5 Recommendations on Improving Your Mobile App’s Usability
The more user-friendly your mobile app, the more clients you’ll have and the higher your income will be. Read this article to get to know how to improve your app’s UI/UX!
Excellent UI/UX is a vital prerequisite of a mobile app’s success. To make sure that your app takes off, you should thoroughly structure its content, provide intuitive navigation and simplify the onboarding process. In this article, you’ll find recommendations on how to improve your app’s usability and increase your customer satisfaction.
Think of Platform Usability
Your app should be available to the widest possible audience. Owners of iOS and Android smartphones should be able to use it, regardless of the brands of their devices. The thing is that you can’t build an app for a certain operating system and then fine-tune it so that it becomes compatible with the other one too. You’ll need to build both the iOS and Android versions from scratch and hire two teams of UI/UX services experts, so plan your budget accordingly.
Strive to Deliver Value As Soon As Possible
The quicker and easier the onboarding process, the better. You should allow new users to sign up in a couple of clicks and provide them immediate access to the most valuable content. Such an approach should help you to expand your customer base, improve your user retention, and eventually, increase your conversions.
It’s vital to let new users sign up with their social media accounts, such as Google and Facebook. If your app lacks this opportunity, people will be likely to discard the registration and uninstall the app.
If you need to gather your users’ personal information, let them fill in their detailed profiles a bit later. To motivate them to do so, you might offer some perks to them. For instance, you might send bonus points to those who have fully filled in their profiles and allow them to spend these points on in-app purchases. The information that each user has to provide about him or her should fit on one, maximum of two pages.
If you offer a lengthy questionnaire to your new clients at the first step, they might leave and never come back. Meanwhile, given the fierce competition on the market, you should convince your new users to come back to your app within the first week after the registration. Otherwise, they would be unlikely to use the app regularly.
Make Sure the Navigation Is Intuitive
As soon as a new user opens your app for the first time, he or she should immediately understand how to find the information that they need. If you sell goods or services, the customer should be able to filter the offers in a couple of clicks. If your app works as an online media, the reader or viewer should be able to see all the content categories from the onset.
When navigating through the app, users should never do the following:
- Find themselves on random pages
- Ask questions like “What is this button for?” or “How can I find this or that function?”
- Scroll the pages
Yet sometimes, crucially important information might fail to fit on one page. Then, you might consider scrolling down but not side-scrolling. The latter makes users feel uncomfortable and they will be likely to leave.
Make sure to add the autofill feature. Your loyal customers shouldn’t type their credit/debit cards details or billing/shipping address every time from scratch. The fewer steps the user needs to make and the fewer barriers to overcome, the more time they will spend in your app and the more often they will come back.
If your app features video content, it should be able to switch from the portrait to landscape format. For apps that are not too focused on videos, that would be not a must but a big plus.
In the previous passages, we emphasized the importance of easy onboarding. Yet in fact, you might not ask users to sign up for your app at all. If you run an online shop, it would be wise to add a convenient guest checkout option. Thanks to it, users will be able to purchase things quickly and with minimum effort. By the way, all checkout buttons should be large and clearly visible (regardless of whether they are for guests or registered clients).
Less Is More When It Comes to Content
Each piece of content in your app should be useful, informative, and adapted to the compact size of the display. You might want to save long-read articles and lengthy videos for your website. Slides and attention blocks are ideal for an app.
As soon as the user opens a certain page of your app, they should instantly see all the information that helps them to achieve their goals. Such an approach is known as content prioritization. For instance, if the person wants to buy a book, they should see the photo of this book, its name, category, price, rating, annotation, and the big “Add to Basket” button. There should be no excessive details on the page. The user might want to read other people’s reviews about this book — and in this case, they might need to click the corresponding button and visit another page.
While you strive to make your content clear and concise, you should never omit important details. For instance, the page might fail to show that the book has a poor rating. The customer might buy it and regret it. Or, they might find out about the book’s rating on the next step and feel disappointed. Your conversion rate will decrease and your clients will start to question your brand’s credibility.
Gather User Feedback
Let users share their impressions right in the app: rate it with 1-5 stars and leave text reviews. Analyze people’s feedback and improve your business accordingly. This will save you from the necessity of carrying out costly polls and complex marketing research.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this article came in handy, and now you better understand how to optimize the usability of your mobile app. These pieces of advice should be relevant for apps of any category. Your customers will be genuinely grateful if you implement them!
