How UX Design Patterns Help Designers To Create Engaging Design Prototypes For Web And Mobile Apps?

• By Juned Ghanchi
• 22-01-2020
• UI UX Design

These days designers have access to an array of prototyping tools to shape their mobile apps with the details of the look and feel. There are advanced tools that help them to create highly immersive app prototypes at a much lesser cost. The best thing about these tools is that they provide us a lot of relevant insights about the shortcomings and drawbacks of the design and help us improve them much before the app design undergoes the testing phase.

These days, UX design patterns are extensively being used for mobile app prototyping. Since these design patterns already came as tested and tried formats to evaluate an app design, they are increasingly becoming popular for prototyping as well. Let's understand some basic concepts first.

Key Advantages Of Prototyping
Prototypes offer us the proof of design concept that can further be worked upon and utilized. Since we have great prototyping tools such as Adobe XD that can deliver highly immersive digital prototypes by incorporating all the intended design concepts and elements, prototyping tasks became funnier and more relevant than ever before. Let's have a quick look at the key advantages of prototyping.
- Prototyping creates a validated proof of the design concept for an app.
- Prototyping helps to save a lot of design costs, effort, and time.
- Prototyping helps involving many people in the design and development process.
- Prototyping also works as a connecting dot between designers and app developers from app development companies and helps to explain the app concept to all stakeholders.

What Is Called UX Design Pattern and How It Works?
Like any patterns that can be repeated and re-applied, UX design patterns are design solutions that can be repeatedly used for different design problems. Whether you are designing a brand new website or a mobile app or an enterprise software solution, you will be trying to make use of those conventions that are already tried and tested for their efficiency in allowing users to interact with the website or app easily.

UX design patterns come with these tested and tried conventions to help you create an effective design for user interaction. Long story cut short, and these patterns help you to save the entire effort, time, and money required to create the design from scratch, and instead, they allow you to create a design with already validated patterns.

The key reasons UX patterns are considered important by designers
People are mentally trained to look for familiar design attributes and elements that allow them to interact with ease and with the least effort. For example, when landing on a website or a mobile app, every user expects to find everything in their proper place so that they can easily navigate and take actions as per their needs. The last thing that users want is feeling confused amidst a whole array of design elements without really finding where to go and what course of action to take. This is why already tested and tried user experience design patterns prove valuable in minimizing confusion and making interactions simpler.

With the use of already known and used patterns in a website, the designers can easily maintain the convention and usability without much scopes of confusion. But in spite of using these design patterns, designers still can use unique design attributes to deliver a unique look and feel for the website or the app. In this respect, it is essential to find the right UX pattern that can allow a lot of unique attributes without losing the ease of use as the key value proposition.

The key ways to find the right patterns
Here are some effective steps to find the right UX patterns for your app or website prototyping.
- Make a list of design issues that you need to solve. Now while checking the UX patterns, ask whether it provides the solution to the respective design problem or not.
- Search for all those websites and mobile apps that solved similar design issues and find out the patterns used by them.
- Take recommendations from the designers and online communities regarding the issues and the UX patterns to address these problems.

The key considerations for using UX design patterns
Using UX patterns simplifies the entire design prototyping task. But how to go about it? Well, let us explain the key considerations for using UX patterns while prototyping.

- Data input patterns: Data input patterns that are basically used to allow users making data input and streamline feedback in response are essential for many websites and apps. In such patterns, you need to ensure using buttons that stand out from the surrounding. For such patterns, it is also important to provide befitting feedback that visually stands out. Using animation for feedback has become an effective design element now.

- Structured Content and Hierarchical Presentation: With this pattern, the designers are basically able to create a visual hierarchy of content to help users scan pages and get to their required content easily. Avoiding visual clutter with an organized flow of content and making proper use of negative space are two crucial attributes of this design pattern.

- Navigation: The UX pattern for navigation is extremely important as easy and smooth navigation across pages is the key aspect of great user experience. The navigation pattern must allow users to know about his location on the website, the previous page, or content from where he is being navigated and the areas next to where the user can navigate to.

Conclusion
From the above-mentioned discussion, it is more or less clear that UX design patterns play an extremely crucial role in maintaining the most relevant design concepts throughout the app while providing a lot of scopes for further value additions. In the years to come, UX patterns will continue to remain key to great design. Find out experienced mobile or android app development agency for UI-ux design.