Services About Works Blog Contact us

Home Blog Design

Design · 28 Jun 2023

How to design a mobile app:

Step-by-step guide to app
design process
Vladislav Luchkovski
Head of Design

Illustration by Amir Kerr

Creating a mobile app from scratch may seem daunting, with millions of
technical responsibilities, iterations, and twists. And it can be, but it doesn’t
have to be. A consistent app design process will spare your nerves and put
the app development pipeline on the right track.

A thought-out mobile app design process also dramatically affects your

app's user experience. According to Toptal, 90% of app users have stopped
using an app due to poor performance. Therefore, a user-friendly and sleek
mobile design is paramount for a positive ROI.

But what does it take to craft a winning design? And what are the main
application design steps? Let’s find out.

A short primer on the mobile app design

process
Mobile application design commonly refers to the external interface of the
mobile solution that users interact with. However, app design isn’t just a
mere line-up of pretty visuals, buttons, and other elements.

Here designing means making the product both easy to use and appealing.
A designer’s role is to advocate for the end-users to humanize software and
create the app’s flow and structure.

All application design has two facets – UX and UI. Both contribute to the
same product but encompass different design aspects.

What is UX design?
UX (user experience) is a design strategy that focuses on satisfying the
user's needs in the best way possible. The main goal of UX specialists is to
ensure that the app meets user expectations and provides users with value.
The main pillars of a successful UX design are good usability, accessibility,
reliability, and usefulness.

The primary responsibilities of UX professionals may include but are not

limited to:

Performing user research;

Creating user personas;
Identifying the information architecture of an application;
Designing user flows and wireframes;
Creating prototypes;
Performing user testing.

What is UI design?
UI (user interface) is about how an application looks and feels to the user.
UI design includes color schemes, buttons, labels, animations, transitions,
etc. Essentially, UI is the process of building graphical interfaces with a
focus on looks or style.

A typical set of tasks for UI designers can include:

Transforming requirements into style guides and attractive interfaces;

Identifying design problems and finding effective solutions;
Creating animations;
Choosing fonts and color palettes;
Designing UI elements like scrollbars and icons.

As you can see, UI and UX are the two sides of the same coin, as both lead
to a better product experience. Therefore, it is essential to pay due
diligence to each during the design process.

Competitive User-friendly Forms Layout

UX UI
Functional -Seamless Typography— —Buttons

Consistent —Accessible Content Colorscheme

Findable Media

Now that you know the fundamentals, let’s go over the main app design
process steps for building a mobile solution.

How to design a mobile app: 10 crucial

steps
According to CIO, almost 80% of mobile apps get dumped after their first
use. Unfortunately, this means that you don’t have a second chance to
make a first impression. To improve your app’s first impression, below are
ten recommended steps that you can take to design a conversion-worthy
app.

Set clear goals

Any software development process should be preceded by thorough pre-
planning. Therefore, before creating a digital product design, you should
thoroughly analyze your future solution. At this stage, a design team will
work closely with other software specialists and clients to evaluate goals,
pain points, and competencies.

The planning stage can be further divided into the following milestones.

Stakeholder interview A short primer on the mobile

app design process
Planning starts with interviewing key stakeholders to gather valuable
How to design a mobile app:
insights about business goals. Stakeholder interviews are also essential for 10 crucial steps
understanding technical constraints, usability problems, and user needs.
Set clear goals

Stakeholder interview
These interviews also help establish a shared vision of the future design,
Design strategy
improve communication, and build trust. Designers then document and
Scope of application
analyze responses to shape a cohesive strategy. Content requirements

Write a plan of action

Design strategy Research your niche and

competitors
Next, your design team will wrap the interview results into a succinct
Stages of user research
strategy. This contains core information about the product goal, target
audience, incentives, and competitive advantages of the future layout. The Analyze the findings

strategy then helps you and the team define UX milestones and objectives. Establish application structure

Build wireframe

Scope of application Take care of UI design

In mobile app development, the scope is defined through functional Send designs into
requirements and content specifications. Functional requirements refer to a development

solution’s intended capabilities, appearance, and interactions that help Spice it up with animation
users achieve their goals.
And don’t forget the post-
launch research
These requirements don’t include any complex technical details. Instead,
functional specifications focus on how users will interact with the The bottom line

application and how the system will operate in response to users’ actions.

Book a consultation now

Content requirements To discuss your tech and business

needs in detail

Unlike functional requirements, content specifications revolve around visual

Get in touch
or media information that will complement the user experience. Thus,
designers validate any content feature against strategic objectives,
including images, audio, and video. Content requirements should offer
Subscribe to our blog
rough estimates of the size of each feature, such as file sizes for
downloadable content elements or pixel dimensions for images. Articles, tips and expert talks
about mobile apps

Email Subscribe
One email, once a month

Write a plan of action

Comprehensive planning is among the salient app design steps that follow
the initial pre-planning stage. A detailed UX plan sets specific expectations
both for the team and the customer. Thus, securing key stakeholders’
expectations with key performance indicators to measure the product’s
future success.

A plan of action also details the product objectives and the team structure.
Moreover, this stage documents a single communication channel for the
team and the client to ensure convenient and effective collaboration
between the stakeholders. Generally, a UX plan aids a client in making their
vision a reality while adhering to specified guidelines, KPIs, and clear goals.

Research your niche and competitors

After you have solidified the plan and determined the main objectives, your
team will move on to the research phase. This stage mostly boils down to
performing user research and assessing competitors’ solutions present in
the market.

Competitor analysis helps UX designers deep dive into the industry

standards and identify opportunities for a product in a specific niche. This
stage also allows design teams to determine competitive UX/UI features
using other companies’ experiences and success stories. By understanding
the flow and functions of competitors’ products, your team can strategically
design your solution to deliver a superior product and experience.

For user research, its purpose is to help you connect with potential users
and explore their needs. Understanding what your users want is essential to
creating designs that click with the end users.

Additionally, user research can help teams identify potential problems

before implementation, allowing for fewer biases and improved usability.
Ultimately, user research leads to a better user experience and more
satisfied users.

Stages of user research

User research can take many different forms and include various
milestones. Here’s how our mobile app designers tap into the minds of your
future users.

Interviews
Interviewing users is a method of research that gathers actionable insights
about your target users’ needs, pain points, opinions, and experiences.
Unlike focus groups (which we’ll highlight later), user interviews are one-on-
one sessions that cover a specific topic, like behaviors, habits, or previous
experience. User interviews can also provide insight into demographic or
ethnographic data that will be later used to build user personas.

Surveys
Compared to interviews, surveys are a quicker and easier way to collect
valuable data about your users. For example, a UX survey is a questionnaire
that provides qualitative and quantitative input for future design.

Here, your team will ask a group of people the same questions to gather
their opinions on a given topic, be it a product feature or usability. User
surveys are a critical part of understanding user feedback that helps to
create an intuitive design and satisfying user experience.

Focus groups
A focus group is another discovery method approach that can help
prioritize design features. Here, your team invites a small group of 5-10
participants to study their needs and feelings about your product.

Specifically, your team can set up a focus group to gauge reactions to

potential new features or gain perspective on existing ones. A focus group
is usually supervised by a moderator who guides the group on a specific
topic of conversation.

Field studies
Unlike focus groups and interviews, field studies study users’ lives and
goals with additional context about the user's environment. This research
technique may involve day-in-the-life user interviews to help teams identify
the most valuable personas and contextualize potential design features.
Since field studies don’t occur in a formal setting, they allow researchers to
observe the user’s natural, real-world behaviors.

Diary studies
Diary studies are another UX research method where participants keep a
log of their experiences, activities, and thoughts over time. Participants can
also take photographs or engage in other activities to document their
experiences and better communicate their needs.

Here, researchers analyze the users’ feedback when the study time is
completed. Although diary studies aren’t as exhaustive as focus groups, this
research method can still chip into creating a more user-oriented design
development.

Analyze the findings

The mobile application design process continues with analyzing and
evaluating the data collected from the conducted studies. This stage aims
to create a holistic vision, visualize the findings, and validate the
hypotheses. However, the analysis process will likely require these
subsequent steps.

Creating user personas

These are usually archetypical fictional users whose goals and
characteristics represent the needs of a specific target user group. By
creating one (or more), you can better understand who your target
audience is, what their needs and wants are, and how to better appeal to
them. This information can then be used to create targeted design user
flows and interfaces.

Helpful resource: User persona template

User persona example

Outlining user stories

This step refers to a general explanation of a design feature from the user’s
standpoint. It is a lightweight method to capture the users’ interactions with
the future product.

User stories contextualize the app’s functionality so that designers can

better understand how the end user will benefit from a given feature. These
usually come in short yet informative sentences such as “As a [user], I want
to/can [goal to achieve] to <receive value>.”

Helpful resource: Storyboard template

User Story for Withdrawing Cash

Mapping user journey

Now it’s time to bring our user personas into a cohesive whole with the
product interaction process. Customer journeys are visual storylines that
describe the app touch points the end-user goes through as well as
problems they may face using your future product. These maps can be
simple or complex based on the level of detail you’re aiming to describe.

Helpful resource: Customer journey map template

CustomerJourneyMap
Exampleofanonlinestore

STAGE AWARENESS CONSIDERATION DECISION SERVICE LOYALTY

Viewonlinead, Conductresearch, Makeapurchase Receiveproduct/ Makeanother

seesocialmedia research service,contact purchase,share
CUSTOMER campaign,hear competitors, customer experience
ACTIVITIES fromfriends comparefeatures service,read
andpricing product/service
documentation

Traditionalmedia, Wordofmouth, Website, Phone,chatbot, Wordofmouth,

socialmedia, website,social mobileapp, email socialmedia,
TOUCHPOINTS wordofmouth media phone reviewsites

Interested,
Curious,excited Satisfied,excited
CUSTOMER hesitant
Excited Frustrated
EXPERIENCE

Numberofpeople Numberofnew Conversionrate, Productreviews, Retentionrate,

reached websitevisitors onlinesales customerservice customer
KPIS successrate, satisfactionscore
waitingtime

Increase Increasethe Increase Increase Generatepositive

awareness, numberof conversionrate, conversion reviews,increase
BUSINESS interest websitevisitors onlinesales service retentionrate
GOALS satisfaction,
minimizewait
time

Establish application structure

After you and your team have all the vital insights on your hands, it’s time to
go over the application design. Here, the application structure will define
the user interaction, application behavior, and content layout. The process
of designing an app can be divided into two substages.

Interaction design
This design component encompasses a broad range of user-product
elements that help the end-users achieve their goal. Interaction design is
also commonly defined as “the goal of creating products that enable the
user to achieve their objective(s) in the best way possible.”

Simply, it helps design teams examine and define the interactions between
the system and the user to increase the app’s usability. Interaction design
typically stems from a combination of user behavior, time, physical space,
graphical elements, and content.

Helpful resource: Flow chart template

Information architecture
As the name may imply, information architecture helps organize and
structure content. It lays out the location of elements or content to make
them easily discoverable for users.

Therefore, thought-out information architecture should be flexible and

adaptable to new content. It can either remain at the structure level or be
more detailed when describing each element.

Helpful resource: Information architecture diagram template

Build wireframe
Wireframes are essential during the app design process; these are low-
fidelity sketches that depict the layout of a website, app, or other product.
By creating wireframes, designers can establish a visual hierarchy,
determine UI elements and how they will interact, and explore user flows.

Usually, wireframes include a visual display and arrangement of interface

elements, content, and navigations based on collected data from previous
stages. For designers, these sketches help create the final layouts of the
application design. Also, wireframes help speed up the development
process by allowing stakeholders to get on the same wavelength before
moving on to high-fidelity mockups.

We recommend using Figma or Axure RP for building wireframes.

Take care of UI design

Once the wireframes get your approval, UI designers step on the scene to
breathe an aesthetic into your application. At this stage, UI designers
decide on the color palettes, typography, and graphics, and they study the
main UI elements of the interface. Remember, UI design is always based on
the project vision you established during previous stages.

By this time, your UI team should also have a few application concepts for
you to choose from. Once you select the best option, the team will develop
a style guide that provides guidelines on the product's user interface to
build your UI consistently.

Helpful resource: Spectrum – Figma plugin and web app for generating
color palettes.

We recommend using interface design guidelines from Apple or Google if

you do not have a budget allocated to testing your design hypotheses.
These guides increase your chances of creating an intuitive and compelling
interface for your end user.

Send designs into development

At this stage, the designer creates the final layouts, which will later be
presented to the development team. The final layouts should be as detailed
as possible, covering all screens in their various states.

For example, your design team should include a display of an empty news
feed post-registration or ‘incorrect password’ messages. Also, if the
application displays articles, designers should include examples of long and
short headlines.

Tools like Figma allow your team to create interactive prototypes that mimic
the behavior of a future application. By creating interaction layouts, you can
prevent the appearance of undeveloped screen states. They also expose
your user flow to additional testing and help your team run final tests.

Spice it up with animation

User interface animation is a must-have ingredient of modern visual
products since it makes apps more interactive, dynamic, and intuitively
understandable. From a tech standpoint, UX animation is the process of
adding motion to the user interface to improve the usability and satisfaction
of a user’s interaction with a product.

Animations can be used to explain how a product works, guide a user

through a task or make the waiting time more tolerable. More interactive
mobile applications also help reduce cognitive load, which is especially
useful for educational applications.

Other benefits of animation include:

Increased usability – dynamic pieces help provide key context and

prevent users from getting lost;
Originality – when animations combine emotions and storytelling,
users can be enticed further into the digital solution;
Convenient, easy interaction – animated elements can be used to
make transitions more obvious;
Multitasking – animations can fulfill several functions simultaneously;
 Faster interaction process – animated scrolling allows the user to
jump to a new position on the same page;
Clear feedback – visual feedback reduces uncertainty and creates
necessary expectations.

Animation includes screen animations, onboarding flows, animated log-ins,

and explainer blocks. Therefore, designer teams may resort to various tools
to dress up your solution.

Next, let’s look at the usual suspects found in our toolbox when building
engaging animations for your mobile applications.

Adobe after effects

After Effects is the golden standard for creating visual effects and motion
graphics. It is one of the most-used animation software that empowers both
simple and detailed, sophisticated motion graphics animation. Packed with
robust functionality, After Effects is our favorite tool for 2D animations.

Figma
Figma is another software masterpiece with a less steep learning curve
than After Effects. It is a flexible, cloud-based tool with in-built functionality
to quickly turn Figma designs into advanced animations. Structural
animation, push animation, and button interactions are just a sliver of
Figma’s capabilities.

Framer
Framer's animation library is also sufficiently powerful, with Framer Motion
fuelling production-ready animation. Framer Motion is mainly associated
with React and is often used for quick prototyping. As for animations,
Framer is great for simple animated elements, transitions, and mount
animations.

Principle
Principle is a lesser-known prototyping tool for animated designs with a
Mac-friendly interface. The tool’s timeline allows designers to tweak the
bounce, ease, and pop to a tee as well as experiment with different
interactions.

InVision Studio
While InVision Studio comes short as a full-blown general design tool, it
brings powerful animation design capability to the table. In addition,
InVision Studio is a valuable tool for interaction design and allows designers
to add advanced transitions and animations for added interactivity.

Using this variety of animation software is often necessary for your design
teams. They allow designers to select a winning combination of features
and customize animations for specific interactions.

Related: Top 25 tools for mobile app designers

And don’t forget the post-launch

research
Even after successfully launching your mobile app, the design work is far
from over. That is why your design team should invest time into post-launch
production to ensure that the final product hits it off with the end user.

Post-launch research is a type of market research conducted after a fully

designed product has been released to consumers. This research evaluates
how well a product is performing in the market, assesses customer
satisfaction, and flags potential improvements through established metrics.

Post-launch initiatives also help identify unmet user needs that could be
addressed in future product releases. By understanding what resonates
well with customers and what could be improved, businesses can make
informed strategic decisions about their mobile applications.

Among the most popular post-launch research methods are:

A/B testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a scientific method of testing
changes to a digital product. Here, designers present two or more design
features to the user to test them against each other. A/B testing can be
used to test anything from the color of a button to the text on a page.

Usability studies
This research refers to evaluating a final product by testing it with
representative users. In this case, real users are asked to complete a list of
tasks so that the researchers can see weak points or ill-timed interactions.
If the same problem is valid for most users, designers will schedule updates
to eliminate the issues.

Surveys
After your team has wrapped up a launch, your designers may also suggest
the end users answer a few questions. For instance, surveys can include a
set of design questions about a specific feature. Based on the users’
feedback, your team will plan further design improvements if needed.

Log analysis
This research method also provides useful metrics for further
enhancements by providing recordings of users while they interact with
your mobile applications. This way, UX/UI designers can see how the users
interact with the app first-hand and pinpoint potential stumbling blocks that
need perfecting.

The bottom line

Design thinking has a non-linear nature. And designing a mobile app follows
suit, especially since the design is usually a combination of art and science
with more variables than constants.

Therefore, the app design process described above may not look the same
in practice. For example, during your development process, many steps
might overlap or need to co-occur.

As your design team dives deeper into the minds of the end users, some
design solutions can be set aside or swapped for more relevant ones. The
rationale is simple – take the time to research your users' needs and keep
calibrating your product until those needs are met.

If you are interested in testing our design approach, talk to us with your
special request.

What are the 7 steps to creating an app?

What is the process of designing an app?

What does mobile app design include?

How many steps are in the mobile design process?

What is the first step in the application design

process?

Rate this article!

(18 ratings, average: 4.4 out of 5)

Insights

Latest Articles

CLIENT GUIDES TECH

7 stages of mobile app Taking the edge off edge cases in

development and how to achieve mobile and IoT product testing
more in less time 25 Nov 2023 16 min
04 Jan 2024 11 min

More Insights

Contact us Company Services Hire Developers

[email protected] About Android App Development Hire Remote Developers

+1-424-208-02-09 Blog iOS App Development Hire Mobile App Developers

+48-226-020-085 Case Studies Web App Development Hire Android App Developers

Careers MVP App Development Hire iOS App Developers

Don't miss our updates Values UI/UX Design Hire React.js Developers

Quality Assurance Hire Node.js Developers

Industries React.js Development Services

Node.js Development Services

Healthcare
JavaScript Development Services
Fintech
Full-Stack Development Services
IoT

© Copyright 2024 ODG Sp. z o.o. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy