Improve 5 Design Elements in Mobile Apps to Boost Usability

• By Alicia Rother
• 31-05-2024
• Mobile Apps

The triumph of a mobile app is simply based on its usability. To make sure that people interact with your mobile app and perform important engagements, you need to improve the functionality and the user experience of your app.

The enhanced user experience or usability also ensures that you retain those loyal customers. This is because of the obvious reason, people will only use your app repeatedly if their previous interaction was seamless.

Mobile applications have revolutionized the way people use their smartphones. These apps have become an effective tool for marking and advertising products or services. According to research, the average number of apps installed on a single smartphone device is 18.45. This was the data from 2023 and if you don’t believe the numbers, check out your smartphone.

The more consistent experience your app offers, the more reliable it becomes! A user's entire experience starts with witnessing the design of the app upfront. Also, the brand design trends in 2024 will focus more on usability.

Let's have a look at the five leading design elements to improve mobile apps to boost usability:

1. Color Palettes & Visuals

Colors add liveliness to our worlds. But overdoing everything in terms of colors could totally ruin the entire concept of the app. It's critical to understand the psychology of your target audience to bring the correct visuals on board.

Simple changes with respect to colors can enhance a holistic look and appeal of an app.

To get a better idea of using the best color palettes, you should analyze the demographics of your target audience.

To see how visuals can overhaul the content of an app, here are the most used color palettes for you:

• Monochromatic

A monochromatic scheme is one of the most used color palettes that remove ambiguity from the app. It's very appealing to the eyes and encourages the users to go ahead!

People use monochromatic colors in their logos and brandings to create a distinctive brand style and enhance certain emotions. All of these elements are necessary for effective storytelling.

This color scheme uses a single base color in various shades to create a balanced and harmonious color palette which can add depth to your design.

• Analogous

This color palette is based on three hues. Mainly, one color will appear to be dominant. In contrast, the other color will be used to augment the whole color palette.

• Complementary

In this palette, the colors are pretty diverse to catch the instant attention of the audience.

You might have heard of complementary color palettes, these shades include red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and purple.
These are the balancing colors in nature. With one dominating color and the other color balancing the hue. Designers use these colors to make the visual elements stand out.

2. Illustrations

Adding illustrations makes your design more appealing and interactive. Mobile app marketing is competitive, for that reason you need to add eye-catching visual elements that make people want to install your app.

To improve your mobile app design, you can implement illustrations in the form of rewards. Suppose a player completes a certain level, they can win trophies, reward coins, or other incentives.

Illustrations help in setting the overall theme of an app. Moreover, the app’s visuals would assist the written content to convey the main message.

Want to know why illustrations hold so much importance in a mobile app? Here's why:

• Brand Building

Illustrations are memorable and catchy, so people use them in their brandings. These illustrations communicate your brand tone, messaging, and brand personality.

These are also used by big companies to narrate their brand stories and to attract their target audience. Like food businesses use illustrations of food in their promotions.

The graphic design trends in 2024 will all be about building a stable brand identity for an app, which would highly account for the complete design of an app to bring a satisfactory smile to the users' faces.

• Increased Conversion Rates

We have discussed that illustrations are appealing to people. That’s why savvy marketers use them in strategic places to increase conversions.

Illustrations are used in all forms of content. People use it in their blog images, the hero section of their websites, and many other places to attract attention and to persuade people to click and find out more.

Conversion rates tend to boost due to appealing illustrations. Uncomplicated, plain, and simple imagery is the key to progress in a business.

3. Fonts

As you're reading this, your immediate attention is towards the content! However, the attention could shake up if the fonts are mismatched. For example, if the content is about a grave topic and you're using fun or casual typography, then the audience will not take your content seriously and might choose to skip it.

The content and the selected fonts go hand in hand. Additionally, the fonts augment the strength of the content of your mobile app.
The font selection alone can make or break the user experience. Want to see how fonts can improve your mobile app? Here are a few key factors:

• Enhanced Readability

Fonts play an important role in conveying your brand message and tone. Your typographic choices also impact how people see your brand. Now we can go into an endless debate of what fonts will be best for your mobile app and what fonts will simply look out of place.
Although there is no right or wrong answer to it, it just depends on what industry you are talking about. Any professional app designer will tell you that it only comes down to following the design principles and selecting fonts that make your content readable and easy to consume.

There are several fonts available to choose from. So, always select the appropriate font for the content that is easy on the eyes for enhanced readability. Following are a few best options for fonts for easy readability on mobile apps:

• Playfair Display
• Montserrat
• Nexa font
• Open Sans
• Source Sans
• Roboto

• Improved User Experience

One way that designers improve the user experience on the apps is by adding various font pairings. This also creates balance and gives structure to your text. However, it is important to keep in mind that adding too many fonts may impact the readability of the content on your app, especially if you have a news app.

A good rule of thumb is to use different styles and sizes of fonts. Like using different fonts for various sections in your app including headings, body, menus, and button texts.

The primary concept of an app is to convey the brand's perception. Therefore, the fonts must align with the agenda on your app so that the user feels at home. The audience gauges the concept of an app due to the font size, color, and the font itself.

For example, a larger font should be used for headings. Bold text should be used for emphasis. Within the body content, there shouldn’t be much experimentation with the font. According to Web FX’s study, the user experience on their apps was enhanced when they decided to use 14px for body content instead of 10px, 18px, and 21px.

• Use Hierarchy Principles

Present the content on your app in a structured and organized manner. One way to do this is to apply hierarchy principles. Use fonts of different sizes for headings and body text so the users can easily scan the content.

According to the design rule, your heading size should be 1.3 times larger than your body text. This will make your heading look separated from the body copy.

Text size also affects the clickability of the buttons. When working on small devices like smartphones you need to make sure that your text is large enough so the user can easily click on it.

4. Icons

Last but not least, icons are an essential element to improve mobile apps for enhanced usability. Starting from interactive icons to app icons, users tend to resonate with them once they’re accustomed to using an app. Icons improve usability in various ways. Some are given below:

• They eliminate distractions so that users can focus on the gist of the app.
• Users with foreign languages can easily understand the app through icons.
• Specific icons customized specifically for the company lead to enhanced brand recognition.

5. Navigations

To retain users on your app, you need to give a sense of gratification or reward each time users complete a task. This can be done by creating an easy to follow path and improving the user journeys on your apps. Improved navigation functionalities make it easier for the users to find what they are looking for.

You need to show the correct path to the customers. Rather than making them feel lost! Subsequently, customers should be able to find their way in an app to carry out tasks with comfort. So, easy navigation and helpful guides are the way to go!

Straightforward navigations lead to valuable results. Want to learn the best navigation patterns for mobile apps? Here are a few:

• Hamburger Menu

A hamburger button is a navigation menu with three parallel lines. It is usually placed on the top corner of both websites and mobile apps.

This button is used when there is little space available to add the button. It's like a drop-down menu that gives you the full list once you click on it.

With less space available which is usually the case on mobile phones, you can use the hamburger menu to fit in the necessary content.

• Tab Bar Menu

The tab bar is an amazing pattern to put several options in the same place. Hence, users can easily navigate and reach a destination by clicking on any option. You can use a tab bar to let people navigate different areas of your app.
One pro tip when implementing tab menus is to keep your tabs to minimum. AS including more tabs will only confuse the users.
You can also use little icons or symbols to label each tab as it will help people to find out where that tab will take them.

• Sub Navigation

Sub-navigation provides you with the chance to explore embedded categories with ease. If your app has several related categories, then sub-navigation is the best to use.

This menu bar is useful when you have different product or service pages on your website that can be grouped under one section.
If a person clicks on a sub-navigation menu bar it shows different content pages that the person might be looking for.

Key Takeaways

So there you go! We have discussed the crucial design elements that you can use to your advantage to boost the usability of your mobile app.

A successful mobile app results from your patience, hard work, and the right decisions! The app's design is a crucial factor in determining the overall usability. So, it should be attractive, can retain customers, and consist of every feature that could never be found on the competitor's app.

Therefore, there's a never-ending need to keep improving the design elements to ensure the customers are happy!