Designing and developing a new application is often an exciting project. Critical elements to get right are knowing your customer’s needs, the technology to use, and the sustainment plan. However, there are two elements that your customers will use every time they engage with your application: User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX).

UI and UX are two different but connected design features of an application’s development. Despite the two terms being used somewhat interchangeably, they are different. It is crucial to get each one correct to provide the best experience possible for your customers. And further, to stay ahead of developing app dev trends, we’ve made it a top priority staff only the most highly qualified UX app design team, ensuring to our Dogtown Media clients they are in safe hands. 

So, if you’re looking to get a better understanding of UI/UX, how it can influence your upcoming app, or how it greatly impacts app retention, we’re here to help!

What is UI/UX

UI and UX are two principles that have been around for a while, especially UX. Generally, both take a human-first approach to development and functionality instead of a technical one. Individually, however, UI and UX focus on different aspects of an application’s visual design.

• UI – User interface design is the primary way a person interacts with a digital product. Typically, UI is very visual and uses a combination of colors, images, and buttons that consumers use to navigate through an application.

• UX – User experience design focuses on the overall experience of using an application feels for both first-time users and loyal customers. UX identifies areas for improvement and pain points for consumers to create better design solutions.

As a dedicated iPhone app developer in San Francisco, we often time break down the relationship between UI and UX as such: UI is the steering wheel, seat, pedals, and dashboard, while UX is how it feels to drive the vehicle.

Why is UI/UX Important for your App?

It is essential to get all the elements of an application correct. From your customer’s perspective, their interaction and engagement with your application, and whether they enjoy it or not, are driven almost entirely by the UI and UX. This factor is especially true for mobile applications. An application can be a functional and technical marvel. However, if it is designed poorly and provides a miserable experience for your customers, the application will not succeed.

From a competition standpoint, UI and UX are essential to attracting customers, but more importantly, keeping them using your application. This factor is exceptionally relevant for startups and small businesses.

Top Three UI/UX Tips for Your App

Both UI and UX decisions and considerations start early in the development process. Here are a few tips to get the UI and UX right for your application.

• Knowing your audience might seem like it goes without saying, but it doesn’t. It is challenging to get the UI and UX correct if you don’t know who you are designing the application for, what problems it solves, or what services it provides. The most effective way to know your audience is to conduct user research.

• Wireframing is a tried-and-true method to create sample application variations. Comprehensive wireframing efforts test the look and feel of an application, useability, and some functionality. Due diligence with wireframing can save time and money during the development of the application.

• Deciding on an overall visual style and maintaining that approach throughout the application development provides uniformity. These elements include a color palette, design atheistic, and theme. Consistency is the main takeaway, and every design decision should be made to support the overall visual style.

Additional UI/UX Tips for Your App

And once you’ve knocked out the basics of UI/UX in your app, here are two additional considerations:

• Simplistic designs tend to be better accepted by customers. This approach does not apply to every application. However, cluttered, cumbersome, and clunky UI tends to be poorly received. If your application is difficult to use, your customers will find a similar application that isn’t. An effective way to determine if the design is working or not is to test iterations with potential customers – not necessarily members of your team.

• Don’t overlook or underestimate the onboarding experience. The UI is the first element a new customer will interact with. However, it will not be long – minutes, perhaps – before that person decides if the UI/UX works. If your application is complex for new users, or the customer needs some guidance getting started, a muddled or non-existent onboarding means losing customers. Additionally, provide an option to skip the onboarding as some customers just want to get in and go.

Next Steps

UI and UX are essential parts of an application. It is the most crucial part from a customer’s perspective, as this is the only way they will engage with your application.

Dogtown Media uses intuitive UI/UX design for our client’s applications. Our design team creates innovative and customer-focused user interfaces that enhance and compliments the overall user experience. Contact us today for a free consultation to see how we can incorporate UI/UX into your applications.

As we’ve always said, If you can dream it, we can build it — that’s our motto! Over the past decade, we’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with clients all around the world to commit to that motto. We couldn’t be happier to see it pay off.

And to that, we would like to extend a huge thank you to the Techreviewer team for naming us a top app development company in the US. The review list of leaders was compiled based on the expertise, experience, and reliability of the development companies. To make an assessment Techreviewer collected information about our services and client’s reviews. Their research placed us in the list of mobile app development companies out of over 500 competitors. Here’s to a big win for Dogtown Media!

As a prominent iPhone app developer in San Diego, we here at Dogtown Media, foster a collaborative experience with our clients to take their dream concept and turn it into a reality. We emphasize an iterative approach of ideation to creation to deliver functional apps that solve real-world problems. It’s these principles that have allowed us to thrive as an app development agency since 2011, and receive awards such as this one!

Our Reaction

To receive this recognition puts us over the moon! It’s always deeply satisfying to receive awards such as this, signifying we are on the right track! We also want to thank each and every one of our clients who believed in our mission to bring their innovative app ideas to the market. 

When we receive this type of feedback it reinforces that we as an app development agency are on the right track. We’ve worked tirelessly to deliver high-quality projects to our clients. This award shows we’re on the right track. We can’t wait to continue on this journey and help our clients develop new exciting revenue opportunities.

With the help of platforms like Techreviewer.co, we hope to continue to reach a greater audience of companies where we can deliver value through our application development services. Here’s to a successful 2022! We hope our dedication to our craft continues to foster these exciting accolades!

Our Reaction

Techreviewer.co is an online agency reviewing platform that conducts annual research to deliver market leader lists. Based on their industry-leading investigatory practices, Techreviwerer is able to identify market leaders are for a given industry.

Techreviewer prides itself on delivering high-quality agency rating services as an independent IT market research and analysis company. The platform helps to find the best companies that provide high-quality IT services for an array of services. As a result of objective market analysis, the Techreviewer platform determines the most successful and reliable IT companies in the industry. Techreviewer’s ranking lists help organizations select the right technology partner for their business needs.

Everyone in tech seems to agree that the future is in augmented reality, but a clear AR leader has yet to emerge. Google and Facebook have a head start on the competition, but Apple threw its hat in the ring at this week’s WWDC with ARKit, its new AR platform. Apple can now claim that it has “the largest AR platform in the world.” This is great news for iPhone app developers looking to break into AR and its seemingly endless possibilities.

The ARKit makes the imaging and tracking built into iPhones and iPads available to developers instead of forcing them to create their own from scratch. It utilizes something Apple is calling “world tracking,” a form of machine learning that maps out various points in an environment and tracks those points so that perspective and scale change accordingly as users move their device around. It’s impressive, but it’s not quite the AR breakthrough iPhone app developers have been craving — at least not yet. Unlike Google Lens or the AR ambitions Facebook unveiled at this year’s F8, Apple hasn’t emphasized the camera as a sort of automatic search function, which seems to be one of the most potentially revolutionary aspects of AR. Overall the WWDC announcement was surprisingly light on prophetic speechifying about the ways AR and machine learning are going to change the world.

But maybe Apple knows that kind of talk ultimately doesn’t matter, especially if it has its long game in place. As soon as iOS 11 hits, Boston iPhone app developers will be able to deliver their AR creations to iPhone and iPad users. People won’t need to buy a new device akin to Google Glass or Snap Spectacles — their AR device is already in the palm of their hands. Google’s Tango project is not on every Android device, and developers working on AR for Facebook are exclusively tied to the Camera app. ARKit will be on every iPhone or iPad running iOS 11, and developers will be able to incorporate its features into independent apps. All of this bodes well for Apple in the chess game that is the AR field.

This past weekend, Uber pulled its self-driving cars from Tempe, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh after one of its autonomous Volvo SUVs flipped onto its side in a traffic accident. Even though the self-driving car was not at fault and the company’s autonomous fleet is already back on the roads, the incident keeps Uber in the news in a negative light.

The wreck coincides with reports of deeper, more damning issues with the Advanced Technology Group (ATG), Uber’s autonomous vehicle wing. Waymo, Google’s self-driving unit, is suing Uber over stolen technology. Since November, more than 20 engineers have walked away from the project, many due to frustrations with the company’s tendency to rush to flaunt its technological achievements before perfecting them. To make matters worse, a rift has reportedly developed between the original ATG team and the crew from Otto, a self-driving trucking startup that Uber acquired last year, in part because Travis Kalanick has yet to decide whether the business should prioritize its autonomous cars or trucks.

All the bad press Uber has received lately seems to loop back to Kalanick’s questionable leadership. Already struggling with governance issues, the company has lost several executives in the past couple months, most recently its president, Jeff Jones, an experienced business leader who only stuck around the startup for six months before moving on. The search is underway for a COO to help right the company’s course; whoever lands the job has a tough task ahead of him or her. San Franciso app developers have to wonder what it will take to rehabilitate Uber’s tarnished image — and if the company can fix it before one its competitors pulls ahead.

It seems as if everybody wants to play the Snapchat game these days, which is understandable given the ephemeral image messaging app’s popularity with young people (and investors, of course). Instagram and Facebook have already looted the Stories feature, and now it appears as if Apple is doing a little borrowing of its own with its app developers’ latest creation, Clips. Announced on Tuesday, Clips is an intuitive video editing app, ideal for dashing off quirky videos to share with friends. It has features comparable to Snapchat, Instagram, Vine (RIP), and similar apps as well as some novel innovations of its own, including a Live Title function that allows you to add text to your video with your voice. But what differentiates Clips the most from Snapchat is its lack of an attached social network.

This is admittedly a pretty huge distinction. Clips is designed as a zone for creation only; what you put together has to be shared on another platform. Users will be able to send their videos to their contacts through iMessage, and Apple’s app developers have even added a feature called Smart Suggestions that utilizes facial recognition capabilities to recommend which friends to share your videos with. But while users can upload their videos to Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, there is no internal messaging system in the app or a way to broadcast from the app directly.

For those who are concerned about privacy, this lack of a built-in social network may prove to be a draw. But iPhone app developers familiar with Apple’s recent history will note that the tech giant has consistently struggled with social networking (remember Ping?). Still, Apple has an opportunity here to be the video editor of choice for the next generation of viral videos, just as long as their creators have an iOS device.

Is it possible that Clips is more than just a fun video app for the Snap generation? Consumer tech observers are already theorizing that Clips may be a prototype for Apple’s coming push into AR. NYC iPhone app developers can determine how serious these predictions are for themselves when the app drops this April.

In the business of predicting future trends, there are few who can touch Ray Kurzweil. Among all the panels on offer at this year’s SXSW Interactive, we at Dogtown Media knew this was one we couldn’t afford to miss. Beyond his groundbreaking work as the primary inventor of technologies as disparate as the charge-coupled device flatbed scanner and print-to-speech readers, Kurzweil is a noted author and champion of the futurist and transhuman movements. (Not to mention head of engineering at Google.)

His current primary interest, however — and one he shares with his daughter, New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil — is artificial intelligence (AI). How will automation affect society in coming years? More importantly, what are the implications of that work on quality of life for regular people, tech companies, and NYC app developers?

Riffing off a cartoon by Amy Kurzweil featuring robots playing golf, Ray shared some fascinating background on his current project developing computers that are able to write poetry and paintings based on written input on the styles of historical artists.

The challenge, as any iPhone app developer working in AI can attest, are the hard limits of today’s technology, and the seemingly glacial pace of machine learning development. Sure, on the outside it looks like machines are getting faster on a bell curve, but in the trenches it feels more like building a sand castle in a rainstorm.

Said the Kurzweils, we can envision today’s AI technologies as being capable of “level 100” sophistication — perhaps 115, with the right resources and contexts. For reference, a computer distinguishing between objects (like, say, a dog or cat) would be considered level 15. The real prizes in AI are currently several times above level 100, where AI might start being able to interact with the world and “fill in the gaps” with intuitive logic. A human, shown and image of a dog running towards a man and then a second image of the dog standing on top of the man, can infer that the dog knocked the man down in-between “frames.” For machines, leaps of logic like this may be farther off than we’d like to think.

Snapchat’s IPO was one of the most anticipated tech events of the year. So you can bet that when $SNAP went live this Thursday, app developers were watching. Would it soar or sink? Will traders benefit, or only underwriters? And why is the social media titan listed as, of all things, a “camera company?”

You read that right: not a social media company. Not a media platform. A “camera company.” (And we all saw what happened to GoPro, the last big “camera company” on the stock exchange, whose price dwindled to a fraction of it’s initial value within the year.)

Apparently, Snapchat is betting that they’ll be able to pole-vault beyond the ephemeral image-sharing that made them famous, and even above the wearable “Spectacles” and filter advertising that made them notorious. According to their S–1 filing, “we believe that reinventing the camera represents our greatest opportunity to improve the way people live and communicate.”

The question every iPhone app developer in Los Angeles is asking is: what on earth do they mean by “reinventing the camera?” In all likelihood, it’s under wraps for a reason, and will follow a progression much more ambitious than their toy-branded Spectacles launch, which has seen low adoption and negative revenue. (Although to be fair, Snapchat’s app developers succeeded where even Google failed in making wearable cameras cool again.)

The answer will likely address how Snapchat can grow without fear of copycats, as features like their “stories” function have proven easily adaptable by more mainstream social media platforms. Instagram’s “story” statistics nearly matched Snapchat’s within just a few weeks of launching, going to show how app developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel to reach users. They simply have to have the thing users want, in the right context.

Not all investors trust that $SNAP will deliver on these promises, particularly as founders and high level executives cashed out billions in stock on opening day, signaling that even the higher-ups may be skeptical that their shares can maintain a value as high as the $25 they closed at on opening day. For mobile app developers, the only way to answer these questions is to watch and see.

If you’ve ever combed through reviews in the Apple App Store deciding which app to choose, you’ve probably noticed something weird. Unlike Google Play, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and most other review-based digital ecosystems, Apple doesn’t let developers respond to reviews.

This is too bad for iOS app developers, because it leaves them completely at the mercy of (possibly malicious) users, often more frustrated with some aspect of iOS or their phone than the app itself. It’s too bad for users as well, as it makes it difficult to gauge how engaged a developer is with their product at first glance.

Long story short: allowing responses has been a long time coming for Apple developers.

San Diego iOS developers will finally get their wish in a couple months, as Apple has announced that iOS 10.3 will launch with the feature. The operating system is currently in beta, and while a firm date hasn’t been set for release, developers expect it to arrive within a couple months.

The company will also be updating the baked-in mechanisms for prompting users to rate apps. This, too, has been long overdue, as the current system drags users out of their app experience mid-task, and encourages developers to include “nag screens” that launch… well, far too often.

Instead, users will be able to quickly rate in-app via a simple overlay, without losing anything they’re working on or redirecting to the Apple App Store itself. Smart stuff.

iOS 10.3 has more than just an improved app store and rating experience waiting for users and developers. Increased Siri integration into native apps will open exciting new possibilities for voice-control of app and OS functionality, while features like “Find my AirPods” will appeal to users feeling locked out by controversial design changes like, notably, the removal of a headphone jack.

This time last year, few developers would think of the Parisian tech scene when they thought of FinTech and mobile banking app development.

In the wake of Brexit, the tech community is starting to see that change. Just this week, Paris held it’s first FinTech Forum event, highlighting exciting work going on in the French capital and drawing interest from developers, startups, and investors who otherwise might look to London for FinTech opportunities.

The change, of course, can be blamed on Brexit—England’s controversial vote to separate from the European Union, which has thrown their large and complex banking system into a bit of confusion. For now, London safely remains the financial center of Europe, operating as a major clearing house for the region. Analysts expect the nation’s banks to lose as much as $77 billion once the Brexit movement becomes official. The result: members of the European union are competing to see who will be the next economic center for the continent. Paris, with it’s thriving tech scene, is emerging as a strong contender.

While Paris has long held a dynamic artificial intelligence and backend development economy, “hotter” startup areas like FinTech have traditionally booked it for London or San Francisco upon maturity. That stands to change, and French app developers know it.

With over 1,500 international delegates in attendance, the FinTech Forum shows a bright future for mobile app developers in Europe, or even San Francisco app developers looking to engage with the Euro market.

This time next year, there’ll be more competition and choice in the European tech economy. From a mobile perspective, Brexit could give at least as much energy to emerging startup markets as it takes from the London tech scene—translating to an overall “win” for the global mobile economy.

London has a problem. It’s a problem that is probably familiar to anybody who’s rented an apartment in a major city: rising rents, obscure housing laws, and difficult landlord-tenant relations.

London app developers at RentersUnion might have a solution to this problem. And that solution comes in the for of a small, inconspicuous chatbot, with a twist—their product not only translates legalese to help renters understand the complex logic of their current or potential lease agreements, but also uses artificial intelligence to draft emails and contact landlords on a renter’s behalf, following best practices to handle transactions in a timely and legally safe manner.

The bot is specifically tailored to the London real estate market, with a comprehensive knowledge of local laws and regulation when it comes to apartment repairs, issues like mold or environmental damage, and insurance.

Normally, getting answers and resolutions for these kind of issues requires tenants to consult with property lawyers. As you can imagine, this can be prohibitively expensive, especially for the lower-income renters who need the most assistance to avoid falling through the cracks of the housing system. While mobile apps and chatbots can’t replace a lawyer in all circumstances, run-of-the-mill issues and questions are often repetitive and minor, allowing tech startups to potentially save clients huge amounts of money—and providing an important, socially-conscious service in the process.

Says RentersUnion co-founder Faisal Khalid, “if this works, we could actually end up becoming the largest housing lawyer in all of Europe—which creates a lot of interesting opportunities beyond just giving advice.”

For now, the small agile app development team is working to create an API and widget for embedding and integrating with existing charities and housing advocacy organizations, ensuring that their tool can reach as many real-world users as possible—not just the few who happen to think of “tech” when they think of “solutions for problems.”

Whether it scales into a business, a social justice organization, or both, RentersUnion is a great example of how mobile app developers in London are tackling tricky problems that brick-and-mortar solutions have struggled to solve. And they’re making life better for thousands of regular people while they’re at it.