Understanding the nuances between desktop vs. mobile app designing and how to make the best of both to optimize user experience is critical for app designers in the modern world. This guide will go through some of the top practices for optimizing the user experience for both desktop and mobile.
Understanding The Difference Between Desktop And Mobile App Design
There are many differences between designing for desktop and mobile. Understanding these differences is critical to optimizing the user experience.
Screen Size
This is the obvious difference. The large difference in screen size between desktop and mobile gives you the opportunity to add more elements to the desktop version of your app. When designing for mobile, keeping the design simple is crucial to an optimized user experience. Designing for the desktop will let you be more creative.
User Interaction
Users can interact with the app using a cursor on the desktop and access different features using the cursor such as hover text or cursor-triggered animations. This enables desktop apps to have entire displays dedicated to images and videos, with informative text appearing only when the user hovers over them. This can let designers be more creative and make their application stand out from the competition as there are less limitations to the design possibilities.
On mobile, you can’t hover over the different elements, but you have an unlimited number of movements at your disposal. Swiping and shaking, for example. Don’t waste these capabilities of the mobile devices, use them. This will help your mobile app stand out from your competition.
While there are so many differences, these are two of the main ones that designers need to remember. If you want to know all of the differences, then you can get help from app design firms. Now let’s talk about how the design can optimize the user experience.
Desktop Vs. Mobile App Design: How To Optimize Your User Experience
So, what are some things you can do differently for desktop and mobile? Let’s take a look at some practical design advice to help you improve the look and user experience for both. You can also use the help of the best app designers to optimize the user experience even more.
Always Design For Mobile First
If you are going to design for both mobile app and desktop, then you should start with the mobile version first. Designing for desktop will be much easier once you’ve completed the mobile design. Why is this? Well, you will have more room to work with, more elements to incorporate, and you won’t be constrained by the screen size. If you want to optimize the user experience for both mediums, then start with the mobile app’s design first.
Prioritize The Important Elements
Only the most important elements of your design will fit on a mobile screen. You must be aware of what they are. Make a list of all the design elements and rank them from most significant to least important. This will come in handy later when deciding which elements should be on the main screen and which should be hidden in hamburger menus.
Users don’t like to waste time; your design choices need to help make their lives simpler and easier. How do you achieve this? Think about what users need and what actions they want to perform the most. Start designing with that as a priority and choose the elements which users will need to interact with the most.
This will help you streamline your app and optimize the user experience on both desktop and mobile.
Take Advantage Of The Mobile’s Capabilities
Having to do more work can be off putting and daunting, but there is a difference between developing and designing for mobile and porting a desktop app to a mobile device. You need to take advantage of all the features of a mobile device, such as motion controls and special sensors. These features will not only make mobile apps more usable, but they will also make them more interesting and stand out. This will optimize the user experience and show that you care about the users.
Understanding What Users Want
If you want to optimize and improve user experience, then this is important. You need to know what users want. Users want to have a speedier experience on a mobile device compared to desktop. So the design of the mobile app needs to be simpler and straightforward. If you want to add complex features, then add them on the desktop version.
Simplicity
Don’t clutter up your desktop and mobile designs with too many elements and information. This will cause the user to leave the website as it will be a bad first impression of your brand. Users should feel confident and comfortable when using the desktop and mobile versions.
There are many things to keep in mind when designing to optimize user experience for both desktop and mobile. These include:
- Keep important features and elements consistent across the desktop and mobile versions.
- Help lead users to the important features and information that you want them to use and see.
- All information should be clear and concise. Prioritize the content that users need the most.
- If there are form fields on the desktop and mobile versions, don’t add too many of them.
- It should be intuitive for users to navigate to what they need.
Conclusion
There are many ways to optimize the user experience on desktop and mobile. This guide talked about a few of the important methods that can be used. If you want to stand out from the competition, then get help from a mobile app design company who have helped other businesses do what you are looking to do.
