At least 46 percent of adult smartphone users admit that they “can’t live without” their device. The main reason – Internet access, FOMO and different apps users regularly use to organize their lives. While it seems there’s already an app for everything, the market continues to grow and it’s not late to join the mobile party this year.
Considering that you already have the idea, you know your target market and ideal buyers; you have even found some great guys to help with the project and settled on the costs, now all you need to do is start developing your app. And to make it shine, you should avoid the following UX mistakes at all costs.
Ignoring Responsiveness
At least 78 percent of modern app users expect the app to load as fast as or even faster than the mobile website, as well as render their actions immediately. If the app is slow and glitchy, no marketing can save it.
Speed and responsiveness are the crucial factors of the app’s success. Even a brief moment of lag or confusion, alienates you from your users as they get quickly distracted and can choose to install a similar app in just one click. Even if they had the intent to return to the app later, they often forget about it and simply delete the app some weeks later without use.
Your designer user flow should be smooth and help the users get what they want as fast as possible.
Copying Other App Design and UX
What has worked great for a similar company will unlikely yield the same results for you. While checking out your competitors’ apps and reading “best practices” online is a good starting point, each app has to meet its unique goals, appeal to a specific audience and offer relevant value.
“The most common request we get : “I want an app that looks like popular app X”. What we advice instead of being a copycat is to get actual customer feedback first. You don’t build an app for yourself. You build one for your audience. The first steps towards creating a great app is sourcing as much qualitative data as possible and asking users what kind of functionality they would like to see. Afterwards, you can use A/B testing to determine the best UX and ways to meet reach higher KPIs,” – advices Andrew Lobel, Director of Magora Company.
Requiring Immediate Sign-in/Sign-up
Sure there are numerous benefits why you’d want the user to sign-in immediately, however those create at least two major problems:
Sign-ins require imputing loads of personal data, which is kind of cumbersome on most devices and puts off a lot of users.
Solution: offer to use to skip registration and test-drive your app first and get a sense of value. Afterwards, you can encourage them to sign-up to unlock access to bonus functionality e.g. saving custom preferences; review their past actions, make one-click purchases etc.
No option to go back in multi-page sign up forms. So the sign-up process is annoying for a lot of users. When you have a multi-page sign up form with no way of going back to correct the data, the only option left is to start filling the form all over again to amend a single field. Obviously, the vast majority of users will simply bounce off.
Solution: make sure you do have an easy way to go back during signup process and consider simplifying the form to one page after all.