I have never used an app more than once that didn’t appeal to my eyes or one that made me think about how to use it. Design is just too important, and good design is a sure way that your app stays on your customer’s phone.
Not only does design influence the behavior of your customer, but also drives perceptions and to an extent, helps you get to the app store’s featured list.
While it’s natural to consider design as the look and feel, it’s much more than that. Design means the form and function of your app and how your customers will navigate through it. Design means making sure you offer an overall fantastic user experience.
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You should focus on three goals for a better-designed app (a creative vision highlighted by Google). First, enchant your customer. The look and feel is the first touch point for any customer that comes across your app store page or microsite. And when it’s one app among many in that category, it better stand out in terms of graphic design.
Second, simplify the life of your customer who’s going to use your app. It has to be so simple to use that your app doesn’t need to come with instructions. The interface has to be intuitive. The only way to test this is to create an interface and let your potential customers play with it. Study their behavior and improvise.
Finally, integrate a well-designed product with one that is personal and at the same time lets your customers experience new ways of doing things. To give you an example, a cluttered market filled with to-do list apps was confronted by Clear, a beautifully-designed app.
Let’s look at some resources that will help you create a stunning design for your mobile app.
1. pttrns. A curated library of over 2,900 iPhone and iPad user-interface patterns, pttrns already has over 2 million page views per month. Use it as a design inspiration from some of the best apps out there. Of course, you can adapt the designs for Android apps as well.
2. TETHR is a completely free iOS design kit by InVision that offers eight Photoshop document files and 138 templates with over 250 components that you can incorporate in your designs.
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3. Android App Patterns. Specific to the Android OS, this website offers design inspiration with more than 1,600 screenshots of beautifully designed and functional apps across 31 categories.
4. Unsplash. Finding good quality stock photographs to use in your app or its associated microsite can be a challenge, and there are costs associated with them. Unsplash is a great resource to find high-resolution photos free of copyrights that you can use the way you like.
5. iOS Fonts features a listing of default iOS fonts in one place with a total of 260 faces for iPhone and iPad. You can type the text in the preview box and see the result of how it appears.
6. App Icon Template is a free Photoshop resource that helps you create app icons for iOS, OS X and Android apps on the go. This tool has built-in textures and colors and it automatically renders out all the various sizes of icons required on Android and iOS.
7. Lookback. This tool allows you to see how people really use your app so that you can create a better user experience. It can also track bugs. It's a great tool for creating a more usable app.
Have you used some other tools that have worked for you? Please let us know in the comments section below!