We often get asked to give presentations and educate other clients about mobile usability and experience design. So we have put down our top 10 tips to give your mobile app design the right finish:

1.      Respect the user environment and design based on lighting, holding style, noise levels etc

Mobile User Experience and interface design is centered around understanding the environment in which the mobile device is being used. For example if the mobile device is primarily being used in an outdoors environment (ie: buses, trains) we know that the lighting will vary and noise based alerts will be difficult for the user to hear. Similarly, if being used in a bus/train while the user is standing and holding the rails – it is important to design the app for one-handed use rather than both hands.
The aspect of the UI should be friendly: delicate, warm colours and soft curves, it must give the sensation of a quiet, private, kind and comfortable environment. The user experience must follow this criteria by having a clear and well defined user flow, allowing him to keep track of his position inside the process, and should give a sort of calm and relaxed sensation. We don’t want to scare or confuse the user. It may happen that the app will give bad news to the user, this is a very delicate task and the whole environment must help the user to maintain a certain level of comfort.
2.       Mobile not miniature web – and therefore it is important not to create a solution like a website.

Mobile is its own unique medium that requires thorough testing to ensure smooth usage without complexities like its web-counterpart. Mobile devices offer additional sensors as well that can help improve our solution such as GPS, camera and recently gyroscopes and such — these often allow a mobile app solution to be much more adapted to the user than a web-solution.
3.       Mobile is a very personal device – be ready to adapt your app to various user customisations and settings.

Unlike a PC / Laptop which is often shared, a mobile is a very personal device and people often run many more customisations on it (themes, colours) compared to PCs (where people rarely change their default Windows colours). Therefore it is vital that our design layout be simple with high contrast to ensure that regardless of user settings on the device, the app still is easy to understand and to navigate.
4.       The mobile user is in a rush – 3 taps or less to all features

Typically a mobile user is looking for specific need when using the service, so its important to minimise (or hide away) additional unrelated information (such as legal disclaimers, notices and introductions). The user needs to be able to get to most features of the app within 3 buttons
5.       Content on top, Controls at bottom

This is one of the key design guidelines for mobile devices where our holding style determines that the buttons should be at the bottom ensuring maximum screen space to display content.The Thumb is a key control for most users – so add the key action buttons in the “thumb-hotzone”
6.     User like to scroll sideways, not top-down

Avoid Scroll down, encourage swipe over (especially touch-screen). It has been observed that users tend to prefer scrolling panels to the side on mobile devices unlike the PC/Laptop where we are accustomed to scrolling down
7.  Think Big, Design Small

The Finger on the screen issue – With a touch-screen interface, it is important to consider that the control method (the user’s finger) can also obstruct the button and screen below it. While the finger seems like a small thing, it has a big impact as relative the proportion of the screen size, the finger occupies a larger space (compared to other touch screen such as ATMs and ticket machines)
8.   Use effective error messages

Short, exact and provides a resolution. Should be easy to dismiss and resolve – rather than requiring and additional inputs.

9. Depth in the Button design

On Touchscreen devices should involve a 3D button style rather than flat graphic. This gives the user the sensation of pressing to get required action (including feedback while pressing).

10.  Minimal text – more symbols.

The text and written content should be reduced to the minimum, even though we assume that the user base of this app is english speaking, we can build a graphic UI top level for the menus and main interactions with minimised text which will, on the contrary, be prominent inside the specific sections. This process will help to create a UI that wont be an obstacle in case of future multi-language development, even though is a test app it’s a good practice not to lock any door behind you during the development.