Nowadays, 90% of the time people spend on their phones is spent on apps. An average user has more than 4 million apps to choose from (both on the App Store and Google Play). However, people usually utilize no more than just 30 apps a month.

As you can see, the competition is enormous. To win the users’ hearts, not only the functionality but also the look and feel of an app are essential. A professional UX design agency will help to make the app’s navigation and design simple and intuitive.

Today, we want to share with you some tips that UX firms usually use so that you can keep up with the hottest design trends.

Five features to make your app stand out

When your marketing campaign leads the user to download and use a mobile app, your next task is to make so that the user would continue coming back to the application. Then, you can motivate them to make a purchase or perform other valuable activities for your business. That’s where the UI/UX design agencies come into play. If you want to learn more, click here.

1. Encourage simplicity

Overloaded design distracts the user’s attention from the product. Moreover, it’s just annoying. For example, take the Facebook app design from ten years ago and compare it with the current version. More features mean more clutter, but they try to keep the right balance by simplifying and modifying the UI all the time. You can notice a similar tendency with other popular apps like Instagram or YouTube.

Moral: Don’t get too taken away, trying to add as many details as possible. Minimalist, even primitive designs are now the most significant trend, and your efforts in this direction will undoubtedly be appreciated. Sometimes less is more.

2. Smart layouts

Organize the details on the app page in a well-thought system. You have a home screen, a menu, and other screens that dispose of items or essential information.

A lot of UX/UI design studies have been conducted to find out how people spread attention across the screen. Different layouts are suitable for different types of content:

• For instance, there is a widely-used model called an F-pattern. It’s used to display texts. The main headline here is on the top, and that’s where your attention goes first. The secondary headlines lay one below the other forming a shape resembling the letter F. You can implement this pattern for a blog or a news portal.
• On the other hand, if your app is more interactive, you can use circular designs. For example, an English-teaching app Drops makes all the content elements appear in circles. You can also think of Instagram that started to show avatars in circles and not squares a couple of years ago. It looks very stylish. Forest, a popular time-planner, also uses this trick.

Moral: A well-organized layout can pay off much more than you could expect. So, don’t hesitate to hire a UX/UI design agency to take care of it for you.

3. Progressive disclosure

Too much information is scary. For example, can you imagine playing a mobile game where all the rules would be explained beforehand on ten screens? Nobody does that.

Instead, UX/UI designers implement a progressive disclosure to provide information available only when users need it. That’s done to reduce the cognitive load and improve the intuitiveness of the interface.

4. Attention to the color scheme

Bright colors provoke people’s interest.

• Airbnb has both white and deep pinkish shade of red in their brand book. This combination is stimulating and energetic, inspiring you to travel more without being too pushy.
• Tik Tok, which was awarded this year as the most downloaded iOS app, combines black with neon green and red. It makes the user think of night clubs and parties, which is the right message since the majority of the target audience are teenagers and millennials.
• If you look at the most popular food delivery apps in the US like Seamless, GrubHub, or DoorDash, they all utilize different shades of red in their design. That’s because red stimulates appetite and provokes action.

Note: At the same time, if you’re making a commercial app for premium goods or services, bright colors can appear too vulgar. So, try to search for a darker, more elegant color palette. Black, dark brown, and violet are traditionally associated with exclusivity and luxury. Remember Apple product presentations? Black and white, the most sophisticated combination ever for one of the most expensive mass production gadgets.

Moral: When you search for a suitable color combination,

coordinate it with your brand and transmit the right message to your target audience.

5. Responsive designs

To create a successful User Interface, you need to always keep in mind the commodity and value it’ll deliver to the users. So, regardless of an app category, make sure it looks good on different mobile screens. It is called responsive design. You can prepare unique templates for some of the most popular screen sizes (which is especially challenging to accomplish for Android, since there are so many options) and make it adapt to all the other ones. Nobody likes the apps where content is unreadable because of being shown distorted, so find a UX designer who can do this job well for you.

Hopefully, these UX/UI tricks that top mobile software design companies use will help you make the most out of your app.