2023 is almost around the corner, and like always, it is time to take stock of the new design trends and principles shaping the digital landscape, particularly mobile app design. Since app design is continuously evolving, creating opportunities for fresh new user interactions and personalized user experience, taking a closer look at some of the evergreen and trending UX design principles is important before you hire app developers and designers for your next app project. 

Some UX design principles for mobile apps, such as adhering to the platform-specific guidelines, focusing on simplicity and ease of use, and audience-specific personalization, will continue to be the mainstay of app design. But at the same time, there will be emerging UX design trends that are going to shape the app design of the future. 

Whether you hire a professional UI/UX design agency or some skilled designers in-house, you cannot leave aside these principles and trends in UI/UX design that will rule the app world in the future. Here are our picks on top UX design principles for creating a great app in 2023. 

Adhere to the OS guidelines

Let’s focus on the basics of successful app UI/UX design. For shaping the mobile app UI/UX for iOS and Android platforms, the operating system (OS) and its design guidelines remain a core part of the design process. You cannot help but adhere to these OS guidelines and recommendations to shape the app’s user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). 

• User Interface (UI) specialists should comply with all the recommendations and guidelines of the particular operating system platform.
• Set your priority straight on the choice of key features and UX attributes that are crucial for meeting the platform-specific user experience standard. 
• Ensure you provide mobile-specific features and functionalities for engaging mobile experience, such as fingerprint and image recognition, barcode scanning, etc. 
• Adapt to the platform-specific typeface, font size, and color scheme for a more organic look and feel. 
• Make sure the CTA buttons and scrolling perfectly fit the mobile device screen for easy interactions. 
• When designing the navigation and the menu, optimize it for each platform separately for a native user experience. 

Keep your design focused on the target users.

Another key and evergreen principle for app UI and UX design is keeping the design considerations focused on the target audience. For an engaging mobile user experience, it is important to impress the audience with the first look and engage them with simple and easy interactions. 

If you are building a food app for which bright and attractive color contrast is the rule, using the blue and white color scheme of a typical financial or professional app is no use. You must choose design assets per the app’s target audience and niche, from color scheme to font type and size to layout and graphics. 

This is why app UI/UX design should go through a lot of research into typical user persona and user experience attributes. To keep your UI/UX design focus consistently on the target audience, you need to bring your research to the table corresponding to the following attributes. 

• Identify the location of the customer base.
• Identify user personas in vivid detail, including user backgrounds, requirements, and the app’s objectives. 
• Make deeper research of all competitor apps, their user journey, flows, etc. 
• Validate the user experience attributes and key features through wireframes and prototyping. 
• Instead of building a fully-fledged app, create a minimum viable product (MVP) with the basic features first. 

Listen to the app analytics. 

Let’s begin with where we have ended the last point. Instead of building a fully-fledged app at one go, it is always advisable to build it over time through several incremental updates based on precise user feedback. Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is an incremental development approach allowing you to build an app in steps. 

With an MVP app launched on the market, you can just continue to listen to the user feedback through in-built app analytics and understand the user pain points and areas of the app that you need to improve further with value additions. This approach reverts you from draining resources on unnecessary course corrections in design. 

Focus on simplicity of design and usefulness of content 

Finally, the simplicity and ease of use that matter most in any app UI/UX design. It is important to ensure faster engagement with a trimmed and fit-to-purpose design that can reduce cognitive load to the minimum and allow users to do more with the least effort.  Some key ways you can always boost ease of use and simplicity in design include the following. 

• Use one font type and size consistently for similar body text. Similarly, use another for headings and a different one for buttons. 
• Use finger-tap-friendly buttons for important CTAs within the thumb zone to allow easy interactions even when the user handles the device single-handedly. 
• Use a consistent type and size of images and ensure the images are original and perfectly fit into the UI design. 
• All your design elements should be lightweight and low in footprint to ensure a faster and seamless loading time with low instances of bounce rate. 

Over to You 

Despite the trends and emerging design experiments that may sweep the mobile app space in 2023 or years beyond, the above-mentioned principles look pretty evergreen and fresh for many years. Since any ambitious and successful app project cannot simply do away with the easy, effortless, and instantly engaging user experience, these principles will stay relevant for all mobile apps.