Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens

Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens is crucial for any application to be successful these days. In 2021, the number of mobile users worldwide stood at 7.1 billion. As the number of mobile phone users continues to increase, more and more UI/UX designers are focusing on Designing web applications for keeping mobile screens in mind.

Most of the designs are now more mobile-friendly and designing web applications for mobile screens is now becoming a very critical aspect of the entire web design process.

Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens

In this article, we will discuss various aspects of designing web applications for mobile screens, how to design web applications for mobile screens and what is the importance of it.

Mobile First Design

Mobile first design as the name suggests is about designing any application, website, or piece of software keeping mobile-friendliness as the main priority and making sure that the design is compatible with smaller screens. In this approach, unlike the traditional approach where we first design for the larger viewports, we may not design for the larger screens first, but rather start with designing the application or website for smaller screens in order to make the application or the website more scalable and reach out to a larger number of audience.

The Mobile First Design approach came in existence ever since the first smartphone was created. But it started becoming recorganized by the designers community after Google popularized the mobile first design in 2010. They did it by making sure that all their applications are mobile friendly. Now mobile first design is taken as a best practice by almost all major tech companies.

Importance of Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens

Importance of Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens is immense. And that was the reason mobile-first approach was born in early 2010s. The Importance of Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens can be understood through following points:

Better User retention:

User retention is a very tricky job and is completely independent of how good the codebase is. The user only looks and interacts with the interface not the code. Key to User retention is a good user interface coupled with great user experience. A user will not spend time on an app where text is overflowing and colors are causing eye strain.

Effective and Enjoyable interaction:

A good mobile first web application design is a great way which can improve the user’s interaction with any mobile application. User interface design is aimed at easy enjoyable and effective interactions between the users and the app. The primary goal of application UI principles is to provide the best interaction to the user.

Turning customers to loyal customers:

The whole idea of UX design, more specifically, Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens is to create an application structure that provides the best experience to the users. The aim of mobile application design principles is to turn customers into loyal customers by providing a positive experience to them. UX is directly or indirectly responsible for a user’s journey through an application which ultimately decides the success of the business.

Scaling the application to millions of mobile users:

Designing applications keeping in mind the mobile users can really help you in targeting more customers and getting more eyeballs to your product/service. The mobile approach UI/UX design can help us scale the application to more number of people. UI/UX design concepts like Repetition, Alignment, Contrast, etc. become even more important for the mobile app approach since the size of the screen and the visuals that can fit in are limited.

Communicate your mission:

The visual elements along with the copywriting takes the major part of communication for the brand. To communication you mission and your product/service – you will have to do these to things right. Irrespective of what help marketing provides, users have to come to your website/app to buy product/service or know about it. Here good copywriting along with great UI can create a lasting impression in the mind of the user.

How to Design Web Applications for Mobile Screens

The process of designing web applications for mobile screens can be divided into 3 parts:

Step 1. User Research

The process of UI/UX designing starts with user research. The UI/UX designer takes detailed notes of the user research. there’s a lot of information that will be gathered so the UI/UX designer has to analyze the information, understand the trend, and organize data using tools to identify trends and patterns in that data. The role of the UI/UX designer is to create reports and presentations to present that complex information to other people in the team.

Step 2. Wireframing and Prototyping (Mobile First approach)

Wireframes are detailed structural sketches that illustrate a concept. A wireframe for a digital product is similar to a blueprint for a house. Wireframe clearly illustrates how the product functions and the core elements of its design. These steps are quite similar to that of web designing for desktop screens the only difference being here we will focus on Mobile-first approach. Mobile-first approach basically means to design prototypes focusing on mobile screens and then move towards larger screens.

Step3. Visual Designing and testing

The UI/UX designer then comes up with creative and innovative design solutions. he/she designs the User Interface and creates different visual touch points and establish the interactivity with them. Along with that the interfaces are tested and iterated upon the shortcomings.

Best UI/UX practices – Designing Web Applications for Mobile Screens

Follow these essential best practices for designing better web applications for mobile screens.

Emphasize on what mobile user needs:

Here is an example, Phones are getting bigger and the header section is unreachable so by having the search box closer to the thumb users can easily access it. While other did not even notice, in the new iOS release Apple moved the browser bar from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen. These are the small things that matters and in mobile design. Always give emphasis on what the mobile audience wants from the design.

Contrast:

Setting up a proper contrast to the mobile UI helps the user differentiate between what is important and what is not. Proper contrast can be obtained through organizing the design, establishing hierarchy, emphasizing a focal point and adding visual interest. It can be done by a lot of different ways – we can add contrast with color, with weight, with size of typography or even with the imagery.

Limit Form Fields:

In mobile screens, limited form fields is essential improve usability as users are checking out the webpages from small screens. Hence we must keep the form elements spaced out so visitors can fill them out easily without accidentally clicking on the wrong one. Here , two practices are a must – avoiding drop down menus and using easy to find, bigger buttons. Multi-step forms are even better for mobile users as users can fill out each question at a time which allows them to go quickly through the form without scrolling.

Alignment and Proximity:

A proper alignment in a mobile first user interface helps organize and group elements, it creates a visual rhythm of elements on the screen, Alignment and proximity brings order in unordered typography. Hence a proper alignment becomes even mor crucial for smaller screen where the readers can handle a large chunk of text all together.

Page Speed:

Page speed is not just an essential factor for mobile first approach but also one of the most crucial factor in user experience and conversions. The ideal page loading time should be 2 seconds that means your webpage should load within two seconds ideally but in the worst case scenario it should load in two to four seconds.

Repetition:

Proper use of repetition through increasing consistency, increases the user’s ability to learn and identify the pattern in our interface or layout and it also reduces confusion and helps the user guess objects in the layout properly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, designing web applications for mobile screens is now not just an add on to your design, but a best practice that designers follow. Make sure that you mobile first design is optimized by prioritizing what the mobile audience needs, using responsive design techniques, simplifying the navigation, optimizing performance, and working on user user feedback.

Having a mobile-first mindset and following the best practices we discussed in the article will surely help you create better and more engaging designs, specially for mobile audience.