Mobile app user experience continues to hold the key to the success of businesses on digital platforms. Since the user activities and behaviour are driven by their responses and behavioural patterns in actual life contexts, mobile app user experience should be created, keeping real-life user preferences in mind.
App usability is the aspect that ensures ease of use by addressing user behaviour and user responses in different contexts. In that sense, usability is the core element if the user experience that no developer can undermine. Since there are still many apps having multiple fault lines in regard to app usability, here we would explain some of the common usability issues and the ways to solve them.
Maintaining Consistent Usability Across Platforms
The first and foremost thing is to make sure that the app remains usable across all platforms and offers a consistent user experience. If an app makes it difficult for iOS or Android users to run the app on their devices, this is a platform issue and should be resolved at the earliest. If certain features and user experience attributes work on one platform and fail to work on another, this would be a big usability issue.
To address this common usability issue that mostly occurs with cross-platform apps, it is advisable to use frameworks and technologies that help to incorporate platform-specific features and user experience layers pertaining to iOS and Android. Flutter and React Native are two great cross-platform development frameworks to offer native user experience to the optimum level.
Not doing Affordance Design to Help User Inputs
Affordance is the key design element that gives users visual clues and signs for various actions for their desired output. Now, the affordance design will significantly differ between website design and mobile app design. Because of the poor or missing affordable design, users can be confused about making inputs and taking actions. This can severely undermine the user experience.
Apart from giving focus on affordance design through conventionally established best practices, the app designers and developers should also maintain a smooth app flow to help users complete actions without hitches and difficulties.
No App Onboarding
In many apps, users simply hang around trying to understand the menu options or the features to fulfil their objectives. Even if they understand how to navigate the app, they miss the app’s key value proposition and unique feature. This is why an app onboarding experience plays so crucial a role.
As for designing a great app onboarding experience, it is important to guide users through the most relevant in-app features and activities simply through a visual screen layer, briefly explaining the options, features, and user actions for specific results.
Not Optimizing the App for Different Screen Resolutions
This is another major usability issue that prevents an app from maintaining a consistent look and feel across different device screens. Because of this usability issue, the app user experience suffers. Over time, it is not used by the vast majority of users using a variety of devices with different screen sizes.
If you employ modern responsive technology and make your app pass through strict usability testing, this will not become an issue. Testing the app across diverse screen sizes of the Android and iOS ecosystem is important to avoid facing this issue.
Endless Scrolling and Tapping
Do your users need to scroll for several minutes at a stretch before accessing a piece of content? Alternatively, does a user need to continue tapping on a multitude of options and buttons to get those things done for which they started using the app? In any case, this is a big usability issue of the user has to take too many actions to get things done.
To avoid this major usability issue, it is important to design the user experience in a way so that with just a few taps and with limited scrolling, the users can access content and get their things done. The app should also intuitively offer options that users are more likely to choose.
Not Offering Landscape Mode
Many apps simply do not work in landscape mode. Since mobile devices, including tablets, continue to come with bigger screens, landscape mode is important for superior user experience.
Make sure your app offers landscape mode for using the app. You should design the app screens to fit into both portrait and landscape orientations as per their preferences.
Absence of Auto-Suggestion of Data
The auto-suggestion or auto-filling of user data based on previous inputs and choices is a great way to reduce the user’s efforts and time for providing simple information. Without this, a simple filling of forms may consume a lot of time and resources.
Make sure all the form fields and user input areas allow auto-suggestion based on earlier input data and chosen options by the users. While allowing the auto-suggestion option, don’t forget to provide an edit button to allow editing the auto-filled data.
Handling Errors
Handling of certain user input errors that may stop the app from working shows a big usability issue for the app. If the app cannot handle errors properly, users can have a frustrating experience.
Make sure in case of erroneous inputs; the users can be notified about anything that goes wrong. The error handling should be excellent enough to give users more scopes to rectify the faults and give fresh inputs.
Conclusion
These usability issues continue to make pain points for the app user experience across a multitude of apps. The issues mentioned above and the remedies should be given priority to ensure a glitch-free app user experience.
Author Bio
Brian Walter is An Senior Mobile App Developers At We App IT – An Software Development Company Provide Services of App Development Denmark. We App IT Hold Expertise in App Development Include Android, iOS & Mobile Game Development. Apart from his professional life brian love to share his knowledge, experiences and opinion about new technologies through his writing skills.