Mobile UI Design: 10 Best Practices to follow

At present, the competitive landscape in mobile apps is highly influenced by how an app looks. Just to emphasize how things have changed, let’s consider an example. When Booking started out in 1996, it looked like a 90% HTML web page. Today, an app that looks like that would likely be perceived as a scam or a joke. So even an MVP version of your mobile app should be up to par with customer expectations and competition. And when it comes to fully-fledged solutions, you should take care of Mobile UI Design and add to that:

• an ever-present task of outperforming the competition;
• a diverse user base, and, hence, the need for much more extensive responsiveness and adaptability;
• ever-evolving accessibility practices.  

It may sound like a challenge, yet when you get a true professional on your team, it turns into an exciting and creative journey. 

Lastly, UI design is tightly intertwined with User Experience (UX) design. Both of them together are strong determinants of your app’s success.  

So in this article, our first task is to distill the role of UI specifically. Secondly, we aim to demonstrate the latest and greatest practices. Finally, we will break down best practices so you can gauge what your UI specialist is offering and why.

UI vs UX

It would be a mistake to say that either UI or UX is more important. Each bit of mobile app development plays its role in the user journey through your app. 

• You may have the most amazing and modern UI. But coupled with confusing UX – your app will not succeed. 
• Having the most thought-out interactive and smooth UX might also not be enough. For instance, if your UI’s contrast, typography, and poorly clickable buttons make it a challenge for the user.
• But, we’ll say that: if your UI is really pretty, it might make the user keep the app and give it another chance. If it is ugly or boring, the user will probably be quick to delete it. 

Mobile UI design is all about visual appeal and aesthetics. It is also guided by user research, the same as UX. It plays a significant role in UX as well. Its typography makes sure a user doesn’t spend too much effort while reading. Its contrast also helps to make the visual presentation intelligible. Such color palette helps to shape the user’s emotional response to the experience. Its aesthetic style helps the user to connect and relate. UI is the magic that binds all elements together. 

That’s why mobile UI design is generally seen as a creative field. It might trick people into thinking it has no tangible impact. Yet, there is still a strong and direct connection to the mobile app’s performance metrics. So here is a list of the  mobile UI effects on specific metrics:

Next, we will present the 10 best mobile UI design practices. In the last section, we will provide average numbers on each practice and the actual metrics.

Mobile UI Design Practice 1: Flat Design

The first best practice is already driven not so much by trends and tastes but by the need to optimize the app’s performance. It’s called Flat Design and it has been replacing skeuomorphic design a lot lately. Skeuomorphism is the one that tries to emulate every object as close to reality as possible. It involves 3D shapes, shadows, multiple layering, a lot of texturing, and things like that. Surely, it seriously affects the app performance metrics. So, going back to basics in a creative way led to a new wave of classical flat digital looks. Here are some of the best examples of flat mobile UI design.

Historically, skeuomorphism was pioneered by Apple, around iOs7. By 2010, the trend was over. But it didn’t go away completely. It is still pretty popular with desktop UIs. Skeuomorphism on laptops takes a different spin, upping the game. (Imagine a 3D image of a burger and when you hover over it, certain ingredients pop out and they can be clickable). And as for mobile UIs, trendy mobile apps selectively utilize some elements of skeuomorphism. Yet, it got a new name too – Neumorphism.  For example, in the banking app below, all elements are framed with drop-shadows to create more depth and visually separate elements. This lightweight modernized implementation looks refined and clean and adds to the usability. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 2: Dark Mode

This is more than just a popular trend. Dark Mode made its way into built-in native functionality. These days most phones offer built-in Dark Mode. If the mobile app detects this setting, it can automatically switch to darker colors. These days, it is standard to design light and dark versions of your mobile app.

Statistics on Dark Mode indicate that 80% to 95% of users prefer the dark mode. So if you are going to cut UI costs for your MVP, do it by designing for Dark Mode only. But why such colossal popularity? 

• First and foremost, health benefits – dark mode is much easier on the eyes. The blue light of light screens can be detrimental to eyesight. This fact makes even users who hate dark mode to at least attempt to use it. 
• The second factor is aesthetic impact as dark colors often get associated with luxury and premium status. After all, the black color is synonymous with power and strength. If you think about luxury cars, they are mostly black. Black also screams dominance. So, black sells. 
• Thirdly, dark mode in mobile UI design saves battery. In some devices up to 60%. It won’t be the main reason to choose the dark mode, but some users find it important. 

Implement with Caution: Hype is Followed by Cool-Off Stage

As we all know, after the hype comes the cool-off stage. So, don’t discard the light color schemes. 

The discussion around the health benefits of Dark Mode has already changed its tone. It appears that dark mode isn’t as beneficial as it seems. It does reduce the blue light, but the effect isn’t drastic.  And it appears, there are other ways to reduce the impact on the eyes. For instance, phones offer night mode – usually from 10:00 pm phones switch to warmer tones and decrease brightness.

The other thing is the app’s psychological impact. Even though it is a trendy UI practice, some people experience aversion to it. Black might feel heavy, or when used with strong contrasts, it can feel violent or aggressive. 

In addition, if people use tools for work in dark mode to protect their eyesight. So, if that’s after-work app browsing, they need a change to ‘lighten’ up their mood. 

Lastly, some app concepts just aren’t suited for the dark mode while others would suffer from consistency issues. After all, keeping the consistency of emotional load between light and dark modes is a challenge. (But Practice #3 is here to help with that, so read on). 

Find the Balance and Right Fit

Implementing the Dark Mode that benefits your app is not an easy feat. So, here are some tips:

• Don’t use pure black – opt for dark greys
• Use dark mode for media-heavy apps rather than text-heavy apps
• If there is a lot of text, ensure readability with contrast according to accessibility guidelines. 
• Adjust the text size.
• With dark themes, don’t use a lot of different colors. Dark themes get their aesthetic benefits from a clean look, so stick to the 60-30-10 rule. It allocates 60% of screen space for background color, 30% for secondary color, and 10% for accent.
• Test! Test! Test! Usability testing is vital. You should test:

1. the effects of dark themes on users depending on ambiance, 
2. the impacts on app consistency between light/dark themes, 
3. the look of a dark theme on different devices.

Mobile UI Design Practice 3: Glassmorphism

Glassmorphism is a hot topic nowadays and is praised for a variety of qualities. However, the main reason why it deserves attention is that Glassmorphism makes the Dark Mode look less ‘dark’. The other key reason why it is a practice deserving implementation in your next project is that it can ensure consistency between light and dark modes. The image below showcases it. The colorful background elements and transparency of the main elements are what make Glassmorphism. Glassmorphism allows to deepen, smoothen, and brighten designs. This style makes an app look modern, aesthetically advanced, and adds depth to the screen. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 4: Asymmetrical Elements

The next best thing to accentuate your app look is by adding asymmetry in mobile UI design. It looks dynamic, fresh, and modern. Such design makes the user’s eyes travel and take the path you intended for them. It gives a sense of complexity. It creates a bit of positive tension as it relies on contrasts. Such design makes your user take notice of content. As the brain works with regular patterns, users mentally check out things and move on. But when the disruption in perception occurs, the brain focuses and concentrates. All in all, users give more energy and attention when presented with asymmetry. 

To implement Asymmetrical mobile UI design, your UI designer must be a real deal. The design isn’t complex technically, but it is complex in background design skills. 

• A professional must be a virtuoso of grid understanding and placing focal points. 
• Visual weights of composition on a mobile screen aren’t something any designer can do. 
• Creating a good contrast considering the variety of ambiance the user can be in while using this app – isn’t a simple task either. It requires lots of experience. 
• Playing around with proportions and white space also requires a trained eye. 
• Finally, strategically planning for eye movement on a variety of mobile screen sizes and orientations relies on a good amount of practice and user research. 

This design when implemented skillfully makes users dynamically travel through your app. Just like a first-time passenger boarding a cruise ship or a first-time visitor to an Apple store. It shows good conversion opportunities. It is also one of the greatest solutions for MVPs. Generally, you would not want asymmetry for a full-blown app as they contain many screens. Remembering that asymmetric design is good for catching attention and impressing, it requires more energy from the user. So eventually you will have to put things in more relaxing patterns. But to storm a new niche with an exciting app – this is a great option.

Mobile UI Design Practice 5: Loading Elements 

In this section, we’ll look at three key pillars of keeping your users on your app while content is on its way. They are loading icons, skeleton screens, and feedback features. These what seem to be little things have a direct impact on your app’s revenues.

Loading icons

Sometimes, phones are just slow and the Internet connection just isn’t doing it. It is what it is. So it is a standard practice to have some indication of loading across your app. A lot of UI designers make do with regular circular loading elements that look like the one below.

But as a user, you never know at what stage of loading you are now or how long you have to wait. Sure, if you are a regular user, you’d probably wait. But if we talk about getting new users and turning them into regular ones, it isn’t going to do it. As a business owner, you’d want as many users as you can get, not only the patient ones. So, indicating the progress and the expected wait time with loading elements is the best mobile UI design practice to follow.

Skeleton Screens

In addition, the screen should not be an empty white space of nothingness while content is being sent. This best practice of loading elements also comes with creating a skeleton screen. It is something extremely lightweight and might be even just a grid with some indication of what’s to come. But it gives the user an idea of what they are waiting for. Below you can see the LinkedIn skeleton screen. 

Feedback Features

With any action your app offers, you should consider the performance as much as perception. Some actions will entail waiting for your server to do some computing, fetching some intermediate data, and then returning the results. It must take time and it can’t be avoided. The waiting time may be not so noticeable to the user if distracted. It’s comparable to waiting for an appointment in a crowded noisy room VS relaxing time with a cup of coffee and flipping through a magazine. The second one is the obvious winner. 

So what kind of distraction? Depending on the app and creativity, it can vary. If it is an educational website or financial app, you can offer a piece of advice. If it is more of an entertaining app, you can do a joke or a fun animation bit. You can even design storytelling animations that are present throughout the app. Aligning it with countdowns is popular as well. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 6: Heatmaps & A/B Testing

Anything user-facing is a channel for feedback. Whether it is UX or UI, user testing is a must for a successful mobile app. The difference is only the focus of data and the angle of interpretation. 

Heatmaps in UX would be analyzed from the point of view of functionality or data hierarchy. It can mean a feature opportunity or rearranging the elements. In UI, it means checking for lack of contrast, or appropriate sizing and margins. 

Both UI and UX would check the clickability and responsiveness of the functional elements on different mobile screens. But UX specialists would be focused on scenarios. For example, when those buttons should be clicked, e.g. “If the user returns from the next screen to the previous, does the button work the same?”. However, the UI person would be more focused on things like “Is the button conveniently clickable if the screen orientation jumps between portrait and landscape?”. 

Every element of a user interface is subject to A/B testing. Things that would fall within the area of responsibility of UI professionals are the following:

• Design of the action buttons – sizing, margins, colors, and feedback message
• Color palette – emotional impact on users
• Navigation – the balance of white space, contrast, readability
• Typography – trying different fonts, font weights, and font colors for the most legible combinations
• Form fields – borders, paddings, icons vs text, validation message 
• Overall responsiveness – how all of those visual elements adapt to different mobile screen sizes and accidental/intentional orientation flips

So, when you imagine the work of UI designers, you should imagine getting right the things like in the picture below. 

A Note of Caution

The sensitive issue about UI design is that the personal tastes or vision of the team or even the business owner don’t really count.  It is about how much your target users love how it looks. And for an MVP version, you don’t need “Da Vinci” to do the design, you need a hard-working apprentice of his. It all boils down to the proven financial benefits of the mindset of user-centric and data-driven approaches. Project decisions including aesthetics should be ruled by data and information from the users. Together. 

Why together? Because sometimes users say they like things a certain way. Then you implement it, the conversions go down. So you cannot just rely on gathering user preferences or trends. And you cannot solely rely on data. It’s possible to really bump up conversations. Some elements can induce making a purchase. But then users experience regret, returns rush in, and the bitter aftertaste ruins any immediate wins. So, both data and preferences should be factored in. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 7: Design for Inclusivity

It means creating special features for users with different sorts of impairments. Like voice navigation or Braille translator. It is not about simply following accessibility guidelines. A lot of internet experts will say that it is an essential practice. Many today insist that it is a must in your mobile UI design. However, practically speaking, if you are at the MVP stage, it is best not to burden your project with that. With MVP, you just seek the feedback of early adopters. So bear in mind the overarching goal. Later, when you go on to develop a fully-fledged mobile app, that is a must to introduce in your mobile UI design. Why? 

First of all, people with impairments will be able to use your app effectively. Sure, it is often not a big percentage, but it is the right thing to do. It is also important to follow ethical business practices. Think about color-blind users or users with physical impairments. Design for them with contrast, font size, and scalability. Make sure users can navigate with voice commands.

Second of all, when a first-time user opens an app, it is a matter of trust. If your users see the button “Accessibility mode” or whatever you call it – they know that a lot of work has been put into the development of this product. It is an indication that this app is there to stay. It does not matter if you might have a tiny portion of users who use accessibility features/modes. Every user sees the option and saliently perceives its impact. It feels professional, reliable, and solid. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 8: Design for Touch 

Accommodating different finger sizes is the essence of this practice. The placement of buttons belongs more to the realm of UX design. However, it is up to the UI designer to balance out the composition. It is the UI’s job to proportionally design different options of buttons in relation to other interactive elements. It is their responsibility to ensure users’ ability to successfully achieve clicking what must be clickable. This is so vital to any app that it is worth repeating a thousand times over. If the previous practices refer to the design of things at large, this practice comes down to the nitty-gritty that can make or break the entire experience. Success comes from interactions achieved by clickable buttons. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 9: Contrast

The impact of this practice is similar to the previous best practice. Contrast is a part of mobile UI design that is quite nuanced but has a huge impact. In general, when people hear the word “contrast”, they think mainly about color contrast. But in design, there are different types of contrast such as texture, shape sizes, line weights, font size and type, gradient or solid fill, pastel or neon colors, direction of elements, and so on. 

There is a basic designer toolkit set on how to ensure color contrasts and others under Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The picture below illustrates a common mistake with the ‘Add to cart’ action button. Even though the blue-white pairing seems nicer and more readable, it will be a failure.  It is striking how many UI designers fail to adhere to it. It might be because, on laptops, it is not really that big of an issue. Or the practices only checked when the request is to specifically design for people with impairments. However, it affects all users of mobile devices due to their use conditions. Mobile phones have limited screen space, they are often used on the go, and in quite varied environments. 

Mobile UI Design Practice 10: Animation

When used sparingly and with intent, animations can achieve a lot in terms of user experience. Thus, best practices in animations often are guided by UX best principles. In terms of the UI role in this, it is mostly about aesthetic appeal, visual consistency, and the latest fashion. The latest trends to keep an eye on are:

1. Kinetic typography (moving text);
2. Morphing (when elements dynamically blend);
3. Creating addictive playful hover effects (bouncing, changing color, appearing/disappearing…);
4. Cool micro-interactions (after a button click, dragging a finger across the screen starts leaving a trail of color dissipating as the user moves the finger…);
5. Using AI to change animations based on the user’s browsing history, mood, etc… 

The first four trends are worth considering even for an MVP version. But the 5th one is a new trend to be on the lookout for. It is not likely to become big in the next year for mobile apps. Designing a mobile UI with an AI would remain a bit of an overkill as of now. Especially for an MVP unless it is some sort of unique selling point (USP). Yet, the keywords of animation use will always remain the same – use sparingly and with intent. Animations do use up phone resources. Plus, little real estate may make use of animations seem overwhelming and distracting. 

How to Make a Choice

Let’s imagine a scenario of a mobile e-commerce MVP app. Design UI process should follow a procedure where data and user research are analyzed first. Let’s imagine that in this case it is going to sell hand-crafted items like handbags, wallets, and other leather accessories. 

In this hypothetical design, the classic implementation of each of the best practices is considered. In addition, skeuomorphism is added for contrast. Furthermore, A/B testing and loading elements are not presented in the table. Loading elements are functional elements and their impact can vary greatly. For example, if that is a progress bar that represents the stage in the app or onboarding progress, it would increase network requests. If it is a just loading icon, the impact is negligible. A/B testing is a dynamic feature. Its impact depends on what features you are testing and the kind of analytics you are gathering from it. So, here is a table that can guide your mobile UI designer’s selection process of practices to implement in your project. 

It’s a lot of data, but the general trend can be spotted. Flat Design offers the best performance. Adding any extra elements is going to strain the app’s performance at different rates. However, not all apps go for the best performance. Mobile UI design can be your app’s Unique Selling Point (USP). 

As we’ve mentioned earlier, decision-making should be based on data and user preferences. So let’s consider the impact of user research. For example, the user research of a mobile reader app might indicate that users prefer a minimalist hassle-free interface. Mobile UI design should be free from any distractions. Flat Design would be the best. It can be aided by the Light-Dark modes option. There is a good chance that the user would want to read in low-light conditions. 

Let’s consider a completely opposite example. Imagine you are thinking of a design visualization app. It is easy to suggest that these users would be attracted by realistic aesthetics, hence, Skeuomorphism. In addition, professional designers or hobbyist designers will often have technically capable devices. So your team can focus on visual aesthetics and creating the most exciting, complex, and realistic interfaces.

So, make sure your UI designer or vendor follows Design UI process. The key ingredients of success are data, user research, and a master to rule them all.