This whole article is for you if you’re interested in creating apps but don’t know where to start. Here we will give you a step-by-step mobile app UI design process from beginner to advanced level. How to design an app !!! Let’s grab the interesting information.

Beginning Stages: How to Design an App?

• Make a Plan

Take a pen & paper, gather all the information, do a deep study, and sketch the plan. Think of all the stages and create an on-paper road map.

• Set a Goal

Create your plan according to your goal. With clear goals, ‌you can make the best strategies to increase app downloads.

• Research About Your Niche

Research is an essential phase in the app creation process. Understanding your app’s specific market and your competitors’ strategies is crucial for success.

• Look Up Competitor’s Strategy

Knowing what’s lacking from your competitors’ applications will help you come up with better ideas for what to include in your own apps. 

• Know the Development Trends

Trends are encouraging the developers, publishers, and everyone who is trying to plan app design software

Mobile app designs Trends

• By 2023, income from mobile applications is projected to reach over $935 billion.
• 1.96M apps on Apple App Store & 2.87M apps on the Google Play Store are available for download.
• 21% of teenagers open 50+ apps per day.
• 49% of mobile users an app 11+ times each day.
• The avg smartphone user uses 10 applications per day and 30 apps per month.

Read Also: 13 New Mobile Application Development Trends 

Intermediate Stages: How To Design App

• An Eye-Catchy Wireframe

The visual architecture of your app is represented in your wireframe. You’ll move beyond your objectives and conceptualizations to develop a fundamental “blueprint” for your app’s design and functionality.

Although you can initially just accomplish this on paper, using digital wireframes makes things much simpler, especially as your wireframes get more elegant and precise.

Best Wireframe Tools: Adobe XD, Sketch, Figma, UXPin, MockFlow, Justinmind

• App Design

It’s time to create attractive, accurate mockups of your app’s actual design. Don’t rush or cut corners on your app design because this is a crucial phase that will affect your users’ view of you forever. Your app might become a huge hit if it has a stunning, professional design.

Stages to Create an App Design

• Get in touch with a designer directly

Working one-on-one with a designer is the simplest option if you already know how your app should appear and know what you want and need. To locate the ideal fit in terms of talent and style, look at a designer’s earlier work while keeping your goal in mind. If you don’t have any connections with designers, You can contact us.

• Use an app builder

Using an app builder is another design strategy for creating your own app. Similar to a web builder – An app builder saves some money over hiring a professional designer. 

• Run Contest

The app design contest is an excellent choice if you’re unsure of the style you want for your app and are seeking advice. Designers from all over the world examine the brief you create and submit ideas for your app. You can offer suggestions for the design improvement before selecting your favorite as the winner.

• Hire an Agency

The whole package is your best option if you want to sit back and let someone else handle everything. Engage a company to design and create your app from the ground up. If your project is challenging and requires a lot of knowledge from several fields, this is a wonderful option.

No matter which option you choose, be sure to give feedback and monitor whether the design fits your brand and communicates the style and look you were going for from the start. Don’t lose sight of the goals you set initially and reflect on whether the final design says what you want it to say.

Step-By-Step Mobile App UI Design

• Simple Design

For a fresh design, keep things simple and make liberal use of white space. This enables your consumers to concentrate on what is important. Again, making it basic and straightforward to use.

Making the user experience delightful and simple is what it means to design for simplicity. Your user is likely to feel overwhelmed and uninstall the program if there is too much information displayed on the screen at once or just too much going on.

• Easy Navigation

Without simple navigation, even the most wonderful app would be worthless. Therefore, build with this in mind to provide consumers with a seamless and delightful experience.

Make sure it should be friendly. Because people will struggle to use your app’s navigation if the buttons and links are difficult to tap with their fingers.

• Consider The Visual Weight and Hierarchy

Make that the hierarchy you build for pages, sub-pages, headlines, and sub-headlines is always constant. A clear visual hierarchy will benefit your viewers in locating information on your site.

The size and effect of particular objects on-screen in proportion to other components are known as visual weight. The most crucial elements of your design should stick out, thus use visual weight to achieve this.

• Aware of Your Font & Color Choices

Don’t neglect the power of color psychology; it has a significant impact. The appearance and feel of your app will also be influenced by the fonts you choose.

Choose your design components wisely while keeping in mind the hidden messages they convey. Note that for a centralized and polished appearance, you shouldn’t use too many colors and fonts.

If you have brand rules that include certain colors and fonts, be sure to follow them in your app design so that your app extends your brand.

Design Testing Stage

Now, at last, time, call up your friends, family, and anyone for a mockup and test your app design. A rendered click-through model will make this simple and will offer your testers a true sense of what the app will be like.

The feedback you mostly get for the app layout, its look, and feel… More People, More Testing, More Feedback, More Idea, More Improvement. 

Final Stages: How to Design App?

Development Stage For Your App

It’s time to turn your design over to your developer or development team. They will code the app’s functionality and ensure that it accomplishes what it does. 

Most likely, they will communicate back with designers to tweak the design to ensure that everything runs smoothly and to resolve any difficulties that arise throughout the development process.

Testing Stage For Your App Development

Now that we have a completely functional app to test, ‌make sure it is indeed fully functional before releasing it. The app must be flawlessly functional and aesthetically pleasing‌.

Again, do testing with the same person who helped you in testing the design. Give them complete freedom to use your app and use them as your focus group.

Launching Stages

• Launch a beta version

Launching a beta version of your app and making it accessible to early users on a small scale is known as beta testing. In this manner, you can see how your application functions in a real-world setting and assess how consumers react to it.

• Launch your app

After everything is done (planning, testing, designing, developing), now your app is ready to launch. Google Play Store doesn’t require review, just upload your file and it will reach the people. IOS requires reviews before it lives. If everything is fine, it is available for users in the App Store.

Marketing Stage

A successful app marketing strategy will help people find and download your app. Check out this useful post for some simple suggestions on How to Make An Amazing Mobile App Marketing Strategy.

Difference Between iOS & Android App Design

The most crucial aspect of learning how to design an app is keeping to the design concepts and rules unique to iOS and Android. While building iOS apps requires making your attention to Apple’s Flat/Human interface design, designing Android apps requires you need to give attention to Google’s material design approach.

1. Navigation

There are substantial variations between these two design ideas in terms of navigation. You can make either the drawer menu or just a back button appears on the top left & search icon on the top right for an android app design. While you could make the previous tab name always appears on the top left corner and the current tab in the middle and the “Edit” or “Done” button on the top right.

2. Buttons

The iOS app works on the Flat Design Principle, which supports the lower case style of the buttons. Whereas the Android app works on the Material Design Principle, which is uppercase with shadow effects.  

3. Icons and Resolution

You may check that the iOS icon is visible with round corners, with no transparency, including a basic background. While Android icons‌ enable backdrop transparency and promote the use of any icon form that fits the background.

4. Typography

The San Francisco typeface is currently used by iOS, which is more mobile device friendly in terms of comfort and visual clarity. Roboto is the official font for Android. To increase clarity, iOS mostly employs Bold typefaces, whereas Android employs a greater proportion of white space.

5. Search Options

iOS has two kinds of search options: prominent and hidden. Users may have to slide the screen towards the bottom to see the search bar appear, besides the standard top tab search option.

The search bars on Android always appear in their customary place on the upper tab. It is critical to have a search feature with the standard search icon that may be clicked to type in the search box on smaller displays.

6. Call to Action Button

Maintaining sufficient white space for easier tap target and suitable contrast for simple discoverability is also critical in CTA design in both iOS and Android. For key CTAs, Android always uses the floating action button. In contrast, the key CTA buttons of the iOS platform are usually found on the upper right.

7. Actionable Menu

Menus may be activated by any button in iOS action. The menu usually moves up from the bottom. When this menu is displayed, the backdrop blurs. Action menus show with a three-dot symbol on the right side of the content in Android apps. The menu is displayed within a little popular box.

Factors that Affect On Cost of Design Apps

Do you know How much does it cost to design an app? Well, it depends on the functionality you want in your own app design. Aside from understanding the design and development stages, you must also consider the expense of development. As we have already discussed the mobile app design process, let us now look at the essential cost aspects of an app project.

• App Platform
• Research & Analysis
• Prototyping
• Visual Designing
• App type
• Size of the app
• Features
• Testing
• Security
• Maintenance

It would be advisable to examine the following stages to ensure a seamless and friction-free handover:

• Ensure that both developers and designers communicate with clients from the start.
• When planning a design strategy, enlist the help of developers to consider how to design qualities might be molded to app functionalities.
• Updating developers on the core principles of design will enable quick code modifications if UX problems start.

Are you set to design apps that will astound the world?

So, we’ve covered practically everything for you about how to design an app. Keep in mind that effective app UI/UX design relies on the user-centric design idea. Achieving design excellence depends on how successfully you can incorporate users’ viewpoints through user research, wireframing, prototyping, and design testing.

It also depends on your team’s expertise and creative abilities to achieve excellence in UI/UX design. Make sure the design staff is knowledgeable about current standards and trends in design. Additionally, you need to have an incremental design strategy prepared so that you may make minor adjustments depending on user input throughout subsequent updates.