Guide to App Design: Designing Engaging User Experiences

In its essence, there is so much thought put in every aspect of App Design Company and the features the product possesses, which leaves people bewildered as to how can one simple thing such as app development encompass so many different things?

So what do we mean by designing experiences?

The thing about experience is that it is subjective, the experience that you have depends on your point of view. They are ephemeral and intangible, they are not something that you can measure with a physical tool.

So can something which is intangible, be designed?

No experience can’t be designed but rather felt. When you start to design by keeping this in mind you would be able to shift your focus towards the human. How the people out there will experience the things that we design? Regardless of the medium in which those are delivered.

It is about what people ultimately want from the experiences that they have. When we talk about creating great experiences, it is rather the design of anything independent of medium or across media with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.

So when you are designing mobile applications for the audience in order to deliver great experiences so that the maximum engagement can be generated, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Find the Balance Between the User Expectation and Business Expectation:

As a UX designer you would have a lot on your plate, between researching, wire framing, user testing and the list goes on and on. And if you are new to the game this can all fell very overwhelming.

Before starting any successful UX project you only need to be in tuned with two things, you user and your brand.

Let’s start with the user, the big question around this is, what problems are your users facing right now? Once you can identify the problems then you can begin to start working towards the solutions.

Second is understanding the brand, how does the project you are working on aligns with the brand’s mission and goals.

To summarize, in this stage you would want to identify the problems faced by the users as well as the core goals of your brand and see how they align.

Find Tangible Need Evidence:

As a designer you probably have a ton of assumptions about the needs and wants of the user. But not challenging those assumptions will lead you in a hole that tis too deep to dig yourself out of. Having one-on-one interviews, surveys, focus groups and usability tests are just a few tools that help vet your assumptions and base them on real tangible evidence.

Keep in mind you don’t need to survey a million users, a good rule of thumb is finding 3-5 people from your target audience. It will save you time and typically give you as much data as you need to take your project forward.

Build Personas:

Now that you have done your research, you can take all that data and start to work with it. One effective way to lay out your research visually is by building user personas. These will act as a guide when you are making all of your design decisions.

If you ever get stuck somewhere you can always refer back to the personas to figure out your user’s needs. But if you need a wider view of the big picture about the journey that your users take, try a user journey map.

Creating a user journey map will help designers understand what the user would be going through when they interact with your application. This way can give you great insight about the pain points and how to restructure your development process before moving into the next stage.

Create Mock Designs:

In this stage you will actually build out the design, you will be creating things like site maps, user flows, mock ups and other visuals. One of the most valuable thing that designers can create at this stage is a wire frame.

A wire frame is a low fidelity representation of your product and some designers even use them as prototypes. Keep in mind that you would not land on your ideal product with just one wire frame sketch, so it’s better to create as many concepts as you can.

In the end your wire frame should convey your overall direction and description of the user interface. Also a good design team goes out to test each and every wire frame concept to get an initial feel of what the consumers think.

Create a Real Working Product:

After designing, redesigning and then redesigning some more you have to start collaborating with your development team to turn your carefully crafted designs into a real working product.

All while keeping a good cadence of check-ins and feedback along the way because UX is in reality everyone’s job and it only gets better with collaboration. Remember that every phase in this process has to be backed up by deliverable quality checks and also the feedback from the testing team.

Post Launch Analysis:

One the product launches efficient development teams start another round of analysis. But this time you would want to ask yourself and your development teams questions like: Where did our process go right? Where did we struggle the most? How are the users responding to the product? Did we achieve what we set out for?

With a solid round of reflection you will gain invaluable knowledge you can leverage you make sure you can run future projects even more smoothly.

Now, we have rarely seen a product that does not need optimization, by conducting this process you will get an idea about the shortcomings of the product that you launched. By focusing and optimizing continuously you get a great chance of more user engagement hence more return on the investment that you made.

Steven Clark content writer in the USA.As a Digital Marketer. He specializes in writing game blogs.He has created variations in the different type of subject extragameplace