On your quest to create apps for the agriculture industry, knowing what not to do when designing your app is often half the battle. Whether you’re building a calculator, news aggregator or game app, avoiding these common pitfalls can help ensure your finished product is a success.
Cull the Clutter
The more content you squeeze onto an iPad’s screen, the harder it is for users to find the most important information. Prioritize your content, giving more space to primary information and putting it front and center. Incorporate secondary information less obtrusively. For example, put secondary content on another screen accessible via a link or button from the main screen.
Consider the Bloomberg iPad app below.
This app makes it easy to identify and view the primary content by placing it slightly to the left of center and giving it the most space on the screen. The secondary content gets less real estate along the bottom and right side of the screen, making it clearly visible without hindering the user’s access to primary content.
The Devil’s in the Details
Attention to detail is just as important in an app as it is in an ad, a website or a literature piece. Design flaws can quickly damage the credibility of an app’s content. During the development process, keep a close eye on the app’s layout, navigation and overall consistency.
Layout
Basic principles of professional layouts still apply to apps. Look at Example #1 again. The information on the right side is not aligned, causing an uneven margin. Anything you would not sign off on in a printed document—messy margins, crowded copy, not enough or too much white space, etc.—should not make it to the final version of your app.
Navigation and Inconsistency
Making the navigation in your app obvious and easy to understand increases the likelihood first-time users will successfully arrive at the information they want. An unsatisfying first experience with an app is the fastest way to lose potential users. Keeping your app consistent with the standard iPad user experience can help.
To give users access to more information in an easy-to-navigate format, Slate Magazine stacks horizontal menus on top of each other.
Although the layout may not be what every user expects, it still works because users scroll through these menus the same way they would in any other app by swiping right to left or bottom to top with their finger.
Departing from the intuitive design already known to users can make your app more difficult for people to use. Example #3 optimizes Facebook content for the iPad.
Because Facebook posts, photos and navigation on the Web are so widely recognized, the Friendly Plus for Facebook app stayed consistent with Facebook design and navigation wherever possible and only adjusted features as needed to fit the iPad.
Facebook users can easily make the transition to this app because it closely mirrors their existing Facebook experience.
Loading Danger
We’ve tested some apps with content that takes as long as 17 seconds to completely load. Even a 10 second load time is pushing it. Think about it. When you visit a website, do you wait around for a slow page to load? Or do you jump to a faster page instead? The same is true with apps.
Avoiding lots of high-res graphics in your app helps it load quickly. If your app must contain large graphics, set up the app so sections load independently as seen in the Flipboard app.
This allows the app to stay responsive to user commands even while it continues loading.
Pushing Forward without Purpose
The majority of app design pitfalls can be avoided by keeping in mind the experience you wish your target user to have from the very start of app development.
As a news app, it’s safe to assume the USA Today app was created to give users easy access to local, state and national news.
An app designed with the user in mind makes the primary content easily accessible, is easy to use and understand, looks professional and loads quickly.
Just as important as the user experience is the overall goal of the app. What do you want your app to do? Give information? Help solve a problem? Without a goal, an app can easily become a gallery for eye-catching capabilities that have no real purpose. Although the urbanspoon app (below) boasts many interesting capabilities, they all exist to help the user find a restaurant based on location, cuisine and price.
Setting clear goals for your app, keeping things simple, and paying attention to the details will help you create a useful, professional app.
Have you come up against other pitfalls of app creation? Share them with us.
