UX Design Patterns for Mobile Apps: Which and Why

Solutions for recurring problems in UX often start with tried and tested UX design patterns. Find out which ones to use and why to use them. By Luis Abreu.

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Tips

  • You don’t need a machine learning model to suggest event locations. Simply look at similarly-named events and their location. Move up to machine learning only when necessary.
  • Give the user an opportunity to review and accept suggestions.
  • Explore and understand available sensors, such as camera, GPS and others, along with available data sources, such as the Photo Library, Contacts, SMS, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Autofill.
  • When accessing data sources, use a just-in-time approach when the user accesses the feature, or use pre-permission dialogs to set things up ahead of time.
  • Research available technologies. Android and iOS make it easy to add general intelligence and Machine Learning to your app.

Summary

You’ve covered five advanced UX design patterns to address users’ needs for speed, security, and comfort:

  1. Speed matters when it comes to retaining users. Skeleton Views make your app appear faster and are used by Facebook, Slack, others.
  2. The convenience of 2-Step Authentication increases registration metrics and account security.
  3. Advanced users can count on Accelerators to get more done in less time.
  4. For when you’re out-and-about, One-Handed Usage is crucial.
  5. Finally, our apps must use Intelligence to make our lives simpler and stand out against competitors.

As a good next step, keep an eye on how users use your app. Talk to them and understand their problems in a deep and meaningful way. Prioritize those problems by looking at how often they occur and how many people experience them. Focus on frequent problems, experienced by the majority.

Once you understand the problem, then turn to UX design patterns and Apple’s and Google’s design guidelines to see if there is a feature that would solve those problem and make users’ lives simpler. If you manage to solve their problem and improve their experience, you’ll see a related boost in app ratings — and app revenue!

Do you have any UX design patterns you’d add to this list? Let me know in the comments!

Luis Abreu

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