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Mobile UX: best practices for designing a mobile application
Thomas Huber
27/1/2023
5 minutes
Council
27/1/2023
5 minutes
Council
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Knowing your target users is the foundation on which all the best practices for designing a mobile app are built. Mobile UX expertise is therefore essential when designing an app or site for use on a mobile device (tablet or smartphone). User experience is all the more crucial for an app as the contexts in which mobile screens are used can be highly specific, inducing situations of urgency or mobility, for example.
At a time when the smartphone is fast becoming the world's leading web browsing medium, and the use of mobile applications has become part of the daily habits of Internet users, mobile UX design must meet ever-higher standards in terms of usability, informative clarity and efficiency. Knowing your users is the sine qua non for offering them customized journeys that meet their expectations and provide added value for the brand.
Knowing your users means studying them: this is the purpose ofUX research. With this in mind, theUX agency can conduct quantitative studies (data research) or qualitative studies (behavioral research). At Le Backyard, UX research is based on a range of customizable methodologies, including the creation of personas, user observations, interviews and tests.
Mobile UX is always part of a specific context of use, usually mobile, but not always. Knowing the user means not only understanding the application's context of use, but also taking into account the user's browsing experience on other mobile products (sites or apps). Indeed, to create an optimal user experience on mobile, we need to take into account the existing ecosystem of tools available on mobile, and the quality standards that flow from it. These standards must therefore be met as a minimum. Furthermore, one of the first rules of ergonomics is to avoid upsetting visitors' browsing habits: users will always tend to prefer an app that works on the model of what they're used to using, and which will have generated browsing reflexes and expectations in them.
UX mobile design implies, first and foremost, a notion of usability: in ergonomics, there are a number of rules to promote this usability, i.e. the correct use of a tool, without friction. The context of use is also essential to understand, as it has an impact on the ergonomics of the app: it may be necessary, for example, to respond to a context of urgency by implementing shortcuts, or to prioritize information and interactions to respond to a situation of mobility (browsing while walking, or on public transport) and the specificities this implies from the point of view of the user's attention span.
Depending on the users involved and the context of use, Le Backyard distinguishes 3 main types of mobile design compared to desktop design.
This involves switching from a desktop version to a mobile version by reorganizing the elements, so as to ensure full display of the content on the smaller screen of a cell phone.
This involves adapting desktop content to mobile use by pruning content or adding actions.
Last but not least, there's a real dissociation between what's designed for the desktop and what's intended for mobile use. The dedicated mobile version is characterized by a particular and drastically different design from that offered on the desktop. This dedicated mobile UX design is linked to the criteria mentioned above, i.e. the notions of ergonomics and adaptation to the context of use.
Would you like to entrust your mobile UX design project to the expert Backyard team, who will support you over the long term? Contact the agency for a first meeting!
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