App Design Process: From Concept to Reality
The increasing importance of mobile applications in our daily lives makes app development a viable industry for both established businesses and startup enterprises. The app design process requires more than just visual creation, it also involves procedures like research, development, testing, etc. App designers must follow a multi-stage process to provide the best solution to client pain areas.
Our experts prepared a step-by-step breakdown, some helpful insights, and pieces of advice. We explain the necessity of planning out the preliminary actions before going on to the actual design.
After reading the article, you will get a better understanding of the path a design goes through before it ends up in your hands. Keep reading to uncover the secrets and steps of an effective mobile app design process.
What is the app design process?
Before we move on to our guide, let’s first clarify its term.
Simply put, the app design process is needed to create an excellent user interface and seamless user experience. Actually, it consists of 9 phases in most cases, which we have to follow in exact order, as every step has equal value and impact on final outcome.
The primary goal of this process is to build an attractive and functional design that will engage the audience and bring the best return. If the process is well-organized, app designers get the finished application at the last step and are ready for release and post-release promotion.
9 app design process steps
The app design is not something that is completed in a day or a few. It’s a long-lasting process comprising numerous activities and involving different experts. Thus, it should be subdivided into sub-processes or steps to make it easier for your team to collaborate, track progress, and see how one decision affects the other.
Below, we suggest the most universal model. Do not hesitate to change the steps or adjust the model to your needs.
Step 1: Ideation
Benefits of the ideation stage.
Start the mobile design with the ideation stage. During ideation, you and your UI team should generate ideas for your product considering user pain points you can solve. At this point, do not make judgments on the ideas and do not classify them into bad or good. This will be done after your team generates as many ideas as possible.
You can involve other people in brainstorming. Those can be your team members, designers, stakeholders, and even the representatives of your audience. Your joint goal is to determine how your future product can help solve client pains and what pain points you can address.
If you already know what application you want to build, you can move to the second part of this step. Here, you will think about the features or peculiarities of your application that can help you stand out from the crowd. Also, consider the value you will give your app users and the philosophy your product will reflect.
At the end of this step, UI designers will discuss the ideas with your stakeholders and choose the most promising ones. Then, you will validate them, use them to conceptualize your app idea, and move to step 2.
Step 2: Research
At this step, you will create your user personas and conduct in-depth market research. This step is an integral part adopted by mobile app designers. It’s also an excellent opportunity to verify the assumptions you make in the previous stages.
Start by investigating your target market, exploring recent statistics, and studying current market trends. Then, move to user research. The data gained during user research will help UX designers understand your clients and their behavior better and create realistic user personas. You will build your design strategy around this knowledge and quickly set an emotional connection with the audience.
Also, you will be able to evaluate the compatibility of your business idea fairly. As per the Insider Intelligence report, nearly 90% of mobile time in the US is spent using apps, and the rest 10% is spent on the web.
Such promising statistics attract many business founders who are eager to launch a new successful product. This, in turn, makes the app development niche a very competitive area. Therefore, relying solely on assumptions while building your product is risky.
So, take this step in your app design process. Data on user personas will help your UX designers correctly guide the process. It also helps your app developers find clues to improving the app and increasing customer satisfaction.
To collect user research data and the target market data, a design team will need to include different research types in the modern app design. Preferably, you should involve two major types of market research — qualitative and quantitative research. Let’s discuss them in more detail.
Quantitative vs Qualitative research.
Quantitative research
In this type of research, we collect numbers. The data collected during this research type is used for insightful analytics on app potential, user behavior, and marker growth. Quantitative research includes but is not limited to:
- App analytics
- Desirability studies
- Online surveys, etc.
The data collected with quantitative market research may change the way you treat app design and development. It may even require a design team to change your strategy or choose another path for your product’s growth.
Qualitative research
This type of research does not give you numbers; it provides you with information instead. In this type of in-depth market research, you build your user personas and get knowledge of the recent trends, client preferences, and valuable market insights. Numerous types fall under the qualitative category, including:
- Interviews
- Journal studies
- Observational studies, etc.
In qualitative market research, a design team can observe how the focus groups interact with mobile apps like yours or even ask them about their impression after using such a product.
Step 3: Defining the scope
Steps in creating scope of work.
To proceed with your application design process, you will have to develop a software architecture and answer the following questions:
- What will be the type of your application?
- Who is your end user?
- What features and functions do you want to add to your solution?
- What design elements and features do you want to see in the design?
- What devices and OS do you build your mobile solution for?
- What is your tech stack?
- Does all the abovementioned comply with your business strategy and the values you identified in the first steps?
- What will be the peculiarities or specifics of your app that will differentiate it from the rest?
Prepare answers to these questions. You can define the scope and plan out the software architecture based on the information you collect and your user research. For this, you need to have a project management background and an understanding of the technical aspect of the project.
You can also refer to mobile app design services if you need help with this task. An expertized design team led by a project manager will set measurable objectives for your project, break it down into phases and subphases, and provide you with an estimation of the resources, budget, and schedule for the app development.
Step 4: Developing user flows
At this step, you should put yourself in the client’s shoes and check if your idea works for the end user. The easiest way to do this is to develop the user flows based on the information you prepared in the previous stages.
User flows refer to the representation of the path one takes when using your application. It should cover all the actions the user takes from the first screen (where they log into the app) to the last (e.g., where they complete the order).
User flow example.
User flows are very similar to task flows. The difference between them is that the former represents the user journey visually by moving from one app screen to another. Meanwhile, task flows represent the steps schematically.
Task flow example.
To create such a flow, a design team should focus on the significant tasks the app users complete with the help of your product. The flows should be simple and intuitive and demonstrate the navigation through your app. After preparing the documentation for the user flow mapping, app development companies can move to create sketches that will illustrate different screens of an app and the user interactions.
Step 5: Wireframing
Example of the app wireframing.
Step 5 is dedicated to the creation of wireframes. For this step, you should refer to your design team for help. A wireframe is the visual representation of your app’s UI. It represents the structure of each screen of your app, visual hierarchy, transitions, and user interactions.
User flow mapping done in the previous stages will form the ground for creating a wireframe. However, the wireframe will be focused on the user interface representation, while user flows are more centered on the navigation via the app.
Step 6: Prototyping
App prototyping example.
Compared to wireframes, clickable prototypes are like the next-level representation of your app. The difference between these two lies in the fact that a prototype is the closest to the reality visual representation of your product.
At the same time, a wireframe gives you only a basic understanding of what your app will look like. In other words, creating prototypes helps you visualize the finished or close-to-finished design of your app yet without a single line of code.
You may wonder why you must create wireframes and prototypes before starting the mobile app design process. That’s because a wireframe will form the ground for building a prototype.
If you skip the wireframe part, then you’ll be at risk of designing unnecessary or inconvenient features. Only closer to the end you will realize that this feature won’t look intuitive for your user. But you’ve already spent a lot of time and money designing it!
To prevent this during app design and development, start with the wireframes and set a solid foundation for designing prototypes.
Step 7: UX/UI design
App interface design and UI kit.
A design team will be involved in full-scale UI/UX design at this stage. You’ve already done prototyping and wireframing and have enough understanding of what your app will look like and its features. While creating prototypes and wireframes helps you understand the general picture, UX/UI design requires you to care about the detail.
This step of the app development is dedicated to creating all the concepts, design elements, skins, themes, shapes, buttons, images, illustrations, animations, other visual aspects, visual features, etc., that will be included in the finished product.
Hereafter, you will have to multiply test the user experience and ensure the design complies with the user flows and vice versa. At the end of this stage, you will send the UI/UX design to the mobile app developers, and they will bring your product to life.
Step 8: Testing
Reasons for performing a usability test.
After the coding part is done, your team should carefully test the app. For this, you can involve the focus groups of your target audience.
The goal of the testing step is to ensure there are no errors and bugs throughout the user journey. For mobile apps, we may differentiate between 9 testing types:
- Automated testing
- Manual testing
- Usability testing
- Performance testing
- Security and compliance testing
- Device testing
Let’s discuss them in more detail. To conduct the automated testing, you should identify the reusable automation scripts and introduce changes to them as per the project requirements. For manual testing, your testing team will manually check UI elements to ensure they work as expected. When conducting usability testing, the team will focus on the app’s usability aspects by checking the navigation, content, buttons, etc.
One more critical testing type is performance testing. Under such tests, you’ll check how your application handles growing traffic, how responsive it is, and how much resources it consumes when opened. Your goal is to reach maximum stability and efficiency regarding the app’s performance.
Besides, do not forget about the security testing, which tests if the app is secure by implementing SQL injections, SSL validation, session hijacking, etc. Last but not least, during the device testing, you will check how your app works on multiple platforms and various devices by using them directly or using the device simulation tools (like Perfecto, Mobile Anywhere, or others).
It’s also worth mentioning that you should not choose between these testing types. Instead, you should take your app through all these testing series to ensure it works well on multiple platforms and devices.
Step 9: Iteration
Here, we come closer to the end. The iteration phase is a repeatable process of introducing something new, testing the feature, collecting user feedback, fixing issues, if any, and validating the change in the UI/UX design.
Once the app passes all the tests and you introduce the essential improvements, the application is ready for release. You can submit your product to the application store of your choice and wait some time for the app to be reviewed by the app store’s team.
But you have little to worry about if you comply with all the rules and regulations. For iOS apps, developers will submit the app to the App Store. For Android apps, you will do it using Google Play. If you’re in the healthcare sector and looking for a reliable development partner for your healthcare app, consider exploring a selection of healthcare app development companies from Limeup. We have selected those that can offer expertise in developing secure and user-friendly apps that cater to your needs.
Healthcare mobile and dashboard app by Limeup.
5 reasons to plan the mobile app design process carefully
Benefits of considering risks at the first stages of development process.
A well-planned mobile design clarifies the project and helps you organize your team’s work. With such a plan, you know what the tasks for today are and what will go next tomorrow. The specific reasons why you need an excellent mobile application design process include the following:
Mitigate the risks
App development projects’ principal risks are time and money losses. According to the CHAOS report, only 34% of IT projects are delivered within the expected time and budget. The rest 66%, fail to meet the deadlines or exceed the predicted app design cost.
One of the reasons for this happening is ineffective project planning. To prevent risks and deliver the project on time, you will need to plan the process considering all the pitfalls.
By developing your app design process, you set clear KPIs (key performance indicators), define the deadlines, and apply the proper evaluation criteria to check progress. A design team gets more control over product growth, sticks to the plan, and responds to unexpected changes promptly without harming the whole project.
This is all facilitated by practical cooperation between teams, which is an integral part of the well-planned process.
Five steps to creating a risk mitigation plan.
See the whole picture
Mobile app development is like putting jigsaw puzzles together. Every puzzle piece is important, but you must look at the whole picture to fully grasp its importance. Only when you finish the jigsaw puzzle you can see how elements play together and compose a system that gives us a satisfactory result.
In the UI design process, we also break the activities into steps. When working on a particular stage, it may be unclear first why you should complete this activity before moving to another. But at the end of the journey, the role of each “puzzle piece” in designing and improving the application is pretty clear.
Stick to the chosen strategy
When working on particular tasks, people may lose their understanding of the general picture. If you plan the app designing process, you look at the design process from a bird’s eye view. This makes it easier for you to stick to the chosen strategy, methodology, and standards. You use the process plan as a guide, keeping your work aligned with the deadlines, budget, and resources.
Make the work more effective
Let’s return to the example of putting jigsaw puzzles together mentioned above. When trying to put random puzzles together, you will only confuse yourself more and more. Trying to do the entire picture at once is not the best idea. It will only make you toss from one piece to another without understanding what to start with.
A more effective decision is to break the picture down into smaller parts and work on them separately, one after another.
The same happens when user interface designers work on mobile design. Instead of rushing from one activity to another, they can plan the whole process and move smoothly from task to task. Planning the design process prevents frustration, irritation, or being lost in the never-ending scope creep.
Main steps of the design process planning.
Sure, some of the activities in the modern app design can be done in parallel. For instance, app developers can implement the design while your content specialists will work on the app’s content. However, most steps (like ideation, prototyping, wireframing, etc.) require careful attention from the mobile app designers and cannot be completed at once.
Invest your effort into the future
Your design team can reuse this plan multiply in other projects. A design team can put their efforts into planning once and then harvest the result anytime they need. The basic app design process can be customized for other software types, such as websites, systems, desktop apps, etc. Your mobile design checklist can form the core of your next project plan and save time.
Useful tips to facilitate your mobile app design process
Tips that can highlight the design and attract more users’ attention.
When designers follow a well-planned process, they get numerous benefits. These are lower app design cost, time efficiency, better control over the progress, high-quality results, and more. If you want to increase the return from following the app designing process, use the tips below:
Add some motion to your UI design
In app design and development, animations are not necessarily annoying cartoon images that take up half of the screen and cannot be hidden. Animation is everything that takes your user interface into motion.
Animations, for example, can suggest the path to the goal, hint about an additional feature, help app users navigate the application, and make the interaction with the product more smooth and controllable from the user’s viewpoint.
You can hire app designers to create different animation types. The most popular ones include: loading animation, feedback animation, scroll animation, transition animation, attention-drawing animation, and others. When choosing the animation types, try to balance the app’s usability and aesthetics and not overload the product with unnecessary cognitive load.
Explore the tool options before starting the app design process
This can be done in parallel with the initial tool evaluation. In the course of work, it may turn out that you cannot design particular UI elements with the help of your tools. To prevent such situations, test your toolkit before starting the design process. Here is the suggestion for the most effective tools where you can bring your graphic design ideas to life:
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Figma has been one of the most promising UX/UI design and prototyping tools in recent years. It comprises numerous features for prototyping and creating vector graphics. This design and prototyping tool will help app builders integrate exciting collaboration features.
All team members can view, comment, or edit the project as per your permission. Figma can unify the work of your content specialists, designers, developers, and managers under one roof.
Example of Figma interface.
- Sketch is mainly used for building a mobile app design. The features of Sketch include vector editing, symbols, artboards, and prototyping. Moreover, the tool has numerous third-party plugins users can add to automate repetitive tasks, add new design elements, and create animations. Unlike Figma being compatible with Windows and MacOS, Sketch can be used only on MacOS 11 or newer.
Example of Sketch interface.
- Adobe XD helps the design team can create designs and prototypes and share them with the rest of the app design and tech team. Founded in 2016, Adobe XD can be used on Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android. Furthermore, your design team can integrate the software with task management and collaborative tools like Zeplin, Slack, etc.
Example of Adobe XD interface.
Apart from a design and prototyping tool, your toolkit should also include project management software (like Jira or TicketNow), QA testing tools (Test Collab, TestRail, PractiTest, etc.), and analytics tools (like SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, Omniture, or others). A practical toolkit will streamline processes like software architecture planning, testing, and implementation.
Don’t forget about the post-launch effort
After the release, your development project continues. Post-launch research should be at the core of your team’s effort after the app goes live. This type of market research is aimed at evaluating how the product performs, if the active users are interested in it, and if there are any challenges when interacting with the product.
Steps to consider after app launch.
Post-launch efforts in the app designing process are about more than finding some problems. It’s also an excellent opportunity to discover new client needs and try to solve them with your product. By tracking user behavior, a design team gets closer to client pain points and preferences and can better understand what resonates with the audience the most. This information can influence strategic growth while making it more goal-focused.
Below, we list some of the most popular post-launch methods of exploring your product and your target audience:
- Enable log analytics. It’s important to find the right log software for this aspect of app design and development. In the tech context, logging means documenting all the events and actions in a particular system. Among the famous log collectors, we can mention New Relic, Fluentd, LogStash, etc. Using them will allow your technical team to trace issues and fix them promptly before they affect the client satisfaction rate.
The most famous log collectors.
- Conduct A/B testing. A/B testing is also called split testing. This testing method will help you masterly finish the mobile app design process by allowing your active users to test several options and choose the best one. Under A/B testing, the target audience is presented with two or more versions of a particular feature, user interface elements, buttons, etc.
Example of the A/B testing.
Your task is to expose the new features to the target audience and give them time to test and explore them. After the deadline, your design team collects and compares the data on the interaction with the feature options. The one users interacted most with wins this competition. After conducting A/B testing, your development team will know what option can help you deliver a seamless user experience.
- Organize user surveys. Listen to your target audience during the UI/UX design stage and after the product launch. The good idea is to conduct user testing or organize quick surveys. You can encourage active users to take them by offering a reward. For example, this can be a coupon code for a discount or the opportunity to win a prize.
Example of questions that can be included into the users’ surveys.
Do not make the user surveys obligatory, and do not include too many questions. Make the questions quick and easy to answer and avoid biases. This will help you increase the number of completed surveys. The user feedback collected from the surveys can help you evaluate the demand for a particular feature or check the overall client satisfaction rate.
Summing up on launching an effective app design process
Our team explained everything you should know about mobile design. Firstly, we explored the app design process steps that can be applied to your checklist for creating a competitive product. Then, we discussed the vital reasons you should plan the whole process before starting the project and shared tips to help you enhance the effort.
With this knowledge, organizing the application design process and mitigating the risks will be much easier for you.
Limeup has experience in building successful mobile applications for companies across the globe. Get in touch with us if you have some questions left or look for help with creating an outstanding digital product.