Participating again as a Judge for the 2nd Annual Mobile UX Awards was an honor and a privilege. It was exciting to serve on the Mobile UX Awards Panel alongside the best product and design experts from Amazon, DropBox, Spotify, AirBnb, Uber, LinkedIn, Google and more. Check out the MUX Awards site for the full list of judges. It was truly an amazing mobile design event!

This year, many more companies submitted their apps than last year with its debut. Alan Nowogrodski, founder of the Mobile UX Awards, indicated, “The caliber of the awards continues to grow at an incredible pace. This year we partnered with amazing companies like InVision, added incredible judges including VPs from Netflix, Amazon, Google and received submissions from companies like Microsoft, Warner Bros and Mitsubishi. It’s hard to believe that the program is only on it’s 2nd year.” Indeed, so many more mobile applications were submitted that every judge was assigned 20 apps to review. Our evaluation criteria included app usability, user experience, their onboarding experience, overall look-n-feel, and innovative or unique design elements.

For me, it was an interesting experience to see what other mobile designers are producing today. From this, it would be worthwhile to share my observations on what I liked and cover some common UX issues that I noticed, too. So, from that, I came up with some recommendations:

1. Better Onboarding Experience

I was surprised how many apps implemented an onboarding process. We all know that the best UI is the UI that requires no explanation. But from my perspective, a good onboarding experience requires context. For instance, you receive hints about the functional capabilities of a tab or app section when you open it for the very first time. You still might have an onboarding sequence of full-screen explanatory images, but take care to not to make it too complicated.

Points of advice:

Keep the flow short (2–3 steps).

It must be informative and valuable. If there’s no real value, remove the step.

Avoid long text and complicated language. Keep everything short and simple.

Don’t explain all features at once. It’s better to explain features when the user first gets there or starts to use them (context hints).

Stay focused on your core features and values

Allow a user to skip an onboarding flow.

Also allows users to see the onboarding flow another time.

Most Importantly — the main goal of the onboarding process is to help your user to get Activated. You don’t want to lose your customer before they go through the application flow. For more about the AARRR mode, check out Melanie Balke’s, AARRR Framework- Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship. AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue.

2. The Registration Process

One of the most common problems in many of the apps I reviewed this year is a very annoying and complicated registration process. My thoughts:

I highly recommend allowing users to skip registration unless it’s absolutely necessary. Therefore, users get to the app’s core features quicker. Once she is engaged and ready to move forward, ask her to go through the registration process in order to unlock some features, etc.

If you only need the user’s email and name, use social network authentication to pull this information out. Google is a must have for Android; Facebook is a good option for both platforms unless your target audience is younger than 25; Twitter is okay.

Try to make your registration process as short as possible. Avoid excessive questions. For example, you shouldn’t be asking for the user’s physical address during registration. It’s better to ask for it once the user has a product in his cart and is ready to place his order.

3. Colors

Color schemes can influence the mood of your users once they are using your app, so be careful. If you are not familiar with color theory, please read about it — colormatters.com has a nice introduction to color theory. Observations:

Your color scheme should suit your application theme/idea. For example, it’s probably not a very good idea to use a lot of red color in a healthcare application.

Maintain background contrast so content can stand out

Always think about the environment where your application will be used. If it’s for night time, a dark theme might be suitable. If your app will be used on the go under the bright California sun, make sure that your functional elements have enough contrast.

4. Typography Matters

I won’t write a lot of here. Just don’t use too many different fonts and font-styles. It makes your UI look dirty.

5. Avoid the Hamburger Menu

About 80% of the Android apps that I reviewed had a hamburger menu. I agree the hamburger menu concept looks pretty organic in a material design system. But, our phone screens are getting larger. As a result, it’s getting more difficult to tap the right top corner with your thumb. So, the Tab Bar is trendy again!

6. Buttons are supposed to look like buttons

It seems obvious, but apparently not so for everyone. Buttons and actionable elements are supposed to look “tappable.” Non-clickable elements are not supposed to look “tappable.”

Teach your users that buttons are oval, square, or a certain color, and keep it this way throughout the entire application flow.

7. Negative scenarios — what you should care the most about

Positive scenarios even when badly designed are usually pretty straightforward. But negative scenarios are what really defines a good UX. Let users know why something didn’t work. Did they enter the wrong password? Did they leave a required field vacant? Was something left unchecked? Was the device simply unable to establish a connection?

Tell users why their action could not be completed! The most negative and frustrating experience you can imagine is when something is wrong and you don’t understand what you’re supposed to do. You can easily avoid these scenarios by providing users feedback about the error.

I remember entering a standard AT&T Wi-Fi password (random number and lower/upper case letters that is impossible to remember) while installing a PetCube application seven!!! times. It wasn’t because I entered the password wrong. No, the the device was unable to establish a connection. I promised myself to return it to Amazon if I was asked to enter it one more time. It got lucky.

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