Brandon Ashmore of Ohio must have been thrilled when he received the $10000 gift card from Apple. His claim to the money – When he pressed the little green ‘install’ icon to download the word game ‘say the same thing’ from the Apple app store, he was the 50 billionth downloader.
Brandon Ashmore of Ohio must have been thrilled when he received the $10000 gift card from Apple. His claim to the money – When he pressed the little green ‘install’ icon to download the word game ‘say the same thing’ from the Apple app store,
he was the 50 billionth downloader. Fifty billion – that’s 50,000,000,000, definitely a huge number. Google Play is also not far behind. It too has crossed 48 billion downloads. These are staggering numbers. There are on an average one thousand five hundred applications downloaded every second from these two sources.
However, less than 5 percent of these applications hold the downloader’s interest beyond 30 days. That is why it is important that your application is well designed, and most importantly, more usable. Designing a “usable” app is one of the biggest challenges that the mobile app developers face today. There are various issues they face time to time due to lack of guidelines and set rules. It is very important to assess the design of an app to ensure that the user experience is outstanding, and that users will find it usable.
In addition to the software side of the things that can be controlled and manipulated by the coders, there are a number of device specific factors that impact the performance and usability of the application.
Device Parameters
There are so many mobile phones getting launched in the market today. Each of the devices have different specs, and vary greatly from each other in terms of the standard design parameters like the form factors, screen resolution, CPU architecture and speed, memory and storage etc. This makes it difficult for the developers to develop mobile apps that have a uniform performance across all the devices.
One thing that the coders need to avoid is the ‘boil the ocean’ approach, and try not to cram too many features into a single application. App interface and functionality should be simple to start with. Later on you can update it with more features.
Display parameters
What you can’t see, you can’t like, right? Smartphones today boast of high resolution, high brightness screens, which can display truly vivid colors. The coders like to exploit this feature and create beautiful presentation interfaces. Its all well until the user gets to a brightly lit area, when the color schemes make it impossible to see much on the app, much less navigate it.
So use high contrast schemes and design for sunlit area usage.
Readability
In order to cram a lot of information into a limited amount of space, a lot of the mobile products use really small fonts, which are very difficult to read even by a perfectly good pair of eyes. This makes the interfaces useless.
Use fonts that are readable and sharp.
Tooltips
When you don’t understand what something on your personal computer does, you typically can do a mouse hover, and read the tooltip. You cannot do the same thing on a smartphone interface. Therefore, to avoid confusing the users, or making them read a manual, try to create buttons and clickables that clearly mention what they do.
Free text fields
No one likes to type on a virtual keyboard. So try and keep your free text fields to a minimum. Use checkboxes and radio buttons instead.
These little tips will go a long way in making your application more usable, and thus, popular.
