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.

2021 may have just begun, but it’s already shaping up to be a promising year for Dogtown Media. We were recently recognized as one of the best iPhone app developers by Digital.com! Thanks to our clients, team, and community for your support — we couldn’t have done this without you!

iPhone App Development to Meet Your Unique Needs

Mobile app development is a fast-growing and rapidly-changing industry. Whether they’re trying to reach new customers, improve user experience, or engage with an existing audience, businesses from a variety of sectors turn to iPhone app developers to deliver a product that lets them stand out from the crowd.

Since Apple’s App Store launched in 2008, development companies have sprung up all over the world. Each offer their own unique features and services. With such stiff competition, it’s an absolute honor for us to be featured as the best of the best by Digital.com. Let’s take a moment to learn more about their meticulous evaluation process for this prestigious award.

How Digital.com Digs Deep for Insights

Originally founded in 2015 as Review Squirrel, Digital.com has quickly become a trusted source of information for small businesses to find the best tools and services to solve their needs. By analyzing public sentiment through social media and scoring companies’ products and services, the website has established a solid reputation for finding unique insights into what would work best for small businesses across a multitude of industries.

Digital.com’s list of 2021’s best iPhone app developers originally had 160 candidates for consideration! To narrow it down to the top 15 companies, Digital.com’s team spent 40 hours researching and analyzing companies with gleaming reviews on the internet. During this time, Digital.com evaluated three criteria: the service lines offered by each company, the sizes of firms they’ve worked with, and the industries they focused on.

Each candidate had to be capable of providing a wide range of services such as mobile app development, marketing, and design. Candidates also had to demonstrate a consistent track record of successfully helping both large and small businesses. Last but not least, each development firm had to be versatile — that is, could they help businesses in a variety of sectors? With Dogtown’s previous work ranging from machine learning to the Internet of Things (IoT), Digital.com knew that we were a top contender.

Above all else, Digital.com emphasized firms who made the complex capabilities of emerging technologies easily accessible: “Making your service or software accessible to iPhone users requires an efficient and expert iPhone app developer,” says Christelle Feniza, Communications Manager of Digital.com. “This review guide was designed to help small business owners find top firms that can tailor services to meet their industry and needs.”

Thank You for Your Support!

Besides being recognized as one of the best iPhone app developers of 2021, we’re also grateful to have been recognized as a top mobile app developer in Los Angeles by Digital.com! These awards come off the tail of recently being featured as one of the Clutch 1000 List of Best B2B Service Providers for the third year in a row, so we couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come in this new year.

Thanks so much to Digital.com for awarding Dogtown Media with this prestigious honor. And we’d also like to take a moment to thank our clients, team, and community again. We’ll continue to work our hardest to make you proud!

ABOUT DIGITAL.COM

Founded in 2015, Digital.com reviews and compares the best products, services, and software for running or growing a small business website or online shop. The platform collects twitter comments and uses sentiment analysis to score companies and their products.

The bar is high for custom mobile app developers in 2015, with over 1,000 released every day in the Apple App Store alone. Mobile app development companies have to create better products than ever before if they hope to stand out — that applies to mobile games, education startups, and even FinTech app developers.

Differentiating apps begins in the design process. (Any mobile app designer can tell you: the devil is in the details.) Seemingly minute touches like button animations and menu color choices can literally make the difference between success and failure. It’s not just small startups putting more focus on usability and design in 2016; big companies like Facebook and Twitter pour millions into UX research, constantly tweaking their products to maintain a competitive edge.

The challenge for designers is separating the important details from the fluff. The mobile app development process has plenty of shareholders already  before you add headstrong designers to the mix, and many startups fail when the hunches of a single person on the team get in the way of delivering something usable to the shareholder who matters most: the end user. Particularly for designers, putting aside hard-earned gut instinct for what works can be a challenge. (Convincing a client to do the same? Even harder.)

Mobile app development increasingly follows highly established “best practices” when it comes to design — and with good reason. Yes, it’s true that minimal design usually results in better user experience. Yes, as a general rule, soft flat colors palates draw in the user more than complex, textured interfaces.

That being said, following best practices should never be the end of the process. The mobile app development community landed on the current UI/UX trends via rigorous testing, but what actually works in practice will always vary from product to product.

Startups that land on a healthy balance between best practices and rigorous testing of UI details will find themselves with a much more realistic end product; something that users will love to return to because it just “feels right.” As design becomes more important, mobile app developers can’t afford to skip out on testing during the design process.