You're designing a mobile app. What design principles should you prioritize?

Before anything, you should be ready to conduct research in order to know more your users. When you prepare your research, set goals. Your goals should be aligned with your business needs and of course your users expectations. For that, be ready to recruit different kinds of users. Invite some people from those underrepresented groups in order to gain more insights on some different perspectives. Be ready to include their feedback in your design research so that you open the way to more people using your solutions. To know your users, let's say that you have conducted a qualitative research with the method interview, be ready to use empathy all along the journey. And that, with your users and with your team.

One of my favorite examples of simplifying an interface is Shazam. I don't think you could get any simpler than pressing a button and finding out a song's title. The problem has been so well understood, and so abstracted, it reduces the user's need to even think. From the pulsating animation, to the colored background, the user never feels overwhelmed, and knows work is being done behind the scenes. It's a masterclass in engineering, user experience, and simplicity that we can all take inspiration from.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. By keeping things clear and functional, we can ensure that our users have a smooth experience that encourages them to engage with our product. In our recent project for a health and wellness app, we made things super simple. Instead of overwhelming users with lots of text, we used easy-to-understand icons for things like tracking your daily activities or getting personalized health tips. By keeping things straightforward and focusing on what's important, we've made it a breeze for people to take charge of their well-being.

This is why the progressive enhancement is one good method to use when designing your wireframes and prototypes. The content of your app should be adaptative to smaller screens then you can expand the result to larger screens. When prioritizing the mobile version of the solution, you are thinking about the way people may use your app. For example, most of the time, people use their phones or their mobile devices on the go. Your app should be ready to offer some experiences that are quickly and easily to understand that is facilitating the understanding of each elements on the screen. When having your app on mobile devices, you will see that people need to do the tasks as the same as on bigger devices. Those are all important.

It's always essential to test and iterate with your team before any launching and to make sure that you are addressing the pain points of your users. When iterating be ready to review all the feedback from your users and your team. Always align the business needs to the users needs. For example, your findings from the usability studies with your users should be validated with your team on some critique sessions. All of those actions will help you analyze the right features and design to implement in your product. When presenting your A/B testing, be ready to really show which one is the past version and which one is the new version, but most of all, be ready to list the modifications to be done now and the others to be done later.

In the work of design, collaboration and communication are really helping the designers to give something unique and good for the users. Choose the best tools that encourage your team to participate during the feedback sessions. For example, you should respect the steps of creating the lo-fi prototypes because, here, your team will feel more welcome to give feedback. Be also ready to show that you are someone who is engaged in taking into account all the feedback you receive. But stay focused on the fact that you need to align all of them according to the data you gathered and the business needs. Lastly, when collaborating with others, be aware of your biases and the biases around. That is really crucial for the quality of the results.