As a user, one of the things that catch your attention when using a new mobile app is its design and interface. This step may seem pretty insignificant to the developer — but those who know it’s value, will say that it’s the design that can either make or break your app entirely.
Your app’s design serves as a navigation for novice users, making it an important part of the application development process. The goal of creative and vivid design is not to make your app look pretty, but to provide an enjoyable user experience from the moment your users open it to the moment they close it.
Often during the planning phase, potential customer constraints are recognized and strategies are developed to overcome them. Therefore, design should be considered ideal from the start, as it determines the shape and capacity of an application even before it is built.
Therefore, irrespective of whether you’re building a new application or adding features into an old one — you will need to put in a lot of effort in the design phase particularly.
We’d suggest you to work with a designer from your development partner’s team only to develop app screens, icons and graphics etcetera — if you are getting a new product developed from scratch. And if you’re adding additional features into a pre-existing product, ensure that the designer gets your design language very well.
And in case you happen to be a little lucky — and have some designs ready with you, explain to the new designer everything about the how, why and what of the design. Afterall, it isn’t an easy job to start off with someone else’s design.
The Design Deliverables
In the design phase, there are 3 key deliverables:
- Wireframes
Wireframes are the same as architectural designs, the contours of the two-dimensional skeleton of websites and apps. They provide you with a clear overview of your screen’s structure, layout, information architecture, user flow, features, and intended behavior. Wireframes usually represent the original product concept, product style, color palette while keeping the graphics to the minimum.
They can either be hand-painted or created digitally, all depending on the details you are looking to get from your wireframes..
And the most important thing to know about wireframes is — it serves three key purposes — to help maintain a user-oriented concept + clarify and define the functionality of your website, + create the product quickly and cheaply.
- Design
The design part of the deliverables primarily includes two major aspects of the design phase of the app development process: the UI and UX design.
The User Interface, aka UI, includes everything that makes the overall appearance of your app. It’s the UI that makes it easy for users to interact with the application. It generally includes app design, graphics, and icons and the basic presentations which can be seen with the naked eye.
The User Experience (UX) on the other hand includes human feelings, perception, emotions, and preferences during and after the use of the app. The accessibility, simplicity and ease of use of the app enhance the satisfying user experience.
An efficient Ul+UX design will improve your customer satisfaction, and we all know people like to work with brands that make them happy. This increases the credibility of the company as they are able to create good relationships with the company and brand.
- Prototypes
And finally — A prototype which is a simulated or sample version of a final product that UX teams use to test before release is to be collected.
The purpose of the prototype is to share the idea with stakeholders and ultimately validate the idea before submitting the final design to the engineering team for development.
Prototyping testing with end-users allows the UX team to visualize and optimize the user experience during the design process. Since development is expensive and changing the final product is often not as easy as the team expects. Therefore, it is important to find and fix bugs during the design process which can be done with the prototypes!