App design is popularly known for its visual elements. The buttons, brand colors, header — but that isn’t everything about app design.

Another part of great app design is UX design. It focuses on understanding how users interact with your app to make it functional, intuitive, and user-centered. Good UX design addresses questions like:

Is this app easy to navigate and use?
Can the user easily find what they need to complete their task?

In this article, we’ll find out what exactly leads to a good UX design, and what doesn’t.

Why UX Design Matters

Good UX design makes for good user experience — but that’s just one thing. It also is responsible for:

Higher user satisfaction. When users feel at ease while using your app, it makes them happier. This leads to lower churn rate and stronger loyalty.
Improving conversion and retention rates. Great UX design is thoughtful. Since the design is so user-centric, the conversion rates could improve significantly.

Strengthening product-market fit. A strong UX process creates room for more user feedback, allowing you to create a product that resonates with your audience. This also creates a strong product-market fit.

UX Design vs. UI Design: What’s the Difference?

UX design and UI design work together to create great designs. However, they aren’t the same and serve different functions:

User experience (UX) design focuses on an app’s functionality and user experience. It enhances navigation by making the app’s user flow intuitive and easy-to-use.
User interface (UI) design focuses on the visual look and aesthetics of an app. With branding elements, UI design ensures all the app screens feel on-brand and consistent.

UX design is more about the app’s structure than its design. Without it, the app will feel unorganized and confusing.

Best Practices for Creating Great UX Designs

Unlike UI designs, user experience is all about subtle changes that make the difference. Here are the five best practices for mobile app UX design:

1. Keep It User-Centric

The goal is to think from the user’s perspective and improve the app design. When you keep the user at the center of every decision you make, you ensure that their needs are met. This leads to an app that’s seamless and intuitive.

2. Make the Design Structured

Informed architecture is the core of good UX design. The goal is simple: to make it easy for users to find the right information. If the data is organized, users can find everything they need without much effort.

Structured designs are all about the content, site map, and navigation of the app. Good UX designers consider everything and draw rough sketches to visualize how it all fits together.

3. Consistent Design

The form and function of your app should be consistent across all screens. For example, if the “confirm” button is on the right side of the first screen, it should be on the right side for all the other screens as well.

Inconsistent designs confuse users about next steps. However, good designs have consistency that guides users through their journey and helps them complete further tasks.

4. Empower Users

Good UX design empowers users by providing them with the right information and prompts at the right time. It puts similar tasks together and creates a navigational flow so that every task feels intuitive. Thus, users feel at ease.

5. Ask for Feedback

The best designers are all about taking feedback and making iterations to make the design more user-friendly. This feedback could be both direct and indirect.

Direct feedback is what users say when you conduct user research, surveys, and in-app feedback. Indirect feedback is more about user actions. You can find indirect feedback through usability testing, when users are completing tasks.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in UX Design

When you’re designing a mobile app, it’s easy to lose track of what you want to build. Here are five common UX design mistakes to watch out for.

1. Lack of Research

User research is the core of creating a user-friendly design. The best way to do this: ask your audience.

Good UX designers prioritize user research and usability testing in every step of the UX design process. Test and validate your ideas with real feedback and iterate accordingly.

2. Inconsistent Design

Good design isn’t about just the elements. If the design is inconsistent, it will create major issues in the user experience:

Navigating and interacting with the app feels confusing.
The user has to re-learn what certain elements or components mean in different contexts.
It degrades your brand identity.

To avoid inconsistent designs, you can use design systems and component libraries. They will ensure that your app design stays consistent.

3. Forgetting the Customer

Designing a mobile app has many steps: business goals, user research, product development, launch, marketing, and so on. With so many priorities, it’s common to lose track of who the product is for — your audience.

That’s why it’s important to keep the customer in mind at every step. It will lead to a seamless, intuitive, and customer-focused design.

4. Poor Structure

Another major error that generally occurs is leaning too heavily on the user interface that the app’s structure and architecture gets forgotten. While visual elements make the app feel aesthetically pleasing, UX design makes it functional.

Good UX designers prioritize clear, consistent information structure in an app alongside the visual elements. It makes the app intuitive and easy to navigate through.

5. Dark UX

Dark UX refers to intentional design patterns that try to trick, mislead, or push the user into taking an action they didn’t intend to benefit your company. Some of the common examples include:

Making it difficult to unsubscribe or cancel your account
Adding hidden costs at the end step of the checkout process
‘Bait and perform’ buttons that don’t perform the actions the user expects

It isn’t a good practice and leads users to blacklist your brand in the long run. A good rule is to design the app so that every button, action, and choice works exactly how users expect.

Bottom Line

Great UX design is all about trying to create one. It takes time, consistent effort and iteration to get it right.

The good part is: you can make a functional, visually-pleasing app through iteration with Natively’s no-code AI app builder. Just prompt the AI to build any feature, user flow, or screen and it’ll be ready in seconds.

The sooner you build the app design, the sooner you can get feedback and iterate. That’s what leads to great app design. Build your app and launch in two weeks with Natively.