No matter how excellent your knowledge in programming, an app will be of little value to the product or business if it lacks an attractive and effective interface. It’s crucial for product owners to hire a reliable mobile application development company, learn the basics of application interface design and select a significant interface strategy focusing on the end users’ priorities.
By knowing what’s essential to your user base and which type of interface suits best for your app, you can choose an application interface design strategy that offers the best balance between different design principles.
Let’s take a closer look into what product owners need to know about app interface design, including some basic principles and common approaches to interface development.
Interface Design Principles
Practically, various principles lay the robust foundation for efficient interface design for all interface types, users, and applications.
Effectiveness
Application interfaces should be effective enough that users can finish their tasks in as few minutes and steps. To have an effective interface also means avoiding redundant components with the app design.
Simplicity
Simplicity goes hand in hand with effectiveness. Your app’s interface must be intuitive and straightforward so that the cognitive efforts required from the end-users to finish a task should be kept to a minimum. Apart from this, it is easier said than done. Simplicity is entirely subjective. Something obvious to a community of users may confuse others.
As a product owner, your main task is to determine what your target user base considers simple and then implement an effective interface by hiring a mobile applications development company that helps you deliver accordingly.
Feedback
When users utilize the app interface in some way, they should receive constant feedback. For example, it means the button they tap changes the color, or it could come in the form of a quick pop-up box that says, “Processing or initializing, Please wait.”
With feedback, product owners leave users unsure about whether their input was right or accepted. Did they tap the button? Is the application having bugs and not processing the request timely? Avoid all this by providing instant feedback.
Consistency
An application interface should also provide users with a consistent experience – a quite objective principle. In the context of an app interface design, Consistency means that the interface style and structure are the same throughout the app. As a product owner, you don’t want to develop an interface that depends heavily on app menus in one portion of the application and then an interface driven by forms in a different portion.
Regardless of the particular app features or elements users access, the app interface experience should be consistent.
Accessibility
To the excellent product owner’s ability, every app interface should be easily accessible to each user. It requires selecting a layout, size, and font colors. Various other stylistic elements help you make the interface easy to view and navigate for as many users as possible.
Many product owners go astray when it comes to effective accessibility. They assume users who cannot work with the interface will know various accessibility tools like screen readers.
Three Comprehensive Development Approaches to App Interface Design
Most apps use one of these three comprehensive interface design strategies. None is inherently better or more efficient than the others, yet each excels at meeting the various app interface design principles.
The app interface design approach you select should reflect the design principles most important for your user base. Although in perfect conditions you would be able to cater to each principle equally d, you often need to make several compromises in the real world.
Natural Language App Interface
A natural language interface allows users to interact with the application using human language. For example, a modern search engine allows users to enter straightforward, plain language queries such as “What’s the capital of Texas?” Search engines don’t need queries to include detailed configuration data or Boolean operators; they easily interpret input by processing natural language properly.
When connected with various tools to translate speech to simple text, a natural language approach allows users to input data using direct speech rather than a keyboard. This is a crucial advantage for mobile apps because users can easily interact with your application on the go.
Menu-Driven App Interface
A menu-driven app interface utilizes menus to allow users to navigate app functionality. An ATM screen is one of the most common examples of a menu-driven software interface. The main screen presents various menus, like Withdrawals, Deposits, and Banking Information, etc. From there, users tap on the menu that corresponds to their requirements.
Menu-driven screens are great at offering an intuitive and accessible app interface. By allowing users to choose menus rather than forcing them to navigate through long manual forms, menu-driven app interfaces make it straightforward to minimize the total amount of data on the screen at a given time interval.
Form-based App Interface
In a form-based app interface, users enter information into a form to tell the app what to do next. In this context, a form could be an app interface where users can utilize configuration options. It helps with checkboxes and drop-down menus. If you are a product owner, you are likely to execute tasks using form-based interfaces in software tools.
This makes it specifically useful for the applications that require collecting a lot of data to complete a user’s request.
Wrapping Up
This basic information would have given you a good understanding of the app interface design principles. These basic principles will surely help you create an efficient user experience and achieve the desired goals. To keep the whole development process clean and effective, you must hire a reliable mobile applications development company for your app development project.
