What are the principles of user-centric UX design in mobile apps?

What is user-centric UX design?

User-centric UX design refers to the process of designing applications to enhance the user’s experience in a meaningful way. It focuses on application design that compliments an average user’s tendency to do things rather than having them adjust to the technology.

Principles of user-centric UX design

This design approach is especially beneficial when designing mobile applications because mobile-based platforms have unique challenges and characteristics. There are several design principles that different UI/UX designers use when designing a mobile app.

Having learned what user-centric UX design is, we can now dive deep into some critical user-centric UX design principles when designing mobile applications:

1) Simplicity

Keep the interface of the mobile application as simple as possible. App designers often try to think outside the box and be more creative with their application design to stand out from the competition, and in doing so, they end up making an over-complicated application that’s difficult to use.

The design of the mobile application should be simple and clean. We should only go for more complex features if it makes things easier and quicker for the user. For example, several mobile banking and e-commerce applications allow the user to scan a credit card using their mobile camera for online payments without having to manually input the card information.

2) Clutter elimination

We need to avoid cluttering the mobile application screen page with too many options or features, especially considering mobile screen sizes are quite small. A cluttered screen will confuse the user, as there would be too many options to choose from or too much information to process.

As a rule of thumb, we should try to limit to one primary action for each screen or at least, keep removing items until we’re left with what’s absolutely necessary to keep.

3) Navigation ease

We need to make sure that navigation within the mobile application is self-evident and easy. Users should be able to go from one screen to the next logical screen without having to go back to the home screen. We can achieve this by incorporating design workflows such as:

• Use familiar navigation elements like the home icon for the home screen and the hamburger icon for the sidebar menu.

• Provide a navigation bar on every screen with universal navigation elements like that for going back to the previous screen.

• Provide enough information and clarity on every screen so that the user knows their current location in the application.

4) Personalization

We should allow for some level of personalization in the application that pushes the user more toward the content they want to see and hides any content that might be irrelevant to them.

Personalized content on an application helps achieve both marketing goals and an improved user experience. We help users achieve the same results with reduced session times by eliminating content that might be distracting, improving the user experience by streamlining processes like the payment process, and making sure that the marketing and advertising information is in sync with the user’s interest.

However, we should also be wary of having too much personalization as users would outright avoid using the application. This can happen when they feel the application knows too much about them, leading them to think their privacy is compromised.

5) User goal alignment

We need to make sure that we have the context of what the user’s goals are when designing the mobile application. Our design choices can impact users’ behavior and understanding of our application. An application that’s designed without this context can feel like it doesn’t do its job for the user.

For example, users would be less trusting of a mobile banking application with images of food and a restaurant menu theme. Users might just uninstall the application without even trying it, thinking it’s an application for ordering food rather than managing their finances.

6) Good onboarding practices

We should have good onboarding practices for first-time users. The complexity of these onboarding practices depends on the application’s complexity.

For example, if we have a simple web browser application, then a few splash screens or tooltip instructions would be sufficient enough to onboard the user. However, we might need a more comprehensive onboarding for a more complex application like a stock trading application for the user.

7) User feedback provision

We need to provide feedback and confirmations to the user’s input as it enforces a positive user experience. We can confirm if the user’s action was a success or failure, provide touch and haptic feedback when the user taps the screen, or show animations or transitions as feedback to show that the user is on the correct path.

8) User input minimization

We should limit the amount of input data that the user needs to provide as much as possible. If we ask the user to input too much data in one field, they might feel overwhelmed and abandon the task altogether. This is especially true in the case of mobile devices, where it’s much harder to provide input data, especially when it’s in bulk.

9) Typography

Typography plays an essential role in maintaining a good UX design for our application, especially if we need to provide textual information to the user. It can greatly influence how the user understands our message and can enhance or diminish its impact.

Readability is a key part of typography. For example, squishing a lot of information into one page isn’t going to help anyone if the user isn’t able to read it. There should be a fine balance between readability and conservation of space on the screen. We use a font size that’s not so small it requires magnification or so big it introduces unwanted hyphenation. Also, we should choose basic fonts like Roboto and Helvetica instead of fancy ones.

10) Hand position-based controls

The hand position with which we interact with the mobile device and the movement of our fingers matter when designing mobile applications. As per several pieces of research, around 49% of users only rely on one thumb when interacting with a mobile app on their screen. Whereas most mobile-based games require the user to hold the phone horizontally in landscape mode and use both hands. Therefore, we must consider hand positions when deciding the placement of controls in our mobile applications.

The diagram below shows the comfort zones on a mobile phone based on the difficulty of reaching with a one-handed approach:

As a rule of thumb, we place commonly used action controls in zones that are easier to reach and negative or rarely used action controls like “delete” in zones that are harder to reach. It’s also essential to keep the right and left-handedness of users in mind while designing the application.

11) Finger-friendly tap targets

We need to make sure that control elements like buttons and their touch targets are large enough that it’s easy for the user to tap on the correct target. These control elements should ideally have a size of between 7–11 mm, which increases the accuracy of tapping as the finger tap can easily fit inside it. The accuracy is further increased when the user can see the borders of the control element and tap the control easily.

12) Seamless user experience

We need to ensure that we provide a seamless user experience across multiple digital devices like PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Several products, such as music service providers like Spotify, have applications available on multiple devices, and its mobile application isn’t designed in isolation, but the design on all devices is considered. By this, we mean that there is consistency in the design elements and transitions on applications across these devices. For example, we shouldn’t have a purple theme on the web application and a yellow theme on the mobile application.