that is affected by competition, perhaps what you need to do is improve your processes by thinking independently of the product.

For an application to be useful, it must understand that users are making mistakes. In this sense, it should prevent errors and properly inform users when a mistake is made. Avoiding errors can be done in numerous ways, such as context-sensitive help can be used to prevent misspelling. In addition, the app must have an emergency exit button; this means that a user can go back and escape the task or function. When errors occur, they should be reported to the user in a concise language. And finally, the application must prevent future errors by teaching and showing the correct way to avoid error.

Why better User Experience is important for mobile applications?

User experience is very important because people are getting more and more impatient. An experience that will cause the slightest waste of time or frustrate the user can collapse like a dark cloud over all the good things you do.

One of the things that makes user experience valuable is the change in online shopping habits. The increase in the use of mobile devices and the exponential increase in internet shopping forced businesses in almost every business area to invest in these issues. In a short time, the internet has become an uncontrollable market with its good or bad quality or poor quality. After a while, people began to refrain from making purchasing decisions in this crowd. Not only the risks related to the product, but also the problems experienced in the security issue have emerged an abstention user group.

The frequency of people visiting a website, the rate of interacting with the site, and the number of people downloading mobile applications makes it important to get a better UX. That means, if you want to gain sales or brand awareness through your website or mobile application, you should find setups that will enable people to spend time on your applications. This brings us to the subject of designing interaction.

Everything related to technology and the internet world is changing at an incredible pace. The competition continues to show itself harshly in every field. As the competition increases, it becomes difficult to sell through the website or mobile application. The first degree condition to convince the user is to have a perfect user experience.

What is Mobile Interaction Design?

Interaction design is the fictionalization and implementation of the interaction between human and machine. It is a well-known fact that the higher the interaction rate, the more people tend to repeat visits and possible purchases. Therefore, at the point we have reached, it has become necessary to design user interaction as much as the user experience.

Interaction design necessitates the use of marketing communication and psychology as well as general design knowledge. Especially when talking about concepts that encourage the user to experience the desired experience and then share this experience, it may be necessary to make deeper analyzes using different disciplines.

Whether a product exists physically or can only be accessed from digital platforms, interfaces must be parallel to the trends of the users and must be able to intuitively convince the user that he has achieved the highest efficiency with the least effort.

Winding up

There are various ways to enhance the usability of your mobile application and to make it user-friendly, but following the most important ones are mandatory. As mentioned earlier, people are impatience and do not tolerate a bad UI as well as UX of a mobile application.