4 Usability Tips for an Awesome App

It’s 30 seconds into 11:30 a.m. and my stomach is racing between starvation and making it to my 12 p.m. meeting.

At this point, my mind is on my very own rendition of The Black Eye Peas song “Let’s get it started in here.”

“My stomach keeps grumbling grumbling and grumbling grumbling”, as I search for quick food options.

Bingo it hits me…Subway! I decide to launch the Subway web portal to order a tuna salad with spinach, lettuce, banana peppers, cucumbers tomatoes, oregano, and balsamic vinaigrette sauce, but the site was overwhelming to the untrained hungry eye. My eyes were all over the place looking for the to-go order icon.This frustrated my already in a bad hungry pressed for time mood. I finally was able to place my order after the longest 7 minutes of my life. Which left me with an even shorter period of time to get my food and eat!

Have you ever been so frustrated when using a mobile app or website? Well if you’re like me then you don’t want another potential customer feeling this way. It is important to consider the usability design of each application. Usability is the ease of the use of a product by a specific set of users. This not solely based on the interface design but how each user executes each task and how easy it is for them to do so.

Here are a few tips to make sure your user experience is usable.

1. Create an easy to use navigation and utilize recognizable icons.

Dropbox & Google Drive does a great job at this by using icons such as home, favorites, and accounts.

Full-stack, back-end, and front-end web development

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Outlook Handbook tends to group web developers and digital designers into one category. However, they define them separately, stating that web developers create and maintain websites and are responsible for the technical aspects including performance and capacity. Web or digital designers, on the other hand, are responsible for the look and functionality of websites and interfaces. They develop, create, and test the layout, functions, and navigation for usability. Web developers can focus on the back-end, front-end, or full-stack development, and typically utilize a range of programming languages, libraries, and frameworks to do so. Web designers may work more closely with front-end engineers to establish the user-end functionality and appearance of a site.

Are web designers in demand in 2022?

In our ever-increasingly digital environment, there is a constant need for websites—and therefore for web designers and developers. With 17.4 billion websites in existence as of January 2020, the demand for web developers is only expected to rise.Web designers with significant coding experience are typically in higher demand, and can usually expect a higher salary. Like all jobs, there are likely to be a range of opportunities, some of which are better paid than others. But certain skill sets are basic to web design, most of which are key to how to become a web designer in 2022.