Seven design guidelines for mobile applications between design and performance

Article Description: How to create a high-performance mobile user experience.

In the new home a little bit settled down, but the heart or lack of practical sense of direction, cats are also some look forward to panic, to continue to habit; I hope everyone is well. The present candidate seems to have already had a translation, but as I said in "About Beforweb," I only pick what I like, my own learning and collection value, other factors that I do not have a half a dime relationship. No more, just get to the point.

In interpersonal relationships, good first impressions are important, people are willing to seek trust and honesty in each other, and expect to reproduce and enhance those feelings in the ensuing experience. The same applies to mobile apps or Internet products. In the process of creating a good brand reputation and lasting trust relationship with end users, "design" plays an extremely important role.

Mobile applications should be accurate, friendly and efficient in the expectation of users. However, the limitations of mobile devices do pose a lot of challenges to the design of the product. To create a trustworthy mobile user experience, the performance of the product is a critical factor.

In this article, we will discuss the relationship between the design and performance of mobile applications and understand the seven relevant design guidelines. These guidelines are our (English original author) team in various types of mobile applications in the actual project summed up, and hope they can also help everyone in the fall of the real demand for products, from the point of view of the performance of more reasonable planning and design.

Performance of mobile applications

People need to use mobile apps to accomplish certain demand goals in a scenario, such as improving efficiency, comfort, or simply having fun. "Efficacy" is a core element of mobile applications that must be fast enough to provide functionality and value effectively in a variety of variable usage scenarios.

However, in reality we often find that for many mobile applications, the design and development cycle begins with a strong appeal for visual appearance: "It must look great!" "Admittedly, a good visual style can attract users with a good first impression, but the quality and performance of each is ambiguous, especially in terms of performance, to get the user's long-term appeal." Seeing a product that is not used will only destroy its own credibility, and users will soon be aware of its slow speed, or even the inability to use it because of unbearable load times or frequent crashes, which can be extremely damaging to product usability and brand perception. In the user's expectation, a application must first have a quick response, otherwise, the most direct result is in the App store to get a bad rating, the installation rate is poor.

The image below is a comparison of the interface between Twitter and Cookmate's two apps; Aside from the user base, even with dazzling visuals, Cookmate's user ratings and evaluations are not going to go beyond the simple simplicity of the Twitter client.

Performance and Brand differences

Every aspect of the product will affect brand perception. In general, the user's requirements are simple, they just want to find the most appropriate tools to help them to effectively improve some aspects of life. To make your products stand out in a colorful market, build a brand and really attract users, your application must be stronger than your opponents in some ways, or have features that other applications don't. As an important element in the mobile user experience, excellent performance will directly help your application at the brand level beyond other similar products. Further, if you can overcome some of the technical challenges, so that the relevant features can be smooth and stable operation, then this will definitely become your product is difficult to replicate the unique selling point.

On this point, Flickr's iphone app is a good example. Flickr once declared in his main station that their application has two main goals: helping users to display their photos and providing new ways to organize photos and videos. Their application is really good to do this two points, effectively enhance the brand credibility.

Therefore, in planning your application products, it is necessary to first analyze the market and ask yourself two questions:

What are the differences between our applications and those of our competitors?

In what ways can we do better than our competitors?

After clarifying these directional questions, focus on the design and development of the product.

Performance and Design

No matter what kind of products to build, the right way is essential, this is the design and engineering guidelines for people to formulate the original intention. The design of a car will affect its aerodynamic performance, a bridge, in addition to have a beautiful appearance, the wind and traffic load bearing capacity is also in the design process must consider the core factor. The same is true in the design of mobile applications. The choice of design options affects all aspects of the application, including content rendering, interactivity, visual appearance, and, most importantly, performance.

We can see that many product teams throw performance responsibilities to technology developers; the most direct result of this traditional concept is that many potential problems involving performance are exposed only at the end of the design process and at the beginning of the development phase. In fact, the relevant role in technology development should be moderately involved in the project in the early stages of product creativity, and maintain the technical feasibility review of the design proposal.

The next few elements that are related to the performance of the user interface, and the seven design guidelines to be introduced in the second half of this article, will help you realize that the performance of mobile applications is not just a matter for technicians to consider, but also a very close link to design.

Performance elements in the mobile application user interface

The user's perception of performance of mobile applications comes from many aspects, including start-up speed, interface loading time, smooth degree of animation effect, response time to interactive behavior, and error status. The following diagram shows us some of the elements: applications (including visual images, interactions, content, functions, code algorithms, etc.) run on a mobile device in a system platform (iOS or Android) under certain hardware conditions (CPU, screen size, etc.). For many applications, they also need to be connected back to the server via the network (LTE, 3G, 2G). The two red areas above represent a part of a mobile application that is most susceptible to design and development decisions. The following two gray areas are part of the product design process to consider the containment factor.

Decisions about each of the factors shown in the diagram affect the performance of the final product. Any combination of forms, enhancements (such as advanced visual effects) or restrictions (such as poor network connectivity) can increase product complexity, reduce performance, and disrupt the user experience. For example, if you want to enhance your visuals, the application must connect to the backend server for more resource files at slow speed, which is a combination of conditions that is bound to degrade product performance.

Seven Design Guidelines

In the past few years, there has been a lot of change in the Mobile world. Some new UI design styles are emerging, and device screen size and processor performance specifications are moving closer to the desktop, and the way in which the input is changed has been revolutionized.

In this case, designers need to always try to be more sharp, distinctive features, excellent performance of the design program. What we call the relationship between design and performance is not simply the reduction of the size of the picture, but the various decisions at different stages and levels of the design process will have an impact on the performance and effectiveness of the product. Here, let's look at some of the design guidelines that can help us build high-performance Mobile User experience in combat.

1. Define the brand characteristics of the user interface

Every place in a mobile application that can interact with the user, whether it is a single interactive element, or a functional module as a whole, should help to enhance the product's brand awareness, customer loyalty and satisfaction; designers should be able to identify the most critical of them, such as feature features, visual styles, copywriting, Font or animation effects, and so on. Our team has handled many different products, although in the overall sense they have their own brand style, but most of these designs are derived from the same set of basic UI elements developed. We can combine the basic UI elements into an interface module, while the modular, reusable core interface modules can further form the entire user interface.

Therefore, by the style of these UI elements, we can gradually create the interface as a whole to reflect the unique characteristics of the brand style. In the conceptual phase, try to identify the UI elements that play a key role in the following areas:

Features that help improve product differentiation and competitiveness (for example, photo viewing in path, and so on).

Product core features (such as checkout functionality in online shopping applications).

A modular design language. The Metro UI for Windows Phone 7 is a typical example: a strongly styled pattern of fonts, layouts, and interactions forms its unique design gene.

These can embody the brand characteristics of the core elements, itself to be very strong responsiveness. They will be constantly seen and used by users, and will be reused in different functional interfaces of the product, and their performance will directly determine the overall performance of an application. Focusing your design and development attention on these key elements will be a multiplier.

2. Determine product priority

The understanding of the term "efficacy" can be increased to the whole product development cycle and the market level. Most of the time, companies will want to quickly online a new product, or develop a product line (such as a variety of similar products based on a platform, or a single product for different platforms), or for the time and resources constraints, must be selected from a number of products to the priority to complete. In such cases, the work force for design and optimization must focus on the most important products. Priority matrices can help us clear our head.

The selection factors shown above include the system platform, current user volume, expected user volume, competitor situation, and of course, we can make trade-offs from other aspects that are more suitable for our own projects. If your product audience is mostly Android and your competitors are keeping an eye on them, it's better to focus on a simple and efficient Android application and get into the market as quickly as possible instead of sharing your energy among the platforms.

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