Alpha Software Blog



The Best Mobile App Design Capabilities and Features

There are 7 capabilities your app should include for outstanding mobile app design. Including these experience design elements will craft UI/UX design your app users will love.

Business Need More Mobile Apps

To increase productivity, remain competitive and serve remote workers, organizations are building more mobile apps than ever before. IT developers, web developers and business analysts are all scrambling to get routine tasks mobilized faster. Unfortunately, more mobile apps don't necessarily translate to outstanding user experiences on iPhones and Android tablets.

Mobile users are used to outstanding user experiences on B2C apps, and their expectations for business apps is rising dramatically. They want their business apps to be as fast and intuitive and their off-hours apps. They want business apps to leverage mobile hardware device features, including geolocation, video, audio, ink, scanners, special detectors, and the ability to work with large amounts of data. And they never want to be dead in the water if they can't connect to a WiFi or cell signal.

Best mobile app design - an example of an outstanding UI

Building User Friendly Apps: It's All About Mobile App Design

Recently work management company Wrike surveyed 850 professionals from a variety of enterprise departments. Marketing, IT, finance, and human resources workers were asked, about their mobile usage and how it affected their daily productivity. Respondents viewed mobile devices as critical to their work, Unfortunately, they listed a range of problems and productivity issues that they frequently encounter with business apps. 

Concerns included limited app functionality, the unique challenges of mobile data capture, disconnected situations, and limited device storage. Ultimately, these users want sophisticated business apps tailored for mobile experiences and that leverage powerful device capabilities. This all comes own to better mobile app design.

Business users clearly want to use mobile devices more on a daily basis, because there are so many benefits of mobile apps for business. People are buying more and more smartphones and tablets. Companies are developing more mobile apps than ever before. And the need for more mobile apps is only increasing as more workers go remote or companies must practice social distancing between employees, partners and customers.

Unfortunately, business users continue to report limits in the web and mobile apps their companies are building.  In fact, IDC and Forrester recently warned CIOs on the dangers of failing at mobile app development.

Identifying the Best Mobile App Design Capabilities

Our work with enterprise customers and our surveys of mobile app development end users has uncovered many best design practices. Alpha Software has identified 7 critical business app capabilities that are required to meet the real world needs of corporations today. While every app may not require each capability, developers must be able to address these types of business app requirements. 

Best mobile app design - the 7 capabilities you must have

Achieve the Best Mobile App Design by Adding these 7 App Capabilities

To produce mobile business apps that are widely adopted by end users, business developers should consider including 7 app UI elements:

  1. Take Advantage of Mobile Hardware - Utilize more mobile device hardware, such as scanners, audio recording, GPS, local file storage, etc. This expands the amount of data and information an app can collect for users. 
  2. World Offline - Make sure you app can work without a WIFI or cell signal. This ensures your app users can always be productive with the app, even when they can't get a connection.
  3. Leverage Rich Media - Do a great job leveraging new types of rich media, including images, videos, and audio tracks. This provides more information to your end users and makes your app experience more informative and immersive.
  4. Utilize Digital Ink - Enable the end user to capture enter digital notes and marks. This allows them to utilize digital signatures and markup images they access or collect.
  5. Run Cross-Platform - Make sure your apps run on any operating system and screen size. This ensures your app runs flawlessly on any iOS, Windows or Android device.
  6. Be Location and Time Aware - Make sure your apps have full GPS and calendar access. This can speed data collection of times or addresses for end users, or enable apps that can do scheduling or direct users to specific addresses.
  7. Have Optimized Data Entry for Mobile Screens - Make sure your app has visual attributes and input for smaller screens. This ensures that standing workers who can only enter data using one hand, can easily swipe or click buttons to access data or collect information.

Download the complete white paper on The 7 Critical Capabilities for Best Mobile App Design.

In this paper, we explain how these 7 design capabilities enable better user experiences. We offer examples of apps that incorporate data sources like social media. We also discuss how an app that can work without a cell or WIFI connection will increase your app's appeal. We'll also provide:

  • examples of the top app capabilities enterprises are including in award-winning user interfaces
  • the subtle differences between web design and mobile design
  •  what these 7 design elements are and how you can include them to create an incredible visual design.

The paper also explains how hybrid apps can enable better mobile app design with features such as:

  • capturing and editing images
  • accessing more on-device data storage
  • capturing large amounts of audio or video footage.

The low code platform that delivers the best mobile app design for end-users

A Low Code App Development Tool with the Best Mobile App Design Features

Only one free low code app design and development platform includes all 7 of the best design capabilities: Alpha Anywhere. You can download this app builder for FREE without time or app limits. You'll only pay as low as $99/month when you are ready to publish the app. Our team of experienced app designers have produced tutorials on how to build and design a mobile app for free.

Start building and designing apps for free with Alpha Anywhere Community Edition. By signing up, you can create an unlimited number of apps for free. The apps you build will include user centered design, latest app design trends, and user experiences your end users will love.

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About Author

Amy Groden-Morrison
Amy Groden-Morrison

Amy Groden-Morrison has served more than 15 years in marketing communications leadership roles at companies such as TIBCO Software, RSA Security and Ziff-Davis. Most recently she was responsible for developing marketing programs that helped achieve 30%+ annual growth rate for analytics products at a $1Bil, NASDAQ-listed business integration Software Company. Her past accomplishments include establishing the first co-branded technology program with CNN, launching an events company on the NYSE, rebranding a NASDAQ-listed company amid a crisis, and positioning and marketing a Boston-area startup for successful acquisition. Amy currently serves as a Healthbox Accelerator Program Mentor, Marketing Committee Lead for the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Launch Smart Clinics, and on the organizing team for Boston TechJam. She holds an MBA from Northeastern University.

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The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.

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