Think of the common norms that have been established in even the last fifteen years, and how doing without them as a business could be seen as tantamount to discouraging your own success. If you don’t have a website, or social media profiles, for instance, you may as well be operating in the dark. At the very least, listing yourself on aggregate websites (such as restaurants on review websites and business ‘check-in’ pages) is essential.

However, while this is quite a clear and obvious example, it’s true to say that it’s far from the only one. New norms are forever shifting, requiring an integral and focused effort to keep up with the times.

One norm that seems to be here to stay as long as the current mobile OS infrastructure is in place is that of mobile apps. With the best UX/UI Design for mobile apps, you can more easily offer your staff an impressive and worthwhile, highly curated mobile presence. But what are the essential components to be found here? Let’s consider that, below:

Account Management

Account management is essential, because it offers your customers a means by which to curate their profile with you. Your app should offer this as standard. Here they should be able to manage their subscriptions, perhaps to your premium delivery options. They should be able to handle their addresses, payment information, see the status of orders and even potentially track their delivery.

Account management means trusting your customers enough to tailor their own experience within your app, and with your brand. It can certainly help take some of the weight from the shoulders of your support staff, and once a customer creates an account, they’re much more likely to return to it. This kind of worthwhile work can provide an elegant and often eloquent visual means of ensuring your app feels personalized, which is an effort the best developers often try to curate. 

Secure Logins

Of course, secure logins are important. As standard, customers expect you to regularly update the app to provide bug fixes, improve optimization, ensure compatibility with a range of devices, and more. However, security is also essential. Showcasing your data policy front and centre and abiding by those efforts is essential. You may also allow your customers to better log into their app with more security, such as through offering PIN or fingerprint logins with the biometric systems their mobile operating system will use.

Secure logins might also allow for the creation of 2FA (2-factor authentication) to better ensure even compromised accounts cannot be accessed with ease. 

Security is the first and last consideration that will help your app either live or die, and if it gains the reputation necessary to live on the mobile devices of your audience. You can improve bug fixes, ensure your app is intuitive to use, and even offer the best promotions your customers won’t find anywhere else, but if your app is less-than-secure, it will be a failure.

Support Access

An app should serve as a worthwhile hub of your business enterprise, and that means integrating support functionalities. Think of how many bank apps structure this approach. By logging in with your account, they can provide a direct line to your customer support without you having to pass security checks, or perhaps while passing limited versions of a security check. This speeds up the time they have to spend contacting you.

Support access might also mean allowing customers to read past support tickets they have opened and had resolved. It might mean ensuring that they can provide feedback, perhaps even outside of the App Store or Google Play platforms.

Intuitive Use

Of course, all web platforms should be intuitive to use, at least from the customer’s side.  They need to be able to access your products, your promotions, their account, their searched terms, and more within a few clicks at most. This is where that aforementioned UX design comes in, as it considers every single manner by which a customer might use your services and seeks to pre-empt that approach by ensuring even the most unintuitive engagement is met with the most intuitive response. This, in the long run, can serve as an effective and appropriate means of keeping your customers around. If they are certain that your app is the easiest and most informative to use, they will no doubt be back to see what else is on offer.

A Complete Hub

The best way to think of good app design is of it serving as a great hub for your business. Your website should offer little that your app can’t. Your app should be attractive, working on a range of screen spaces and devices. It should, ideally, be a place for customers to better interact with your firm without ever having to visit your website out of principle.

In some cases, you might even better secure your app by making sure it offers functionality customers can’t find elsewhere. To use an example, the Goodreads app allows you to scan the covers of books to add to your reading list, something that the website can’t do. What can phones or tablets offer that web browsers can’t? It’s worth considering this information.

A Forthright Feedback Approach

Unfortunately, it’s almost inevitable that your app will encounter issues, and that not everyone will have a good experience. This means that you need to be responsive and able to apply bug fixes where needed. This might mean asking dedicated staff to monitor your app store reviews, even publicly replying to them where appropriate.

Feedback means ensuring that your app is a dynamic entity, always in development, something that will allow for your customers to get the best impression of your brand. If it’s appropriately impressive then who knows? It might even serve as its own form of marketing.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily curate your app, understanding what the essential components are going forward.

© New To HR