Mobile apps need to function properly and serve users’ needs—remember to test them!—but they should also be intuitive and attractive. An app’s interface can serve as either an immediate invitation or impediment to user satisfaction. With over a quarter of apps surviving less than a month on devices, your e-commerce app needs to appeal to users right away if it hopes to make the cut.
“The number one key to [designing] an interface is to really put yourself in the head of the customer,” says Sherwin Zadeh, Lead Mobile Engineer at Artamata. “You come into the app with a goal in mind of what you want to do. The app needs to be designed very well so that you can do that as quick as possible.”
How to Make Your App an MVP and Beyond
Despite the statistics, most people don’t plan to delete an app immediately after downloading it. However, it really doesn’t take long for users to realize when an app won’t meet their needs. Dave Schuler, Chief Systems Architect at Katalyst Software Services Limited, recently led the development of an app for a neighboring states Department of Corrections and was “acutely aware” throughout the process that a simple and appealing interface would be key to its success.
“Apps cannot be developed in a vacuum,” Schuler says. “My pet peeve as a designer is designs that are better suited to what the programmer wants to do than to what the user wants to use and envisions the process the app is implementing.”
Schuler points to three different categories of apps a company could choose to introduce: the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Minimum Marketable Product (MMP), and Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). The MVP is essentially a bare-bones app, the basic necessary functions that allow it to serve its intended purpose. Basically, this is for anyone who needs to use the app. The MMP goes a little bit further, adding a few features and refining the app to appeal to a wider base. Perhaps it runs a bit faster and more reliably. The MLP goes further still, aiming not just for functionality but inspiring a sense of emotion in users. It requires an app to be unique and to, in the words of Marie Kondo, spark joy.
“The completed product must have all of the features required for an MVP,” says Schuler. “It should have the features required for an MMP, but to gain acceptance by the users, at the very least some of the features required for an MLP.”
Aiming for MLP
If you want to take your app beyond the bare minimum, contact the experts at Katalyst. We can help you assess strategies and determine ways to create programs customers will love. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Make the app immediately inviting. Forgo the desire to force customers to sign up before they’ve even had a chance to see how the app works. Aim for a minimalist, consistent design that doesn’t overwhelm users. Make navigation simple and intuitive. If your app is clunky and distracting enough that it makes someone want to throw their phone at the wall after 30 seconds, you might have done something wrong.Also, keep in mind: it’s 2020. Design standards and expectations have changed.
“Users frequently have some intuitive idea of what a modern, usable app should look like and the designer should be sensitive to that,” says Schuler. “You might have developed the greatest app in the world, but if it looks like it was designed in 1995, it will be difficult for the users to accept.”
- Carry a light load. Users seek speed, but content takes time. Keep users engaged with some sort of unique loading graphic or brand-appropriate indication that content is on the way. Whatever you do, don’t use the infamous “spinning wheel of death”!“That’s probably the one thing users hate to see the most,” says Zadeh. What users do like to see, though, are “skeleton screens” that progressively load text and images as they download. “There’s like a gentle animation to show, and [it] already feels like there’s something loading in there.”
- Make it fun! Consider your audience and cater the experience to them. Yes, first and foremost, your priority must be to create a program that serves their needs in the easiest way possible. But as long as it doesn’t slow things down or significantly increase the size of the app, why not incorporate some animations or look to put a smile on users’ faces?
It’s easier than ever to create an app these days, which makes it more difficult to develop one that will work its way into customers’ hearts. In order to do that, you must design it through their eyes.
