Best user experience and interactive user interfaces are the Achilles heels of mobile app development.
Even the best of us sometimes struggle with the most basic design principals. We believe there is no shame in learning new things and so we reached out to some of the top UI/UX mobile app development companies in USA to know exactly what their leading designers had to say about our questions.
From some of the best work they ever did to what made them churn and struggle the most, here is what we found out.
FUELED – Mobile App Designer Portfolio
Two of our brilliant designers are
Rob Palmer: Fueled Profile | Dribble | Email
Glenn Hitchcock: Fueled Profile | Dribble | Email
Q: 1. What are your top 3 mobile app designs?
Dark Sky
Dark Sky is the most accurate source of hyperlocal weather information app. It is an independent weather service built from scratch that gives you down-to-the-minute weather forecasts. You get to know exactly when it will start or stop raining, right at the very spot you are standing.
It has various amazing features like hyperlocal forecasts, cool maps, a range of notifications like severe weather alerts, custom weather condition alerts and more. It also shows daily summary forecasts.
Official Website: Link , App available on: iOS | Android
Fantastical 2
Fantastical 2 is the award-winning calendar app with features such as natural language parsing, easy reminders management, a beautiful week view, event details with map support and much more! An added treat, it also integrates with your basic mobile calendar.
Official Website: Link , App available on: iOS
Monument Valley 2
A game revolving around the journey of a mother and her child as they walk through the magical world of the Monument Valley. Get mesmerized by the beautiful architecture, discover illusionary pathways and delightful puzzles as you learn the secrets of the Sacred Geometry.
Official Website: Link , App available on: iOS
Q: 2. What are your design hacks for more productivity and creativity?
The easiest way to create a sense of consistency and logic is to start early on. It’s a time-consuming endeavor to begin with, but it’ll save you so much more in the long run. Think about each element as part of a design system — how does it react to different states, user input, and how does it fall in line with the rest of your system?
For us, the design tool Sketch has made this insanely easy, allowing us to share attributes between interface elements and update entire sets of screens with a single change.
Q: 3. What do you think is most challenging and rewarding about being a designer?
New technology and shifts in design paradigms are the toughest things to react to. They require some agility in your approach as from one year to the next the methods you employ may drastically change. But, when your designs finally hit the store and you begin to get valuable feedback it’s incredibly rewarding.
You get to validate and correct the assumptions and decisions you’ve made along the way!
Q: 4. What was your motivation behind becoming a designer?
Creating something from nothing can be a puzzle — incredibly challenging, but also captivatingly fulfilling. As such, you’re pushing yourself but having fun along the way. With Product Design, we get to explore that while being at the forefront of technology, testing and trying in new spaces that are otherwise untouched.
Q: 5. Any advice you could give to young designers?
Don’t behold yourself too much to trends. There is so much inspiration out there, it’s easy to get carried away with the tidal waves of favored approaches. Use it to learn, but stretch yourself to do your own thing, even if it fails sometimes.
It’s a valuable learning experience to create your own design identity.
3: APP MAKERS LA – Mobile App Designer Portfolio
Q: 1. What are your top 3 mobile app designs?
Seduce ME – Dating App
A dating app for the Middle Eastern folks or people interested in Middle Easterners. Easy app controls. Like someone? Swipe to the right, don’t like em? Swipe to the left. Find your perfect match and communicate via pictures, videos, messages and setup dates.
App available on: iOS
Social Names
Social Names is an app designed to manage all your social media accounts from one place. You can post on all of social media accounts with the click of a button. View posts from all your friends on any social media, and that too without any Ads. Log onto all of your social media accounts from only one app and share all of your social media contacts with your friends, and much more!
App available on: iOS
Yashmoji
Yashmoji is a customized emoji keyboard allowing you to create your own emojis. It integrates into your iOS keyboard so you can easily send custom emojis to your friends from within your favorite social media and messaging apps, including iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and more!
App available on: iOS
Q: 2. What are your design hacks for more productivity and creativity?
Our design hacks for more productivity and creativity are that we like to think about the trends that are popular in the market and what is up. After looking, we decide to incorporate those elements in each app, as well as the design and feel of the current operating system of the phone.
Q: 3. What do you think is most challenging and rewarding about being a designer?
The most challenging aspect of being a designer is just putting that first concept onto paper and making it look nice. The most rewarding is seeing the final product in digital images of what the app is going to look like.
Q: 4. What was your motivation behind becoming a designer?
Our motivation behind becoming a designer is that we wanted to have good designing skills to make beautiful apps for our clients.
Q: 5. Any advice you could give to young designers?
Our advice for the young ones out there is that keep practicing and perfecting your skill.
ISBX – Mobile App Designer Portfolio
Designer Detail: Name: Moha Elahwal, UX Creative Director, Email , Profile
Q: 1. What are your top 3 mobile app designs?
The Queen Mary (The ship)
Allows you to explore the historical ship and book your stay onboard, buying tour and packages tickets and online restaurants reservation and much more features.
Saivian
Saivian works with leading brands and retailers to help you save money without the hassle of traditional coupons and cashback, discounts. The app promises shoppers a 20% money back for their shopping and traveling if they meet set conditions. Get daily shopping and travel coupons on tons of products from different brands, stores and apps.
Official Website: Link
ClipCoin
A video recording and editing application which publishes video clips tailored to specific social media platforms based on a templated editing process; The video clips can then be published on an online website platform providing a marketplace for connecting video content creators with prospective purchasers or licensees of such content.
Q: 2. What are your design hacks for more productivity and creativity?
I like to divide my design hacks in three folds.
Consistency: is one of the most important skills brands must master when using colors, fonts, logos & images. for example: If you use buttons with rounded corners, all the buttons in your app should have the same shape, fonts and icons style.
Choose better photos: When searching for HD background images, look for ones with ample copy space that you can use to overlay text or, to create more white space, try enlarging your images and don’t forget to fix color issues if needed.
Padding: This is important. Always keep enough padding between titles and text, also edges and content. When text or buttons are too close to each other it’s even hard for some people to navigate.
Pick nice simple fonts: Pairing fonts is one of the most common areas that stumps people who are starting out with graphic design. A great rule of thumb is to choose fonts with high contrast, it will help the fonts balance each other out while still creating a feature in your design.
Q: 3. What do you think is most challenging and rewarding about being a designer?
I would say managing all these different disciplines and areas that I haven’t tackled before and putting all my energy to learn about the project and coming up with the best solution and practices. Also, working with different people in every project is also challenging. I know I just told you that working with people is also one of the most rewarding aspects, but the truth is that it’s only rewarding because it’s such an inherently challenging thing to do.
Q: 4. What was your motivation behind becoming a designer?
I always loved being creative, bringing solutions to people and making our life prettier. I came from an artistic family. My brother used to draw for DC comics and I learnt how to draw since I was 5 years old. Art and design is my passion since childhood.
Q: 5. Any Advice you could give to young designers?
Learn as much as you can. The time you have now is worth a lot. Once you get busier with life and it’s responsibilities you won’t be able to learn too many things as you do now.
Learn new things beside art and design, I studied human psychology, human interaction and machine learning, and more. These things will help a lot in building better user experiences.
Don’t design for free even if one of your family members or a close friend asked for something. It will make them think that what you do is cheap or maybe worthless.
STANFY – Mobile App Designer Portfolio
Designer Details: Anna Iurchenko, Lead UX Designer Email | LinkedIn | Medium
Q: 1. What are your top 3 mobile app designs?
Transplant hero
Mobile care system for transplant patients – The app is designed to help transplant patients enjoy life after transplantation. Transplant hero automatically schedules medications entered by a patient and provides full control over the timing of the alarm. The patient is engrossed in a rewarding game and motivated to become a transplant Super hero by taking medications regularly.
App available on: iOS | Android | Website
Byte
This is a mobile experience for smart fridges. A healthy food service for offices of all kinds. Byte comes with a fridge stocked with fresh meals and beverages and a device that records employee participation metrics, productivity savings and total number of healthy meals consumed.
Official Website: Link
Waterbalance
Personalized mobile app that helps to stay hydrated – Available on iPhone and Android, this app is designed to make drinking water an enjoyable habit.
It calculate your personal water needs based on individual statistics like weight, height, gender, types of physical activity, etc. and allows users to enter info about consumed beverages, so they can discover the current water ratio in their body.
App available on: iOS | Android
Q: 2. What are your design hacks for more productivity and creativity?
Distractions are my biggest enemy in being productive. There are a couple of things that I found very helpful to deal with that. First, I start my mornings by reviewing my inbox, calendar and project chats and then write down the most important task to fulfill during that day along with a couple of smaller things.
I usually do this on a sticky note that I stick to my desk somewhere nearby the keyboard. Spending some time to plan my day and think about priorities helps me get into a working mood, and having tasks physically written down helps me not forget them.
Another method that I use a lot to stay focused is the Pomodoro technique. It suggests breaking tasks into 25-minute intervals with 5-minute breaks after each slot and a long 15-minute break after four 25-minute intervals. I use a timer on my laptop that I usually run with the ticking sound on to remind me that I should be working on a task.
Q: 3. What do you think is most challenging and rewarding about being a designer?
Everything we create, as designers, becomes a part of someone’s life and influences their emotions, relationships, productivity or even health. This impact could be good or bad, and we should be aware of this. An opportunity to create products and services that change people’s lives is a great reward and, at the same time, a huge responsibility.
Q: 4. What was your motivation behind becoming a designer?
When I was thinking about my professional path, I realized that design combines everything I really love doing: creating new things, understanding people, and solving problems. I am very lucky to find myself in this profession now, at a time when design is so versatile and opens the opportunity to master skills in so many directions.
You can specialize in graphic design if visual aesthetics are what you care about the most, focus on user experience design if you are more of an analytical type, become a design researcher if you are curious about understanding people or become a product designer if you are passionate not only about the users but the businesses too.
Q: 5. Any advice you could give to young designers?
Share your work at the early stages, and learn to appreciate criticism. The perfect time to learn from others, especially when you are just getting started, is by asking lots of questions and making mistakes. Encourage criticism from your clients, colleagues or other designers. There are lots of online design communities on Slack and Facebook where you could share your work and get constructive feedback from more experienced designers. Criticism will help you grow faster professionally and prevent bad work from seeing the light of day.
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CITRUSBITS – Mobile App Designer Portfolio
Chandler Faye Garbell: CitrusBits Profile | Email | LinkedIn | Portfolio
Q: 1. What are your top 3 mobile app designs?
CommitTo3
Make yourself more productive and track your goals. CommiTo3 makes you plan and complete 3 goals daily. That way you can really find your focus, track productivity, and accomplish your goals.
Enter in at least three daily tasks or ‘commits’, and check them off when you are done. Used for both, personal and team goal tracking.
App Available on: iOS | Android
Dr. Seuss Treasury
This is a collection of more than 50 Dr. Seuss books, made super fun and interactive for kids. Parents can also monitor the learning growth by checking the number of books read, hours spent reading or pages turned.
App Available on: iOS
The Cat in the Hat – Read & Learn
An interactive app experience of the best-selling, classic book “The Cat in the Hat”. Kids can explore through pictures, learn new vocabulary and learn to read by three different ways.
App Available on: iOS | Android
Q: 2. What are your design hacks for more productivity and creativity?
Pinterest makes it really easy to pull together mood boards and design references. Track your hours, not only for your clients, but for yourself so you can identify areas of success and areas for improvement. Don’t stay married to a single platform — you can pull so much inspiration from switching gears for a bit and going to something you normally wouldn’t do or design for.
Q: 3. What do you think is most challenging and rewarding about being a designer?
It’s very easy to get lost in the design process because it’s so satisfying, but if you lose the forest for the trees and stop being able to see the grand scheme of things, your productivity and the quality of whatever it is you’re working on will suffer. (Unless, of course, you are your client, and what you’re working on is for you and you alone.) Balance is key.
Q: 4. What was your motivation behind becoming a designer?
I started doing web design at 10 because I wanted to expand upon my favorite book series and turn an aspect of it into an interactive social site. This was before Facebook, before MySpace. I liked being able to connect people to their favorite stories in a new way so they could continue to immerse themselves in the worlds they loved.
The site I built using Front Page and Paint Shop Pro eventually had a community of fans in it that was 500 strong. A few years later I built a similar social site using Photoshop and Dreamweaver for a different book series that eventually had 1500 members. Every time I made an edit to each site’s aesthetics or flow I received feedback in real time and could say to myself, “Ok, that banner is really popular, maybe if I change all the banners on the site to be more like that one people will like those pages, too.” Then I’d make sure those changes stayed true to the story I was telling or expanding on. Design is still about connections for me, and I love being able to make them happen.
Q: 5. Any advice you could give to young designers?
Keep a growth mindset. You may find yourself feeling deeply envious of people around you whose work seems more evolved than yours. You are the only designer you should be competing with. Rather than saying to yourself, “I’ll never be as good as them”, think instead, “What do I need to get to their level?” Weighing yourself down with comparisons makes that “never” statement become a self-fulfilling prophecy.