Think of your favourite mobile app. Why do you like it? How does it make you feel when you use it?
Mine is the Fitbit app. I love the clean, clutter-free interface, the easy-to-understand graphs and charts, and the chilled-out colour palette. It’s simple to use and does a great job of showing me my most interesting health metrics at a glance.
All the best mobile apps have that in common. They’re not only aesthetically pleasing; they’re also incredibly user-friendly. We just know, intuitively, how to use them without too steep a learning curve—and that’s because they’ve been designed so well.
But what does that mean exactly, “designed so well?” What actually makes for effective mobile app UI design, and how can you achieve it yourself?
Keep reading. We’ll cover everything you need to know about making a big impact on the small screen.
Mobile app UI design is the process of designing a mobile app—and, more specifically, the user interface of that mobile app. The user interface (UI) is the user-facing part of the app; the layer that the user interacts with.
App UI design focuses on how the app looks and functions. It includes:
The ultimate goal with mobile app UI design is to make sure that the app is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and intuitive for users. It should provide an enjoyable user experience, enabling the user to complete their desired tasks—and, ideally, return to the app again and again.
When designing a mobile app, there are some fundamental principles to take into account. You can think of these as your essential building blocks; they’ll help to ensure that your mobile app is intuitive, user-friendly, and visually pleasing.
Let’s explore each of these guiding principles now.
Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement of different elements throughout your app’s UI. When designing the layout of each app screen, it’s important to think about how you want to guide the user’s attention. And, given the limited screen space on mobile devices, visual hierarchy is especially critical here.
Important elements should be given priority in the visual hierarchy—you want the user to notice them first. At the same time, the overall hierarchy should help to establish a clear and intuitive flow, guiding the user through the app’s content in a way that makes sense.
You can create a visual hierarchy through position, size (bigger elements will stand out more), colour, contrast, and whitespace.
Consider the Google Maps mobile app for Android. The primary focus of the app is the interactive map, which takes up the majority of the screen—emphasising Google Maps’ core functionality. The search bar is placed right at the top of the screen, making it one of the most prominent elements. This signals to the user that searching for a specific destination is a key interaction within the app.
The consistency principle is all about maintaining a uniform style and approach throughout your mobile app. This ensures that the app is visually coherent from one screen to the next, building a sense of familiarity and making it easier for the user to learn how the app works.
This goes hand-in-hand with clarity: ensuring that the interface is easy to understand. You can achieve clarity in your designs by using clear and consistent language, icons, and menu labels, using familiar navigation patterns, and providing the user with meaningful feedback whenever they take a certain action.
Together, consistency and clarity help to minimise confusion, reduce the learning curve for the user, and generally provide a predictable and enjoyable user experience.
The Airbnb mobile app provides a great example of consistency and clarity. You’ll find consistent visual design throughout—from a standardised set of icons to a cohesive colour palette and uniform typography. The app also provides a straightforward and clearly labelled navigation structure, making it easy for the user to determine what each element represents.
Typography considers how text is styled throughout your app UI design. The fonts and colours you choose contribute to the app’s personality and brand identity—but, more importantly, they impact readability and accessibility. It’s essential that any and all text is clearly legible, and that typography is consistent and responsive throughout.
Consider the Medium mobile app. Medium is an online publishing platform where users can both read and write articles on a variety of topics. The app is naturally text-heavy, so effective typography is integral to the user experience.
The clean, modern sans-serif typeface ensures maximum readability on different screen sizes, and varying the size and weight of the text helps to create a clear visual hierarchy, enabling users to quickly scan and understand the structure of a long-form article.
Colour is another fundamental aspect of your app’s UI design. A consistent and well-chosen colour palette creates visual appeal, builds brand recognition, and evokes certain feelings and associations in the end user.
At the same time, effective application of colour throughout the app helps to create contrast, contribute to the visual hierarchy, establish consistency, and facilitate the user’s journey.
A mobile app often praised for its effective use of colour is the Headspace app. Headspace is a meditation and mindfulness app designed to help its users manage stress, sleep better, and build healthier habits.
The app’s colour scheme is appropriately calming—made up of soft blues, greens, purples, and neutral tones like grey and white. The app also uses gradient transitions between different colours to create a sense of flow and continuity.
Want to learn more about colour? Check out our complete guide to colour theory and its role in design.
Imagery and icons have a crucial role to play in mobile app UI design. They contribute to the app’s overall visual appeal and usability, and they impact how information is communicated.
When selecting or designing images and icons for your app, it’s important to bear the consistency and clarity principle in mind. How do your icons and images contribute to a cohesive visual language? How do they help the user to understand and navigate the interface?
And, when integrating images and icons, you’ll also need to think about where they sit within the visual hierarchy. Should an image be front and centre, grabbing the user’s attention? Or should it feature more subtly so as not to distract the user?
The Nike Training Club app showcases the power of effective imagery. It uses dynamic, high-quality images of real athletes and fitness enthusiasts, creating an energetic tone and helping to motivate and inspire its users.
It also uses easily-recognisable icons to represent different workout categories, as well as progress trackers to encourage users and provide a sense of accomplishment.
Cognitive load refers to the mental effort required to use an app. In basic terms, this app UI design principle is a reminder to keep things simple! You want your users to enjoy interacting with your mobile app. You don’t want them to feel confused or overwhelmed.
The goal is to reduce the cognitive load placed on the user at any given time. You can do this by:
Consider the Duolingo language-learning app. The app’s primary goal is to help people learn a new language. As such, the app has been designed to maximise the user’s ability to retain new vocabulary. Keeping the cognitive load to a minimum proves key.
Duolingo provides the user with short, bite-sized learning units—and, within the lessons themselves, the information presented is concise and digestible. The user progressively builds up their vocabulary over time without feeling overwhelmed.
As users interact with your mobile app, it’s important to provide feedback, guidance, and reassurance along the way. If they fill out a form and click “Submit”, for example, they’ll want confirmation that the form was successfully submitted. Likewise, if an error occurs, they’ll want to know why—and what they should do next.
Animations, colour changes, hover effects, loading indicators, success and error messages, and sound effects can all be used to provide informative user feedback.
In the Uber Eats mobile app, feedback plays a critical role in the user journey. Whenever you add a new food item to your basket, the “View basket” button updates to show the number of items you’ve successfully added. This shows the user that their action has been successful—without requiring them to fully navigate to the basket screen.
Responsive design ensures that your mobile app adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. This provides a consistent and fully optimised user experience, no matter what device is being used.
Mobile app UI designers use flexible grids, adaptive imagery, scalable UI elements, and breakpoints to create responsive apps. Often, they’ll employ a mobile-first approach—designing first and foremost with mobile in mind and then scaling up for bigger screens.
GetYourGuide is an online marketplace for travel activities. You can book tours and excursions in 150 countries worldwide, either through the website or mobile app.
If you compare the website view of GetYourGuide to the mobile app, you can see how the app has been designed responsively to adapt to a smaller screen size. In the website view, we’re presented with four image cards in a horizontal row; in the mobile app view, just one.
Here is the website view:
And here is the mobile app view:
You can’t create a user-friendly mobile app without designing for accessibility and inclusivity. Accessibility ensures that your app can be used by everybody, including people with disabilities. Inclusivity is all about designing in a way that welcomes and caters to a diverse user base.
Accessible mobile app UI design includes considerations such as ensuring sufficient colour contrast, providing alt text for images, including closed captions for videos, and incorporating voice command functionality.
Inclusive mobile app design considers factors such as diverse and inclusive imagery, culturally sensitive imagery and messaging, localised content in multiple languages, and inclusive form design that allows users full control over how they answer certain questions and enter personal information.
We can once again turn to Headspace for an example of accessible and inclusive mobile app UI design. The app features an accessibility menu where you can turn on the Audio Description functionality to get audio-narrated descriptions when engaging with video content. You’ll also find that the Headspace app features inclusive artwork throughout.
We’ve covered the fundamental principles of effective mobile app UI design. So how do you put them into action?
Here’s the general process a designer will follow when creating a mobile app.
The very first step is to define and understand the primary purpose of your mobile app. You should have a clear vision for:
The entire UI design of your app will be created with these factors in mind. A well-defined core purpose lays the foundation for all subsequent design decisions, ensuring that the app meets the end user’s needs and provides a great experience.
Next, you can dig deeper into your target users and think about how you can best meet their needs with your mobile app UI design. At this stage, you might:
The best mobile apps are user-friendly and intuitive. As such, it’s important to learn what your target users expect from the kind of app you’re designing, as well as the industry conventions that are already in place. Armed with that knowledge, you can design your mobile app UI to be familiar and predictable.
You’ve got a clear idea of what your users should be able to accomplish within your app. Now it’s time to think, in more concrete terms, about how they’ll interact with your mobile app in order to achieve their goals. Cue: user flows.
A user flow maps out all the individual steps a user will go through to complete a specific task. When creating user flows, you’re compelled to visualise the user’s journey and think about the sequence of interactions and elements they need at each step. Your user flows will lay the foundation for how your app should be structured.
Now you can kick-start the creative process by brainstorming and sketching initial ideas for the app’s layout and information architecture. Information architecture refers to how you organise and group content across a digital interface, and it should always be optimised for clarity, consistency, and findability.
Based on your user flows, consider the different screens that your app will include and establish the main elements and features that should appear on each screen. Explore various design concepts and experiment with different layouts and flows. There are no bad ideas at this stage—take your time to figure out what works before committing to a specific design direction.
Your mobile app UI design is starting to take shape! Time to create some tangible design deliverables, starting with low-fidelity wireframes. These basic, skeletal representations outline the structural layout and content placement within your app.
You don’t need to include any real details at this stage. Focus first and foremost on visual hierarchy—where will each element sit?—and on the spatial relationships between different components. You’ll want to create individual wireframes to represent each screen in the user flow.
Low-fidelity wireframes enable you to get the layout of your app just right before filling in finer details such as colour and imagery.
Now the process moves from static, barebones wireframes to fully interactive, high-fidelity prototypes. For the purpose of this guide, we’re covering this transition in just one step—but, in reality, you’ll go through several steps and iterations before you get to those working prototypes.
This stage encompasses the following:
At this stage, you’ll also turn your attention to microcopy. Microcopy is the official term for all the text that features throughout a user interface. It’s the text you find on buttons, menu labels, error messages, form fields—any kind of messaging that guides and informs the user as they interact with your mobile app.
Getting your app’s microcopy right is just as important as any other design element. It plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience and making sure that your app is easy and enjoyable to use.
The app UI design process is an iterative one. As such, you can expect your prototypes to go through several rounds of testing and revisions before they’re ready to be developed.
It’s important to test your prototypes on real users (or research participants who closely match the user group you’re designing for). This enables you to gather valuable feedback from the people who matter most and to identify usability issues and areas for improvement.
Based on that feedback, you can iterate on your prototypes—making sure that your mobile app has the best chance of success once it’s launched.
Once you’re happy with your mobile app UI design, you’ll prepare comprehensive design specifications and hand them over to the development team for implementation. This is where your mobile app finally comes to life!
Mobile app UI design is a unique craft, and getting it right can be challenging. You’ve got limited screen space and a diverse range of devices to cater to. Here are some best practices to help you succeed.
This is the golden rule for any kind of design. Make sure that your mobile app UI is based on a thorough understanding of your target audience—including their needs, goals, pain points, and expectations. Conduct extensive user research and use the data gathered to inform your design choices.
As you design your mobile app, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. The most effective apps are easy to learn and figure out—and that’s because they utilise familiar design patterns.
Your users will come to your app with preconceptions about how the app should work, based on their mental models—i.e. their experience with similar apps. Play into these expectations and your app will feel familiar from the get-go, providing a comfortable and intuitive user experience.
In the early days of web design, it was common to apply a desktop-first approach to design. This involves designing with larger screens in mind and then adapting the original designs for smaller screens.
But, as mobile usage has gained traction, it’s more common now to adopt a mobile-first design strategy. With this approach, you design primarily for mobile screens—which is, of course, extremely important when designing a mobile app. Once you’ve ensured an optimal experience on mobile, you can scale up your designs for bigger screens.
The onboarding process is the first encounter a user has with a new app. It comprises elements such as the app’s welcome screen, the user sign-up process, and permission requests or settings. The goal is to provide a positive first impression and help the user get to know the app.
You might be tempted to pack your app’s onboarding with helpful tips and tutorials. The more information, the better, right?
Not quite. Remember those fundamental app UI design principles pertaining to minimal cognitive load and maximum simplicity? Keep those in mind as you design your app’s onboarding. Don’t overload the user with too much information; instead, use progressive disclosure to reveal new information as and when they need it. At the same time, make it as quick and easy as possible for the user to create their profile and start using the app. Otherwise, they’ll get bored and frustrated. Not a great start!
All too often, the importance of good microcopy is overlooked. You wouldn’t believe how many apps are created without any thought for the words the user will encounter along the way.
Treat your app’s microcopy like any other design element. Consider what messaging you’ll need at each step in the user journey and design the app’s layout with that in mind. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself forcing the copy to fit into a specific design—and that’s not necessarily optimal for the user experience.
If you can, work with a professional UX writer to ensure your app’s messaging is tip-top. If that’s not possible, you can still prioritise great microcopy by incorporating it into your design process from the very beginning. Just remember: words matter!
When designing a mobile app, you don’t always need to create from scratch. There are many tools and templates that can streamline the process and help you bring your ideas to life.
Here are some of the best mobile UI design templates and tools to consider.
Figma is a versatile design and prototyping tool. You can use it to create individual UI components, wireframes, and prototypes from scratch, or choose from an extensive library of mobile UI design templates and UI kits. Just browse the Figma community to find the best templates and resources for your project.
Uizard is an AI-powered UX/UI design tool that can really simplify and streamline the mobile app UI design process. One of its standout features is the ability to convert hand-drawn sketches into digital designs. Alternatively, you can use one of their ready-made mobile app design templates to generate rapid prototypes in minutes.
Justinmind is a comprehensive prototyping tool, suitable for designing interactive and responsive web and mobile app interfaces. It supports the creation of wireframes, UI designs, and complex user flows. Justinmind also offers a variety of pre-built UI kits and templates for both iOS and Android platforms, covering common mobile app design patterns and elements.
Renowned for its user-friendly interface, Canva is one of the most popular graphic design tools around—and it’s also a firm favourite among UI designers. This is a great tool if you want to jump straight into mobile app prototypes with a customisable template. You can filter the vast library of mobile UI design templates by style, theme, and colour—or start with a blank template.
You’ll need a tool like Zeplin towards the end of the app UI design process, when you’re ready to hand your designs over for development. Zeplin provides a platform for sharing design files, specifications, and assets—facilitating smooth collaboration between designers and developers.
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about mobile app UI design! If you’d like to learn more about user interface (UI) design, check out these guides:
Considering a formal education in UI design? We’ve put together a thorough comparison of the best UI design courses on the market right now, weighing up factors such as price, duration, and learning format, as well as the key pros and cons of each. Browse through to find the most suitable course for you and kick-start your career in UI design.
We highly recommend exploring our student work for a practical understanding of how UI concepts are implemented in real projects. "The UI/UX case study by AND learner Vinay Bandi could be a great starting point.
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
