Designing an app provides you with an opportunity to reduce the cost of your operations and marketing, as well as generate your sales. Apart from this, you can also get more and more accurate feedback, enhance the overall customer experience and broaden the coverage of your market. On the other hand, this isn’t guaranteed by just designing an app, seeing as how there are so many ways to make your app… well, less than effective. With that in mind and without further ado, here are seven design mistakes that will drive your app into the ground.
Underusing whitespace
Underusing whitespace in your design is a serious mistake, one that can be both easily solved and avoided. First of all, the multitude of choice is known to reduce the engagement rate quite a bit. Having too many interactive elements at the same time can be incredibly restricting but it’s also impractical for mobile users. Namely, underusing whitespace makes the design of the app less scroll-friendly. Moreover, this also increases a chance that your audience will click on something by accident, which is something that will significantly diminish their UX.
Copying your competitors
While there’s no reason not to inspect your competitors and borrow an idea or two, copying them will definitely be a counter-productive matter. First of all, this is something that your audience will notice and will not look kindly on. Second, if you’re using the same design as them, you’re making no effort to convince them to choose in favor of your app. Moreover, once the time comes to evolve your app, you might find yourself directionless, which is why it’s for the best to be self-reliant from day one.
Misleading navigation
If there’s one thing that your audience expects of your app it’s the intuitive navigation. This means that if something looks like a clickable/interactive element, it needs to serve this function. If not, you need to take it out. Keep in mind, that while focusing on a single navigation method may be simpler, you should in no way be afraid of combining several of them. Lastly a hamburger navigation is quite popular, however, it often hides navigation items, which makes it somewhat restricting and less pragmatic.
Think about sales
Keep in mind that this app needs to become a powerful eCommerce platform, regardless if it redirects your customers to a website e-store or directly makes sales. In the case of the first, you should probably look for a platform that’s endemic to the market you’re trying to access, for instance, for your NSW based company, opting for a marketplace platform in Australia would be the best course of action. Even with the app, going for a multi-vendor eCommerce guarantees you the greatest profits, which is why you need to make this into one of the most important points in your agenda.
Lack of contrast
In order to manipulate the attention of your audience, you need to be running in your use of contrast. Here, most people think about color, however, this is just one of many options that you have. For instance, using asymmetry on an otherwise symmetric layout can achieve the same effect. Of course, the left side of the screen attracts more attention, which is yet another handy thing to know when planning your asymmetrical layout.
A similar thing goes for the size of the element. Larger shapes naturally attract more attention than smaller ones, which is a handy thing to know when designing your CTA (call-to-action) button. In other words, there’s so much you can do to easily achieve a much greater effectiveness of your layout that it would be outright irresponsible to miss out on this great opportunity.
Non-responsive design
Making your design non-responsive is probably the single greatest error that you could possibly make and if anything is destined to run your app into the ground, this is the most likely of culprits. Keep in mind that the attention span of an average person is shorter than that of a goldfish, so if your app isn’t responding immediately, they’re bound to just outright uninstall it and look for an alternative. Not only that, but you might also get rated and reviewed poorly on Google Store/iTunes, which will further harm your brand (even worse than if you had no app, at all).
Finding an inefficient development tool
Keep in mind that no one expects you to develop your tool without at least some assistance from a third-party tool or platform. Nonetheless, with so many options out there, it might be hard to find the right application development framework to suit your needs. What you need to look for is something with a strong community, something e-commerce oriented, as well as something that provides end-to-end assistance, so that you don’t have to make a compromise in form of an unnecessary combination of resources. If you achieve to find a framework that meets all of these criterions, you should start using it without any hesitation.
At the end of the day, keep in mind that the efficiency is the name of the game, so, you need to focus on anything that makes your job easier. This means getting assistance wherever you get it but also thinking about the primary purpose of your app. A design is not just about the aesthetics, it’s about performance and branding, both of which play a pivotal role in the future of your business. Therefore, you simply can’t afford to make any of the above-listed mistakes, especially now when you clearly know better.
