If someone time travels from the past to 2020, he would be awestruck with 180-degree evolution in the mobile UX design process. 

They might feel amazed with Voice-based UX or would go overwhelmed with the scope of Artificial Intelligence in the domain. But, there’s one thing that they will find the same. 

Any guesses what is it?

 It’s nothing but the UX design principles. 

Over the years, various functionalities, technologies, and tools have been replaced or at the verge of extinction. But, the basic UX design principles have remained just the same as before.

Now knowing this, if you are someone who is planning to step into the UX domain this year, it is no wonder that getting acquainted with these principles is vital.

So, keeping the same into consideration, we will be covering the same below.

8 Principles To Guide You in Mobile App UX Design

1. Clutter-free Interface

Every application comes with a primary goal. The one where they target a particular pain point of end-users and provide a solution for the same.

But, because of the increasing competition, designers often introduce many other features and functionalities into their plan.

However, at times the app designers introduce multiple functionalities into the same app screen. This confuses the end-users, resulting in more clicks on the secondary (less important feature) compared to the primary one.

To combat this situation, the best way is to make a clutter-free interface. Meaning, introduce a limited number of actionable things in a single screen. A clear view of which you can take from the image shared below.

2. Personalization

We all love things that give us a personalized and special feel. There’s no denying it. The same psychology applies in the case of UX design too.

When you design a user experience that enables users to perform an action in a quick and effortless manner, they fall in love with your application. On the contrary, if it is cumbersome they exit the platform and share negative feedback.

As you can see in the screenshot of the Netflix app above, it informs and encourages users to continue their app interaction right from where they left. Or better say, continue watching the series they left in between.

3. Don’t Rush For Registration

You would encounter many mobile apps that straightaway ask for registration, without giving users a chance to explore the application. Does that leave a good impression of the app in the users mind? 

Personally, I immediately leave such applications. 

Why would any user register in vain before knowing what are the features that the app offers and whether it’s all worth it or not?

This is why it is again imperative for UX designers to follow the principle of keeping the registration process optional.

When you give some time to the new users to explore your mobile app and get familiar with it, they show more interest in your app. This reduces your app uninstallation rate and increases the chances of user conversion.

4. Avoid Nagging Permissions

It’s true that permissions to access user data open a new door to understanding the user and deliver a personalized experience. 

In such a scenario, an ideal way to keep a balance of the two is to ask for relevant permissions only. 

Let’s take another example.

VSCO, a photo-editing app asks for camera access only, whenever users wish to click a picture. It does not ask permission for accessing contacts, or other built-in device apps. This gives users an assurance that the rest of the information is secure.

5. Focus On Users Goals

Since desktop and mobile apps are essentially different, the goals that need to be fulfilled are also distinct. For example, what a user wants to do in a desktop app/website is not something they would want to do in a mobile app. 

So refrain from making it overwhelming for users to use a mobile app with the functionality of a desktop app. They would prefer selective things, i.e., say a user is using a restaurant app- he/she would want to just view the menu, book a reservation, place an order in advance, or just get directions. All the other information is secondary and can be displayed elsewhere, not on the main screen.

6. Design for Fingers

Gone are those days when mouse pointers were the one interacting with applications. Today, with the advent of touch-screen devices, users are interacting with the platforms via their fingers.

In a situation like this, it is again imperative to understand that the human finger size varies from person to person. So, designing for different human finger size is the right practice to bring more opportunities for interactions and increasing the app conversion rate.

Likewise, investing in hand gestures while creating an app UX design is also an optimal method of getting higher results.

7. Only Relevant Notifications

As a proverb goes, “Too much of anything is bad”, misuse of push notifications can drift your future from higher conversion rate to higher uninstallation rate. 

So, the next principle that every novice and experienced UX designer needs to watch out for is to discover how many push notifications are enough. And this way, prevent frustrating the users while getting their motive fulfilled.

8. Effective Offboarding

Since you have put so much effort into UX design for the whole process, it is equally important for you to end it on a positive note. 

That implies, adding UX elements that impart a positive vibe to the users even when they have performed the requisite action or are deactivating/deleting their account. This will improve the chances of them revisiting your app in the future as well.

Interactive design vs. User experience design

Interactive design focuses on the moments of your user’s direct and active engagement – one that involves tapping, clicking, dragging, typing, etc. – with your website. Meanwhile, user experience (UX) design has a wider perspective and considers even moments of passive use – like reading a text on your website’s page – to be interaction.

As such, interactive website design is a part of UX website design that aims at incentivizing and facilitating the moments of a user’s active engagement. Some UX professionals prefer to zero in on this aspect of UX design and hone to perfection the skills of implementing interaction patterns. At Webzworld, we always put such focused specialists on highly interactive web design projects to ensure the quality of interactive design.

Interactive design elements

Interactive design processes break every moment of interaction into 5 elements. Most of these elements apply to all types of interactions, but some can be optional at times. The user experience specialist’s job is to define what elements are necessary for each interaction instance to make it feel natural and seamless.

Here’s the list of all 5 elements:

• Text – A text or a symbol that indicates the possibility of interaction and focuses on its expected results – not the action itself. Think a line ‘Play’ or a triangle symbol that signifies the same intention.
• Visual Form – Some interactive elements, like buttons or fields for text input, should have distinctly visible margins to specify the interactive zone. You certainly don’t want your potential buyer to take pains in finding the input zone when they’re filling in a shipping address for their purchase, for instance.
• Medium/Platform – With interactions requiring different actions on different devices, an interactive design expert should ensure that the choice of interaction-inducing actions is predictable on all platforms.
• Time – Certain interactions require time for processing input data and your website should always keep users informed about the state of this data processing. Otherwise, users may consider the website unresponsive and leave without waiting for the result.
• Feedback – To give a user the feeling of accomplishment, your website should present a clear result of any interaction. For instance, show the ‘Success!’ notice after a user shares an article from your website to social networks.

The roles of each of these elements seem to be evident and choosing the necessary ones to assemble a smooth interaction flow appears to be a trivial task. Still, I’m sure that just like me, you’ve encountered plenty of web designs with broken interaction flows that puzzled you at one point or another or confused you enough to make you leave.

Merits of quality interactive design

Just like the negative consequences of bad interactive website design can be grave, the positive effects of quality interactive design can be impressive. Let’s look at just a few of them.

Lower support costs and increased support quality

If users don’t experience any troubles when interacting with your website, they have fewer reasons to turn to your support, which leads to minimized support costs. Thus, by ensuring that every interaction instance on your website is properly designed, you shield your support specialists from such trivial issues, and they can focus on complex and unprecedented cases, thus enhancing support quality.

Decreased bounce rate

More often than turn to support, visitors who experience a confusing interaction simply bounce and never return. Professionally designed and tested interactive design minimizes the chances of users’ frustrations with your website and prevents a high bounce rate.

Higher revenue

Whether your website’s revenue comes from clicks or purchases, it is tightly tied to the processes of interaction. By allowing users to gain a satisfying experience from engaging with your website, you motivate them to engage more often, thus bringing you more revenue.

Increased competitiveness and loyalty

There’s a caveat to what I said at the very start about good interactive design being natural enough to not attract any attention to itself at all. If you draw your users’ attention to interactive elements by adding some feel of freshness and creativity to them.

Benefit from the comfort of your users

A user interacting with your website is a client communicating with your business. Just as you wouldn’t want your business communication to appear confusing and unproductive, you shouldn’t let these qualities define the interactive design of your website. Whether you need to prevent interactive design issues in your future website or want to fix them in the existing one, don’t hesitate to turn to Webzworld’s team for assistance.

The majority of IT companies already favor cloud apps more than on-premises ones, while non-IT organizations start to share that feeling as well. And ScienceSoft’s software development experience proves this trend: more than 80% of our software development projects use cloud technologies.

In this article, I’d like to share the insights on options you have while developing and deploying cloud applications and what benefits you can achieve using cloud solutions in your business.

Public, Private or Hybrid — That’s the deployment question

Public cloud

With the public cloud, a cloud service provider (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform among the most popular ones) offers resources, such as storage, monitoring capabilities, and networking capacities, or virtual machines, to multiple customers on a subscription basis or a pay-per-usage model.

Sometimes, public clouds are associated with insecurity and inflexibility due to their multi-tenant nature. However, the right tenant isolation makes public clouds flexible and secure, even for the most valuable information.

Private cloud

The main idea of a private cloud is that it is used exclusively by one company.

One of the benefits of using a private cloud is a high security level, which is ensured by employing a secure firewall system and hosting the cloud within an isolated network.

However, if you’re a small or mid-sized business and don’t have a huge budget, creating a private cloud for deploying your solutions may be too expensive for you. The costs are definitely higher than deploying in a public cloud, as all management, maintenance, and updating of data centers, hardware and software lie on your in-house team.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud offers a mix of public cloud and private cloud services. Hybrid cloud deployments allow those services that do not need to be on-premises (e.g., due to data security requirements) to be deployed in the cloud with all its advantages. Compared to the public cloud, this cloud type gives you more agility as you don’t fully depend on third-party providers. Hybrid cloud provides you with a unique approach to data security as you can both store your data in a private isolated environment and use the public cloud for data backup and recovery measures.

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IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS: What are they for?

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides companies with an infrastructure to develop their applications in the cloud. This type of cloud computing services offers you such resources as virtual machines, storage, and network services.

With IaaS, companies avoid huge capital expenditures as they pay only for the resources they use. Another strong advantage is that you can get any resources needed in just a few clicks by purchasing a required infrastructure element. Thus, by choosing IaaS, you can launch your cloud app fast.

PaaS

By choosing Platform as a Service (PaaS), besides cloud storage and other resources, like operating systems, you get ready-to-use tools for developing, configuring, customizing, testing, and managing your applications. Such tools can be, for instance, database, application integration, or AI services.

The PaaS model is popular with companies as it cuts the coding time, reduces time to market, and the overall software development expenses.

Serverless

The serverless model allows for quick development and easy scaling as, naturally, there is no reliance on virtual machines since the cloud executes application code without the need to install anything.

Serverless deployment is financially efficient as a cloud provider charges for the exact compute resources needed to execute your code, not for the number of the virtual machines. Maintenance costs are also pretty low.

SaaS

In the SaaS (Software as a Service) model, software is used on a subscription basis and centrally hosted in the public cloud. The companies don’t need to build anything from scratch but can find a pre-built solution that can be configured and customized to meet their needs fully.

SaaS solutions cover a wide variety of business needs, such as marketing, accounting, sales, HR, and etc. Popular examples of SaaS products are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online, and Office 365.

Why do companies choose cloud computing solutions?

Scalability

One of the great options for companies going for cloud app development is autoscaling. It means that the number of cloud virtual machines automatically changes depending on the load. However, you need to be careful not to pay for the resources you never used or for using more than you actually needed.

ScienceSoft’s experience proves that autoscaling works great for businesses. Our team has developed a billing-as-a-service (BaaS) solution for international payment processing. They created a highly scalable solution that automatically scales from using 2 to 50 app servers depending on the load. This helped to make the inherently scalable, sustainable, and auditable billing system.

Cost-effectiveness

Cloud computing makes app development faster due to the use of cloud services instead of writing custom code, thus allowing fewer human and financial resources to be used. Moving to the cloud helps manage the applications more efficiently and reducing maintenance costs. There is no need to maintain hardware or buy additional equipment when the business starts to grow.

Access to advanced technologies

Besides continuously working on introducing new services to their offering, cloud service providers already deliver a wide range of services based on cutting-edge technologies such as AR/VR, blockchain, machine learning, and IoT. For example, Azure offers Machine Learning Studio (predictive analytics technology), while AWS provides Amazon SageMaker tool for quick machine learning model deployment.

Choose cloud computing for your project

Cloud computing solutions can become highly beneficial for your business. However, you shouldn’t underestimate the knowledge and competences needed to deliver and implement such a solution. Your team needs to be proficient in DevOps, know how to work with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform, and establish ample cybersecurity measures.

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Asset management: the essence

Asset management is a process of tracking, organizing, and maintaining a company’s assets. It covers numerous types of assets, both tangible and intangible, depending on business type and scope. Asset management can be roughly categorize as follows:

IT asset management (ITAM) involves hardware (e.g., company-owned devices) and software, including subscriptions, licenses, patents, and network infrastructure components.

Enterprise asset management (EAM) covers physical assets throughout their lifecycle.

Financial asset management deals with investments, securities, loans, and more.

Infrastructure asset management is use by public organizations and large companies. It is focus on maintaining, updating, and removing physical infrastructure assets like roads, bridges, and utilities.

A common goal of asset management is to optimize the utilization of assets throughout their lifecycle, increase productivity, and reduce operational costs. Asset management software helps businesses achieve that via collecting asset data, tracking asset lifecycle, and providing automated reports for company management to analyze.

Why to use asset management software?

Improve accuracy of asset documentation as compared to manual document management, since human errors like typos or accidental omissions are minimize.

Better asset accounting. Asset management software help be aware of what assets are available and where, who should work on them and when. For example, the software helps identify ghost assets as well as avoid asset theft and loss.

Time and cost saving. Automated asset management workflows allow asset management teams to do more in less time.

Enhanced asset utilization. Asset management software ensures better visibility and control over assets. It provides means to analyze asset utilization patterns as well as plan asset availability and maintenance, thus helping improve asset utilization strategies.

Improved maintenance management. The preventive maintenance feature of an asset management solution help achieve stable and continuous operation of assets.

Better compliance. Keeping in mind all license entitlements and requirements of relevant laws and regulations can be challenging. An asset management system helps minimize legal risks and reduce non-compliance costs.

Popular asset management software

AssetExplorer

ManageEngine AssetExplorer is a web-based ITAM tool aim at managing IT assets and offering features for physical asset management. Its features include:

Comprehensive inventory management throughout the asset lifecycle from procurement to disposal for all hardware and software inventory.

Software license management to support compliance, identify unnecessary or underutilized licenses, detect unauthorized software installations, and more.

Contract and purchase order management to monitor contract expiry dates and get contract- or PO-related analytics by parameters like spending patterns, contractor/supplier performance, and more.

Asset reporting to generate pre-built reports or create custom reports on the key asset data in multiple formats. Reports can be schedule and automatically email to selecte recipients.

Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to track all configuration items and their details in one repository and categorize them.

Mobile app to track and manage hardware and software assets in any location.

The starting price is $995 per year for 250 IT assets.

Asset Panda

Asset Panda is a cloud-based asset management and tracking platform that offers a range of features like barcode scanning, unlimited users, and custom reporting. Its features include:

Asset tracking, including asset assignment to users or workplaces, contract management, compliance and maintenance tracking, ticketing management, and more.

Barcode management to design and print custom barcodes and QR codes to optimize asset management.

Mobile app with built-in barcode scanning, GPS pindrop, and access to reports to manage assets on the go.

Pricing depends on the number of assets and is available upon request to AssetPanda.

GoCodes

GoCodes is web-base asset and inventory tracking software for companies that need to manage physical assets. Its features include:

Patented QR code tags with unique IDs show asset details like type, serial number, and assignment help eliminate duplicates, and prove ownership.

Automatic GPS tracking with a mapping feature enables managers to see and update asset location every time a barcode is scan.

Automated field service requests help review service records, schedule future repairs, and set service reminders.

Depreciation calculation and reporting for fixed assets based on common calculation scenarios.

Auditing financial performance and operation of assets using a fixed assets register with a possibility to review a complete audit history.

GoCodes offers five pricing plans on a monthly and annual basis, each including different number of assets, users, etc.

Make the most of your assets with asset management software

Asset management is a complicated and intensive process that plays a key role in the operation of every business dealing with assets. If you are looking for a partner who can develop a custom asset management solution to meet your company’s needs, or help you choose and customize an off-the-shelf product, just let us know.

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