Top 10 Common Mistakes in Mobile UX Design and How to Avoid Them: Part 1
What is a mobile app? It has become a symbol of comfort, fast work, and simplicity. But it’s always easy to create a product that will become popular and demanded in several application stores. One of the reasons is UX design mistakes. It’s needed for some big company to make one, this mistake is taken by other teams and the process can’t be stopped. So, let's look at some common mistakes and learn how to avoid them.
1. Inappropriate estimation
It’s a cool thing when you are asked to estimate the app, but not when you are asked to make it from the start. iOS app UPNP Xtreme does this exactly. By launching the app for the first time you will have to leave a review. We mean it: you haven’t interacted with the app yet and you must give it a star. You can’t just skip this pop-up or press on some other point. Give it 3, 4, or 5 stars and then you are free. Everyone was far too angry with this feature, so the App Store deleted it in the end. But by that time it had been already downloaded by many users.
Problem: a rating pop-up helps to get feedback from the audience. But it’s fair to ask about this after some time spent in the app. Otherwise, how are the users supposed to estimate it properly?
2. Useless messages
WhatsApp still remains one of the most messengers, because it provides a clean interface and simple navigation. Despite the talks over the new privacy policy, millions of people use it every day. Nevertheless, there is one thing that hates every person. If you want to delete your message, its text will be changed to “You deleted this message”. The worse thing is that the other person will also see this, and that can make it rather awkward.
Problem: if you provide the opportunity to delete a message, you must fulfill this function without leaving any signature. It seems like you make fool of your users, so reconsider the implementation of this feature.
3. Hidden features
A good app hits the audience at once. It manages to become popular for its features and UX. But some unpopular features may become unknown. For example, the app Spotify is an audio streaming platform that is mostly used to listen to music and podcasts. But only a few users know that it’s also possible to publish your own podcasts, analyze content, and monitor listening time.
Problem: the reason here is that this function is hidden in the menu and people just don’t aware of its existence. Consider over the importance of the feature and if it’s not that necessary, remove it from your app. Or if you want to save it, think better of the navigation.
4. New messages VK
VK is famous for its annoying push notifications that cover almost every action in this social network. Notifications in VKontakte inform you about new messages, birthdays of your friends, mentioning of your id in your chats, and replies to your comments. This irritates many people and makes them turn the notifications off at all. But recently some users have mentioned one more type of notifications. Now, if you haven’t read a message for several hours, you will receive the following notification:
If you try to turn them off, then the notification will have the text “Turn your notifications on so that you didn’t miss the message from…”.
Problem: if your push notifications deliver problems to your users, then you should refuse them.
5. Useless tabs
Every inch of your screen should be properly designed and if something can be omitted then do it. But there is the example when the tab bar of the Hulu app contained absolutely useless tab Account. As you see in the picture below, it doesn’t provide any functionality, but just redirects a user to the website. There is no point in creating a special tab for this info.
Problem: this useless tab takes the space that could have been spent on important features. If you want to leave this information, transfer it to the menu or account settings.
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