When mobile-mageddon arrived last April, lots of businesses realized that building a mobile website wasn’t just a thing they’d have to tackle eventually, but an absolute must-have right now if they hoped to stay relevant and compete. That Google decided that mobile friendliness is going to influence search rankings is just icing on the mobile website cake.
But even though mobile search has overtaken its desktop cousin, the way people search on mobile and the way they interact with mobile websites once they’ve landed on them is different than the way they behave on desktop. And too few mobile website designers are paying attention.
You can make of that what you will, but here are some hypotheses:
➤Mobile users have a pretty clear idea of what they are looking for when they search—they are on a mission for specific information.
➤If they don’t find what they’re looking for right away on a site, they will look somewhere else.
➤They don’t have the patience to dig deep through a complicated navigation architecture; they expect to find what they’re looking for with just a few clicks.
So…what does that mean for your mobile website design? Quite a lot, actually. Too many designers approach their mobile website as just a scaled down version of their main site, which misses the point, in my opinion. Your mobile website should be an opportunity to really leverage the unique qualities of mobile devices and engage the unique behaviors of mobile users.
Your mobile website should do more than just replicate the information on your desktop, it should deliver the information a mobile customer is looking for in a way that’s optimized for a mobile device. And that means a mobile-first mentality and design principles.
1. Prioritize Performance.
Slow load speed is the biggest frustration factor for mobile web users and one of the main reasons a customer will bounce away from a site; in fact, over three-fourths of consumers will click away from a site that loads slowly or won’t display properly on their mobile device. So you need to worry about performance first or your customers won’t stay on your site long enough to see all your other fancy mobile-first elements. Here are some things to keep in mind while you’re planning your mobile pages.
Keep pages to 1 MB or smaller for fastest load times.
Think carefully about the images you need, and crop, resize, and compress them for faster loading.
”Minify” your code, especially JavaScript; JS requests increase complexity and slow page rendering.
If you want to know how your mobile site is performing, use this Google PageSpeed analyzer for concrete steps you can take if your site is loading to slowly on mobile devices.
2. Rethink Your Homepage Content.
For most small businesses, what mobile website visitors want to accomplish is probably different from what visitors to their main website want to do. All those flashy branding elements and images on your main site homepage aren’t going to interest your mobile visitors. Therefore, the information you put on your homepage should be directed at the needs of your mobile users, most likely some combination of the following:
contact info, with click to call or click to text
location/directions/hours of operation
search bar/product search
place an order/order status/order tracking
make a reservation/appointment/service request
customer login/account access
option to view main website
mobile app download
social media buttons
3. Simplify Menus and Navigation.
The “hamburger” menu is universally recognized and a very mobile-friendly solution to navigation and it also respects the generally accepted idea that mobile navigation should take, at most, three taps to arrive at the desired page. Ideally, you should have just one sub menu under each menu category for ease of use. Be sure to put your most important pages first.
The key consideration in both cases is making your navigation and menu options easy for fingers of any size to tap and touch. Too many options packed in too tightly makes fingertip navigation virtually impossible. Which brings us, logically.
4. Design for Touch.
This is actually more nuanced than doing the obvious: Making sure buttons are large enough and spaced far enough apart that anyone, even someone with fat fingers, can navigate with ease. The average finger needs at least 44 pixels in both dimensions for a good touch experience; anything smaller and user experience suffers.
But beyond that, you need to design your mobile website around the common gestures and motions mobile device users naturally use and using those gestures as much as possible to let users accomplish their objectives on your site. What does that look like?
Letting users tap a button or icon to call you, text you, email you, add an event to their calendar, use GPS to get directions, download a podcast integrating the mobile device’s native functions and apps.
5. Reform Your Forms.
For the most part, mobile users really, really hate to type on their devices, so expecting them to enter a lot of information on your website is a real turn-off that is likely to cause a lot of visitors to head for the exits. So what can you do?
➤Only collect the minimum amount of information you need for a particular transaction. For example, if someone is signing up for your newsletter, you really only need a name and an email address (and don’t forget to use the email keyboard!).
➤If you have an e-commerce site, don’t force customers to register for an account to check out, give them the option of checking out as a guest.
➤For longer, multi-page forms/transactions, give users a status bar to gauge their progress.
➤Use best practices when designing forms for your mobile website. Users have an easier time completing forms with labels above the input boxes like the one on the left.
6. Make It Easy for Them to Find the Products They Want.
Most mobile consumers have something specific in mind when they visit your site; mobile shoppers aren’t really browsers, as this chart showing Amazon’s visitors demonstrates.
A mobile visitor spends just four minutes and checks out about eight pages on average, which means he is spending about half a minute per page. That is a shopper on a mission; the desktop visitor spends twice as long on site per page.
For the mobile website designer, then, the challenge is making sure the menus and navigation makes it easy to find a specific product or narrow down the choices to meet a shopper’s particular needs that day. A mobile device user is most likely not going to spend a lot of time scrolling endlessly through products, so you have to be creative in providing menu options to help him find what he wants quickly.
Take a look at this menu from Paperchase, a UK stationery store. The menu options on the left are neatly organized with helpful submenus that will take the user to a very specific product category to help her find what she wants without a lot of searching.
7. Don’t Neglect Your Fonts and Colors.
One of the worst things you can do is design your mobile website with text too small to be easily read; your users shouldn’t have to zoom to read a single word on your site, especially your navigation text. This leads to a terrible user experience, which is something search engines pay attention to in determining page rank.
For some brands, font choice is a major part of their overall branding, so the decision to switch fonts for the mobile site needs to be made judiciously. If you market to a mainly millennial demographic, you don’t have the same font size issues as, say, a brand that markets to baby boomers.
For easier navigation, choose fonts that are taller and naturally structured to leave a bit of space between letters. Most device manufacturers recommend Arial, Helvetica, Courier, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Trebuchet MS. Pick font colors that stand out from your background colors for easy reading.
And don’t forget the effect fonts have on load times, which is extremely important for mobile websites. When you are choosing a typeface, check it for speed. And only use a limited number of typefaces to keep page loads fast.
Security testing is sometimes thought of as being hard to automate or a testing process that lacks tools and resources to help make it easier to learn.
I find most testers are not even aware of the amount of free, open-source security testing tools available to them.
This is a shame because I believe the next wave of DevOps is adding security tests to our pipelines. There’s even a name for this next wave: DevSecOps.
I thought I’d create a quick resource to point you to some security tools that you can start trying out.
Below are some of the best ones I’ve found or have heard about.
You’re probably aware that modern applications often use APIs, microservices, and containerization to deliver faster and better products and services.
This changing landscape means security folks need to step up their game. DevSlop (“Sloppy DevOps”) is an exploration of this area via several different modules consisting of pipelines, vulnerable apps, and The DevSlop Show.
If you’re looking to start learning more about adding security to your DevOps pipeline, this is a good resource to start with.
Exercise in a Box
Exercise in a Box is a free online tool from the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK. It helps organizations find out how resilient they are to cyber-attacks and practice their response in a safe environment.
The service provides exercises based on the main cyber threats that your organization can do in its own time, in a safe environment, as many times as you wish. It includes everything you need for setting up, planning, delivery, and post-exercise activity, all in one place.
Security testing is sometimes thought of as being hard to automate or a testing process that lacks tools and resources to help make it easier to learn.
I find most testers are not even aware of the amount of free, open-source security testing tools available to them.
This is a shame because I believe the next wave of DevOps is adding security tests to our pipelines. There’s even a name for this next wave: DevSecOps.
I thought I’d create a quick resource to point you to some security tools that you can start trying out.
Below are some of the best ones I’ve found or have heard about.
I recently interviewed Tanya Janaca, who told me about her project, DevSlop.
You’re probably aware that modern applications often use APIs, microservices, and containerization to deliver faster and better products and services.
This changing landscape means security folks need to step up their game. DevSlop (“Sloppy DevOps”) is an exploration of this area via several different modules consisting of pipelines, vulnerable apps, and The DevSlop Show.
If you’re looking to start learning more about adding security to your DevOps pipeline, this is a good resource to start with.
Exercise in a Box
Exercise in a Box is a free online tool from the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK. It helps organizations find out how resilient they are to cyber-attacks and practice their response in a safe environment.
The service provides exercises based on the main cyber threats that your organization can do in its own time, in a safe environment, as many times as you wish. It includes everything you need for setting up, planning, delivery, and post-exercise activity, all in one place.
To use it, you’ll need to register here first.
Mobile Security Framework
Mobile Security Framework (MobSF) describes itself as an automated, all-in-one mobile application (Android/iOS/Windows) pen-testing framework capable of performing static analysis, dynamic analysis, malware analysis, and web API testing. https://opensecurity.in
It can be used for effective and fast security analysis of Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications and supports both binaries (APK, IPA & APPX) and zipped source code. It can also perform dynamic application testing at runtime for Android apps and has Web API fuzzing capabilities powered by CapFuzz, a Web API–specific security scanner.
Needle
Needle is the MWR’s iOS Security Testing Framework, released at Black Hat USA in August 2016. It is an open-source, modular framework, and its goal is to streamline the entire process of conducting security assessments of iOS applications. It also acts as a central point for you to perform all these security activities.
Needle was designed to be useful not only for security professionals but also for developers looking to secure their code.
Some examples of testing Needle can help you with are:
Data storage
Inter-process communication
Network communications
Static code analysis
Hooking
Binary protections.
Needle’s only requirement to run effectively is that you use a jailbroken device.
Frida
Frida is a dynamic instrumentation toolkit for developers, reverse engineers, and security researchers. I first heard about it from Jahmel Harris, an ethical hacker, security testing expert, and founder of Digital Interruption, who highly recommended it.
Frida is a framework or toolkit for instrumentation, also known as application hooking.
On the Frida website, it says to inject your scripts into a black–box process. Hook any function, spy, crypto API, or trace private application code.
No source code is needed.
Tamper
Tamper Chrome is an extension that allows you to modify HTTP requests on the fly and aid in Web security testing. Chrome works across all operating systems (including Chrome OS).
Tamper Chrome also allows you to monitor requests sent by your browser as well as the responses.
You can also modify requests as they go out and, to a limited extent, change the responses (headers, CSS, JavaScript, or XMLHttpRequest responseText).
Nishang
Is PowerShell your go-to security scripting language?
If so, you should check out the Nishang framework.
It’s a collection of scripts and payloads that enables the usage of PowerShell for offensive security, penetration testing, and red teaming.
Nishang is useful during all phases of penetration testing.
Faraday
If you’ve done any type of development in the past, you know how helpful a well-designed IDE can be to your productivity.
But what about security testing development?
Faraday calls itself an IPE (Integrated Penetration-Test Environment), which is essentially another way of saying a multi-user Penetration Test IDE.
It was designed for distributing, indexing, and analyzing the data generated during a security audit.
Faraday was developed to allow you to take advantage of the available tools in the community in a multi-user way.
They designed it with a focus on simplicity, so users should notice no difference between their terminal application and the one included in Faraday.
Developed with a specialized set of functionalities to help users improve their workflow.
InSpec
At a high level,InSpec is an auditing and software testing framework.
It’s basically an open-source testing framework for infrastructure with a human- and machine-readable language for specifying compliance, security, and policy requirements.
Pocsuite
Pocsuite is an open-source, remote vulnerability testing and proof-of-concept development framework.
It comes with a powerful proof-of-concept engine and many niche features for the ultimate penetration testers and security researchers.
Astra was made for automated security testing of REST APIs.
Their GitHub page mentions that security engineers or developers can use Astra as an integral part of their process so they can detect and patch vulnerabilities early during the development cycle. Astra can automatically detect and test login and logout (Authentication API), so it’s easy for anyone to integrate this into a CICD pipeline. Astra can take API collection as an input, making it able to test APIs in standalone mode.
Examples of the types of security tests you can perform with Astra are:
SQL injection
Cross-site scripting
Information leakage
Broken authentication and session management
CSRF (including Blind CSRF)
Rate limit
CORS misconfiguration (including CORS bypass techniques)
JWT attack
CRLF detection
Blind XXE injection
Pacu
Speaking of API security testing, are you worried about your Cloud-based application AWS APIs getting hacked?
Pacu is an AWS exploitation framework, designed for testing the security of Amazon Web services.
Taipan
Taipan is an automated web application vulnerability scanner that allows identifying web vulnerabilities in an automatic fashion. This project is the core engine of a broader project which includes other components, like a web dashboard where you can manage your vulnerability scans, download a PDF report, and a scanner agent to run on a specific host.
Archery
Archery is an open–source vulnerability assessment and management tool which helps developers and pentesters to perform scans and manage vulnerabilities.
It uses popular open-source tools to perform a comprehensive scanning tool for web applications and networks. It also performs web application dynamic authenticated scanning and covers the whole application using selenium. The developers can also utilize the tool for the implementation of their DevOps CI/CD environment.
Retire.JS
Have a bunch of javascript that you would like to scan for different types of vulnerabilities?
Try Retire.JS, which can scan your code for the use of JavaScript libraries with known vulnerabilities
mitmproxy
Need a way an intercepting proxy for your security testing and be able to run it from the command line?
Check out mitmproxy, which is one of the highest–rated (14,997 stars) on GitHub. Their GitHub page describes it as An interactive TLS-capable intercepting HTTP proxy for penetration testers and software developers.
Metasploit Framework
Metasploit Framework is one of the more popular penetration testing tools out there. It was designed specifically for penetration testing—like how to attack MS SQL, browser-based and file exploits, and social engineering attacks. This is one of the main tools used by hard-core security professionals.
Metasploit contains a suite of tools that can help you do things like performing attacks and testing security vulnerabilities. It contains a number of different modules that can test your application against common vulnerabilities that many hackers exploit. You can also use it to develop your own exploits. In Metasploit, a module is a software component that performs a chosen attack on a specified target.
Selenium
Umm… what is Selenium—a functional automation testing library—doing on this list?
Well, believe it or not, there are many ways to leverage existing functional automated tests, including security testing.
For example, in his Secure Guild session on integrated security testing, Morgan Roman will demonstrate how he leverages his existing Selenium tests to check his applications for cross-site vulnerabilities.
This works mainly by taking existing Selenium tests (or any other kind of test) and then adding a simple security payload to it, and finally injecting some extra detection into it.
This may seem complex at first, but he’ll show us just how simple it is. Register for Secure Guild and check out his session now
ZAP
Speaking of Selenium, another popular way of expanding its capabilities is to use it with the OWASP Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP).
ZAP can help you automatically find security vulnerabilities in your Web applications while you’re developing and testing your applications. It’s also a great tool for experienced Pen testers to use for manual security testing.
Many testers have leveraged ZAP within their Selenium tests to help with their security testing efforts.
Secure Guild
As you can see, there are many tool options available to testers who are looking to get more familiar with Security Testing.
Also, if you are just beginning your security testing career, another resource you should check out is Secure Guild, an online conference 100% dedicated to security testing. Learn more here.
Mobile App Design Process, the thought of creating a mobile app from scratch sounds like an uphill task full of corny, complex coding activities.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! Before developing a new mobile app, you need to design it first. It’s critical to plan every step, and at some point, you might want to retreat and examine what you’re building.
Global app downloads surpassed 218 billion last year. Businesses that made the mistake of not creating a mobile app will continue to suffer in the coming years too.
Having a mobile strategy is essential because this research shows that users spend 90% of their time in apps as compared to surfing the internet.
It’s great to have a mobile responsive website backed by a solid mobile marketing strategy with major resources being allocated to cross-device reach. In today’s competitive era, not having a mobile app has severe implications.
A mobile app helps businesses reach more customers, improve marketing strategies, provide value to the customers, increase brand awareness, increase customer engagement and loyalty, and create one or more competitive advantage(s). Plus, mobile apps can improve your bottom line.
When the average user spends more time looking at a mobile phone than watching television or using a desktop or laptop, what excuse does your business have for not having a mobile app?
The question remains, where and how to start?
There are two phases of any mobile app design.
Mobile app design strategy
App design process
Mobile App Design Strategy
It starts with a strategy. It defines the future and the path to reach your destination.
The issue, however, is with creating a mobile app design strategy. You simply can’t create an app just because your competitor has one. Your competitor might have a different business objective and mobile strategy which are quite different from yours.
Developing a mobile strategy links back to the company strategy and has four stages:
i). Understand the business strategy
ii). Business mobile app strategy
iii). App strategy
iv). Product management strategy
1. Understand Your Business Strategy
Understanding the overall business strategy should form the basis of your mobile app design. Misalignment between company strategy and the mobile strategy might be suicidal.
Recent statistics from the Harvard Business Review show that 70% of employees don’t have enough information about their company’s strategy or their perception of strategy is much different than the actual strategy.
There are several benefits of creating and executing a mobile strategy that’s derived from (and supports) the overall company strategy.
Improvement in quality, value, productivity, employee efficiency, and customer engagement.
2. Business Mobile App Strategy
Your mobile app strategy is your surefire path to achieving success with your mobile app design and marketing in general.
Yes, the success or failure of the app depends on the strategy since everything will be linked to the strategy. It will be easy to create if you have answers to these two questions:
What is the purpose of the app?
What is the benefit that the end-user will drive from using the app?
The simplest way to chart your app strategy is none other than:
“We will build this so that our customers can do that.”
The strategy has to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. Anything that’s too vague or looks seemingly unachievable, strike it out. For example, having more downloads than WhatsApp isn’t a practically achievable goal.
Other Requirements
If you think a functional app idea, a roadmap, and budget allocation are all that you need for the strategy, think again.
Now is the time to define clear use cases on the basis of the customer journey. This calls for a clear definition of the single app strategy.
A use case is at the center of defining app strategy. It’s defined as the list of actions that define the interaction between a role and the system. The image below represents a simple use case that defines the actions of the buyer and the seller – the roles.
“The number one secret is to focus on one or two main use cases. Let’s not overwhelm the user, but really focus on one or two use cases and do them really, really well.”
The best app strategy is one that uses not more than two use cases. Think of Instagram, people use it when they have to share a photo. This is a perfect example of a single-use case.
4. Define Your Product Management Implementation Strategy
Once the mobile app strategy is defined and documented, it’s time to implement it.
The test strategy should be defined before the coders get to work. Here’s what to include in the test strategy:
What is the scope of the app?
What is not in the scope?
The features
Individual cases
Outcome
App versions and integration
Know The Required Tools
What tools do you need for development, testing, and for maintenance? Though, it mostly depends on the budget allocation.
List all the tools required at every stage of the development and post-development.
Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, or Omniture for analytics and performance.
Splunk, FogLight, or AppDynamics for app performance.
PractiTest, Test Collab, TestRail, or qTest for QA testing.
Basic App Design Process
Benji Hyam, the co-founder of Social Proof Interactive, stated that before you approach an app designer, you must have the following things ready:
Understanding your target market and the end-user
List of things that a user might want to accomplish with the app
Initial wireframes
Budget
This is, more or less, what we have covered in the previous section. Having a mobile app strategy will make app designing super easy.
Mobile app design strategy is an in-house process while app design process can be outsourced or done in-house.
The basic app design process consists of the following steps:
Setting the scope
User/market research
UX wireframe
Prototype
UI design
Animation
Software architecture
iOS development
Testing
Release
Let’s roll.
1. Setting The Scope
The scope refers to what needs to be done, what you want to achieve from the app, and how large/small it has to be. The scope may include all of the following:
The nature of the app
Target audience
Most crucial functions and features of the app
App’s visual design features
Potential technologies to be used
Consistency with the business strategy
Specific preferences
Did you notice that consistency with the business strategy is just one part of this process?
In order to document the scope of the app, it’s crucial to identify all of the following:
Objectives and goals of the app
Phases and subphases
Tasks and resources
Budget
Schedule
Based on the scope, the design and flow of the app will be prepared.
2. User & Market Research
This is the phase where the UX and UI designers will get to work based on the scope of the app and on the app strategy. It involves market research and user research.
How is it Done?
Start by conducting in-depth market research and analyzing the existing apps in your industry. If you’re going to create an image-sharing app, you’ll have to look at the existing image-sharing apps, their color schemes, patterns, flow, etc.
The user research will reveal colors and themes that will help you develop an emotional connection with the target audience.
What type of colors and styles will the end-users prefer? You can use different methods to collect data from potential users such as surveys, focus groups, design workshops, etc.
3. UX Wireframe
The visual representation of the user interface is known as the UX wireframe. You have to create a structure of the user interface, transitions, and interactions. It must be based on market research, user research, competition, and strategy.
You can use wireframing software or you can create a simple outline on paper. Lay down the user flow as you want it to appear on the actual app.
The purpose of UX wireframing is to define the flow of the app such as the number of windows, buttons, where each button leads the user, the registration process, the login screen, and everything related to the front-end of your app.
The low-fidelity prototype is a sketchy prototype that can be created right away as the wireframe is ready. There is no need to waste money on expensive prototypes.
Not only does a high-fidelity prototype consume resources but it takes time.
A simple physical prototype will show you how the app looks. The purpose of a prototype, by any means, is not to test or improve the functionality.
A lot of experts recommend using low-fidelity prototypes to save cost and time. Instead of wasting money creating expensive prototypes, spend money on app functions, features, and on coding.
5. UI Design
Do not confuse UX wireframe and prototyping with the user interface (UI) design.
The UX research, wireframing, and prototyping are about how the app works while the UI design is about how the app looks.
Once the UX has been tested, tweaked, and several prototypes have been tested and finalized, you have to move to the UI designing phase.
At this stage, you have to deal with the visual representation of the concepts, color schemes, fonts, shapes, buttons, font size, images, forms, illustrations, animation, etc.
You have to test multiple designs to see what works best for your users. The color schemes, skins, themes, and all the visual elements have to be tweaked several times to find what works.
It’s somewhat similar to A/B testing with the difference being that in the case of UI design, you have to make the judgments yourself. You cannot bring customers on board at this stage.
6. Interface Animation
The animation should be applied and tested with the UI design phase, so as to test different styles of animation in real-time.
Animation refers to the user interface animation such as how a new screen will pop out and how gestures are defined, and so on.
“Motion design can effectively guide the user’s attention in ways that both inform and delight. Use motion to smoothly transport users between navigational contexts, explain changes in the arrangement of elements on a screen, and reinforce element hierarchy.”
The animation should be functional instead of a simple design element.
Anatoly Nesterov has shared seven types of animations for mobile apps. You can choose from the following list.
Visual feedback
Function change
Element hierarchy
Orientation in space
Condition of the system
Visual prompts
Fun animations
7. Software Architecture Planning
This is perhaps the most crucial part of the entire design process. The core purpose of software architecture planning is to scale the app, and make it better in terms of functionality and design.
It involves the entire team including the designers, programmers, and managers. The idea is to improve the frontend and the backend processes by constructively tweaking the software architecture.
It calls for regular constructive discussion on platforms, frameworks, abstract layers, design platforms, technology, components, etc.
Understand the end user needs before designing and redesigning.
Do not hesitate to invest in architecture.
Identify key interfaces, layers, and subsystems.
Use an iterative approach to designing.
8. App Development
This is the phase where coding begins and the developers start creating the app.
This is something that developers have to do, so make sure you deal with the best coders. The app can be developed for android or iOS depending on your choice.
Instead of creating the app for multiple platforms simultaneously, the better approach is to create the app for one platform first.
Why?
Because developing an app for a single platform from an expert will cost you tens of thousands of dollars. If it turns out to be a poorly coded app, you will find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
Better yet, choose android app development first, since it’s cost-effective as compared to iOS.
9. Testing
When the average failure rate for app testing for android is 16.4%, you can’t afford to launch your newly created app without testing.
The purpose of testing the app is to ensure there aren’t any bugs and the app works as expected.
There are several stages in an app testing process. This type of rigorous testing process will ensure that your app works smoothly.
The app can be tested in-house, outsourced, or the developers can do the preliminary testing. The app testers should not be your developers or partners of the developers.
10. Release
Finally, it’s time to release your app once it has passed the tests.
The app must be submitted to the appropriate app store. It will take time since most of the apps are reviewed before they are published. It can take up to a week for the app to get approval so plan your release accordingly.
Most developers believe that a proper release strategy should be used for app launches.
Partnering with the right business is the best approach that worked exceptionally well for David and Goliath. They partnered with David Eckstein for the launch of their app which turned out to be a huge success.
Mobile Design Tips
The following mobile design tips will help you in achieving your set goals:
1. Iterate user interface designs: This tip comes from Amanda Cline, who is a developer with intensive experience under her belt.
She says:
“It is an excellent idea to iterate the interface design options so as to achieve apps that are fully engaging and retain the attention of targeted users.”
Every single iteration will help you learn a valuable lesson that might not be useful for this project, but it can help you in another project.
2. Understand your users: There is only one rule to designing better apps – understand your users. The best mobile app developers collect user feedback and apply it to the design. This is a crucial part of the mobile application design process.
“When I decided to put speed radar on a mobile device, the capability really wasn’t there, but I knew it would be.”
While designing an app, keep the future in mind. Never design for today because by the time you will finish designing the app, the hardware will have been upgraded and when you launch the app, you will always be behind.
System Architecture
This stage is often overlooked in the app development process. But taking the time to understand your system ensures that you can grow your business without outgrowing your app.
The best apps are scalable, reliable, and secure—but also achieve your goals.
Without a system architecture analysis, something will eventually get lost in the shuffle. So make sure you understand the various entities of your system. Figure out the different data flows between each entity as well.
What workflows will be required for each process? Do you need third-party integrations? What are the technical requirements on the backend?
Create a functional spec sheet that details all of the data flows and flow charts. This information can ultimately be handed off to your design team. A designer will need to understand your system architecture to create a design that makes sense for your specific app and its goals.
Wireframes
Your wireframe will be another crucial tool for your app’s design. Anyone can create a wireframe—you don’t need to be a designer to accomplish this.
Think of your wireframe as a rough sketch of your app’s usability. These can be super informal. I’ve even seen some wireframes sketched on napkins or pieces of paper, although most people today will create a digital version.
Conclusion
Mobile app design can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be.
To nail the design of your app, make sure you follow the design guidelines explained in this article. Rather than trying to tackle this on your own, contact our team here at BuildFire. We can handle all of the design elements, and more, while providing consultancy services for your app as well.
Our mobile app designers and app developers will double as strategic partners for your app development project. It’s time to take your design to the next level. Let’s build something great together!
