IOS and Android App Development: Key Considerations for Building User-Friendly Apps

The app market is flowing with a lot of options where every app is trying to compete for user attention. When users find apps that take their attention, they not only spend more time on them but also refer to others. All this is the impact of a great user-friendly design.

But why exactly is user-friendliness important in iOS and Android apps? And what are some key considerations to build a user-friendly app? Let’s explore it so that you can build an app that quickly catches the market audience.

Why Is User-Friendliness In Mobile Apps Important?

Before we move to the key considerations, it is as much as important to know about the reason behind creating user-friendly Android and iOS apps. When we keep an app user-friendly, it opens up several benefits, including:

Better App Experience

User-friendly apps create an overall experience using apps that are enjoyable for the users. When users find an app that is easy to use and checks on all of their points, they start recommending it to others.

More Engagement and Retention

No user wants to use an app that is not easy to navigate. But when your app gives a pleasant experience, then why won’t users want to spend more time on it? Your engagement and retention numbers will surely go high.

Positive Brand Image

Your app reflects your brand! If it is a well-designed app, it will create a positive impact on the company behind it, giving it a committed user base.

All three mentioned components are highly important in giving overall success to a business. A user-friendly app wins and gives all the checks to a business. But how should you build an app that is user-friendly? It is time to look at it.

Key Considerations That Go Into Building User-Friendly Apps

Several considerations go into building apps that are user-friendly. Below are some of the most popular and important key factors.

Give Intuitive Navigation

Intuitive navigation means to provide design that people find interesting without even analyzing it. For example, a well-structured menu will help users to find what they need quickly and with minimal effort. While building the app, make sure that users do not have to think very hard in understanding where they have to go next, which is also known as minimal cognitive load.

With that, the breadcrumbs and back buttons allow users to retrace their steps more easily. This also helps users to reduce the strain in navigation and improve the overall user experience. However, OS specific experts like hire android expert if you want to give intuitive navigation for android app.

Keep the Consistency

People recognize brands from their consistent presentation. The same is applicable while designing applications for iOS and Android devices. Keep a uniform design language across the app for giving familiarity and ease of use to the users. Even the functions shall work in the same way across the app.

Your user must know how to search for something just from your design uniformity. It is tough to maintain consistency in android, so hire Android app development company who have a good experience in maintaining consistency.

Design Should Be Responsive

Responsive design ensures that your app looks great on more than one device having different screen sizes. This is mostly very important in Android application development because there are a lot of Android smartphones in the market.

Keeping a responsive design also demands that your app must load quickly even on slower networks. Even a delay of one second in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions.

Give Accessibility Features

An app will be highly user-friendly if even especially abled people can use it. There are a lot of hardware and software features offered by the operating systems on smartphones. When you design your app, consider users with disabilities by giving features like screen reader support, high-contrast modes, and keyboard navigation.

Even web content can be made accessible by giving web content accessibility guidelines. Your app language should be clear and simple so that people with lower literacy levels can also interact with it. For accessibility, go for OS specific developers like for iOS, go with hiring iOS app development experts.

Give Feedback Mechanism

Users prefer businesses that hear them! When a user performs certain actions in your app, you can give them the required feedback. It can be on the button clicks or submission of forms.

During the errors, give users a message with solutions or guidance to proceed and recover from the error. This removes user frustration and increases the loyalty of users towards your app and brand.

Keep it Minimalist

An app with too much clutter might look eye-catching but fail in keeping what is important. For your app, avoid features that are not important so that your app looks minimalist. 

Use whitespaces wherever you can to keep the whole look of your app organized. Wichita State University, in their research, shared that whitespace increases the readability and user comprehension up to 20%.

Don’t Forget The Performance

Sometimes apps focus too much on the other user-friendly aspects and forget the performance part. Apps running smoothly without consuming excessive battery makes them highly reliable. Users expect fast and efficient apps and uninstall apps that do not meet this criterion.

Not only efficiency, an app shall be regularly updated and maintained to fix bugs. You can consider partnering with a mobile app development company India as the region is known for some best IT talents.

Security And Privacy Win Trust

Security also plays a direct role in keeping an app user-friendly. You have to implement excellent security measures for protecting the data of users. Whenever you want to collect data, clearly communicate with the users about what you are going to do with the collected data. This keeps transparency and trust in your app, making it highly user-friendly.

Final Words

Before we wrap up, it is important for you to know who makes the optimum difference in ensuring the user-friendliness in an iOS and Android app. The answer is your mobile app development partner. You have to make all the important checks while picking up your app development partner.

Have a deep-down discussion with them on how they are ensuring user-friendliness in your mobile app. Share your own feedback if you want your app to have some specific looks. User friendliness is not just a gimmick in the market; it has become a necessary deciding factor for the success of your app.