How to become a great UX Mobile Designer? [Part-2]

If you have missed Part-1 check this article.

UX Design Process:

UX Designs consist of various research process which we will be discussing in this part.

UX design process | Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui

Great UX Designs are been designed by social learning & experiences. By social learning, i meant was, learning from various surveys and interviews helps you to build a great app for them. You have to do lots of Brainstorming sessions to improve your app experiences.

Questions before building great UX designs:

1. What is your App about?
2. Who are the End Users?
3. What is your Motive?
4. Identify their personas & their use-cases.
5. Generating Feature list.

1. What is your App About?

First of all. Brainstorm and create an app that you like to apply UX Design. Let’s assume app name “Kalvi” as example throughout this article.

Kalvi is an mobile app that displays video & text contents for students and the student has the ability to download the paid course by paying some amount.

2. Who is your End User:

It’s always important to identify the end user for who you are building the app. By the way, i meant end users are the people who will be using your app after you built. If you don’t figure out the end user, then probably you are building an app which no one wants. Don’t do that.

According to our example app “Kalvi”, our end users will be students.

3. What is your Motive of the app?

As we know, we are building an app for the student where he/she will browse through the directory courses and they can find their books and download the videos as well. So, let’s write down the motive in ordered list.

1. Browse Courses.
2. Download video/PDFs documents.

4. Identify their Personas & Use-cases:

This process may be tricky for new developers. But trust me, they are quite simple.

Personas means building the end user attributes and getting their tastes.

Attributes means their lifestyle details.

Use-cases means applying various strategies

Let me explain in detail, take our example app “Kalvi”. This app is for students. Let’s take an student “Raghu”.

Raghu’s personas may be like this

1. Raghu is studying Computer Science & Engineering in college.
2. Raghu is 18 age old.
3. Raghu is using Android 8 (Oreo version)
4. Raghu is interested to learn lessons online.

Raghu’s use-cases will be like,

1. How Raghu is gonna use “Kalvi” app.
2. At what time, he usually comes to “Kalvi” app.
3. Will he able to pay for paid courses?

So, we have to combine the Raghu’s personas, attributes, use-cases and create the features depending upon the results.

PERSONAS + USER-CASES = FEATURE LIST

Always remember, don’t create features beforehand. The proper way of UX Design is to go with

1. Brainstorming an App idea.
2. Identifying your End users.
3. Be Descriptive with your Motive/Goal.
4. Personas & various User-cases.
5. Generate Feature Lists.

Do interviews and ask questions to your end users(Students). Questions are valuable and help you to built a better product.

So what is the next process?

After you identified the 5 guidelines, you have to kick over to design constraints.

So what are design constraints?

Design constraints are some of the limitations you have to follow to built a great user experience app.

Let’s take some of the five design constraints.

1. Limited Data & Battery Life.
2. Handedness.
3. Divided Attentions.
4. Small Screens.
5. Sketchy network.

Will elaborate all in simple & shorter words.

1. Limited Data & Battery Life:

Battery life: Since, all smart mobiles consumes more battery usage. Your mobile is not an exception. So built your app accordingly. Close unwanted activities & make sure you don’t have any memory leaks inside your apps. If an user enters into your application and felt like hanging, he/she may not visit your app again.

Limited Data: Don’t drain user’s data much! If you have any image, download it from URL and save it local. So that, next time you can access the local file instead of downloading it again. This saves your data!

2. Handedness:

Learn how people use smart phones. Are they using in Left hand, right hand or in both hands? Built the user interfaces accordingly.

1. Don’t create small buttons or icons.
2. Avoid the Ow zones.(Top left, Top right, Bottom left, Bottom right)
3. Have some good interfaces in general zones.

3. Divider Attentions:

If you have any app that has notification access. Make sure it has quick actions instead of just an notification text. Quick action helps you to perform quick actions directly by clicking the notification buttons, instead of going into app and perform the actions. It’s too long! People hate this!

4. Small Screens:

If you are making an app for small resolution devices, make sure you have enough icons or text-boxes. If you don’t do that. Many users need to find magnifier to see inside your app. Trust me, people wont do that. They care about their eyes. They will uninstall if they found any unreadable UI.

Always use various vectors depending upon the density pixels(dp).

5. Sketch Network:

After you perform all the steps, its time to draw some wireframes that will give an overall idea of what you are building.

So what’s next?

These are some of the research process, you have to taken into consideration. After you done. Make sure you do the following things.

1. Brainstorm as much as you can! Find new ways to make user experience better & even better.
2. Create Low-res Wire-frames of your app.
3. Download some UX-design software’s like Adobe XD, Sketch or use normal Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create your first prototype.
4. Give the UX creativity to the development team or you can develop the app using native programming languages.

For Android:

IDE: Android Studio 3.1+

Languages needed: XML (Design) & Java (Logic)

For iOS:

IDE: xCode

Languages needed: Swift, Objective-c , xcode

Built what is necessary, not what is available!

Hope, you learnt a lot in this article. Will come up in another interesting article sooner. 😉

Shutting off from Anbu ❤