6 ways to help you design a great app

Today this article from the brand, color scheme, pleasure, refining simplification and so on a lot of practical suggestions, and all is the author through a certain app design after the experience summed up, a lot of views are very useful, accept.

Many people are full of praise for the design of parable, and their first reaction is to ask: "Where did the designer find it?" Our answer is that we do not have a dedicated designer, but that everyone in the team is involved in the design. Most people think the answer is unbelievable.

Great design comes from consistency and detail, and every team can do it if there is enough discipline. Here, I have outlined some of the experience of parable visual design, which will help us design beautiful applications.

　　Brand

Brand is the cornerstone of application design. It answers the question "How you feel when you use applications." First, you should determine what your main target group or industry is: children, teens, professionals, moms, students, doctors, designers, seniors, etc. The applied design style must be consistent with the brand in order to build a stronger brand awareness and eliminate user concerns. For example, social applications designed for the elderly should be in large fonts, and stock trading applications would have to use the security lock icon strategically to make the user feel secure. If possible, you should also consider looking for a mascot for the brand. The mascot can personify the brand, while strengthening the application left to the user's impression.

　　Color scheme

Color scheme determines the application of the image, it should be the brand theme color expansion. It is the core of visual design, because the colors are used in all the visible areas of the application. First, you need to choose a theme color that enhances your brand image. For example, the theme color for Evernote is green. Then, you should create a color scheme around this theme color. Bright colors can attract people's attention, so they are suitable for consumption-oriented applications, and the middle color allows people to concentrate on the information itself, so it is more suitable for professional applications. Parable's Theme color is "Tangelo orange", so we chose grayscale as the main color scheme, which is also consistent with our consistent fashion ideas. Another example is Snapchat, which uses gorgeous bright colors to appeal to young users.

　　Intuitive

In the highly competitive application market, there is no time to let users carefully taste your application-we pay attention to "love at first sight." The best application is to make sure that the application of the function is at first glance. One small way to work is to look at how those popular apps are done and try not to confuse users. Then, we should fully test all the interactive links and optimize the application. Before reaching the most important interaction, the user should not be able to do more than three steps, for example, publish to Meerkat only click, publish to Instagram only use point three. Some user-known platforms have specific interaction patterns that often result in tension pile.

Posted to meerkat only Click, post to Instagram only click Three

　　A sense of pleasure

The primary standard for user evaluation applications is experience. To get a die-hard user, you have to offer some unexpected pleasure. Over time, these pleasurable experiences will impress the user, making applications a necessary part of their daily lives. Like Pinterest and parable in the click to share the animation, and refresh the Snapchat when the animation, are a good example.

Pinterest sharing animation, Snapchat refresh animation, parable sharing animation

　　Refining

Excellent visual design is the details of the king, every pixel should be perfect. The first is typography. Font is the face of application, a good font can make your application stand out. You can choose from more than 50 iOS fonts; Of course, it would be better if you could buy and make your own fonts--in short, never hang in the default font on this tree. Serif fonts fit long articles; San-serif fonts can use more font sizes without making the page look crowded. Compact fonts allow you to display more text on your screen, but it's odd to put them together with normal fonts. Next, let's talk about the icon problem. An icon that conveys emotion accurately is the best. You can use some of the free icon resources, and then make a few changes in Photoshop, and turn them into your own icons. When you create a solid color icon, insisting on using a single color will avoid crowding and confusion for the user. Finally, let's focus on the visual resources. The Post-skeuomorphic era makes resource development simpler. We should try to render in code as much as possible to narrow the application package. When adding resources you need to make sure that they match the screen size correctly; One of the major manifestations of coarse shoddy work is the pixel of resources.

Path and Flipboard are examples of each pixel approaching perfection. Note, however, that if a paragraph mixes a bold, compact San-serif font with a serif font, it will be unbalanced on the Flipboard.

Path and Flipboard

　　Simplified

Developers always like to add a complex navigation interface or use irrelevant information, the result of the interface is messed up. This simply crashes the user. Keep it simple! The screen layout should be kept neat, the information should be layered, important on top, not important below. Show only the details of high correlation, use statistical tools to analyze what actions are useless, and then delete them. Can learn from the idea of Apple: no superfluous things that is perfect. Analyze This concise Pinterest personal homepage below. It put the user and the block display area together, the most important attention and the point of praise button is carefully placed in the right place. For best practice, you need to implement this principle more profoundly, so that the content is dynamic, such as when scrolling through the navigation bar to hide the animation, as in a multi-step interaction to hide the button.

Pinterest's Personal Homepage interface

Each application has different goals, but good application design is common. Please follow these steps in the design of the next application and send me the idea on my Twitter (@amitpaka). In addition, welcome to download parable.