Top 5 Most Used Apps and What Makes Their UX Irresistibly Engaging
In today’s world, where you’ve got millions of apps to swipe, tap, search, and meet all your needs, only the exceptional ones survive. Many app developers in India are on a mission to craft the most irresistible, standout user experiences. But have you ever thought about why some apps thrive while some others fade too quickly? The answer is simple, they deliver an unforgettable user experience that keeps the users returning.
One of the latest surveys conducted at Techjury, among smartphone users, states that 74% of users keep returning to an app for its seamless user experience. An engaging app design is a core element of success- it’s what makes the user stick around for the longest time and drives success. In this blog, we’ve created a comprehensive list of the top-most used apps and their UX elements that drive engagement. Read ahead to see which are the top ones!
Top UX Factors That Contribute to a Great App
UX, or user experience, comprises several components that, when combined effectively, deliver the best experience to users. Some such factors are:
Usefulness
An app with good UX keeps users engaged, but an app with great UX keeps users growing. One way to make the best use of UI/UX design strategies is to keep the buttons within thumb’s distance. Then, test and confirm the app’s layout on both small and large screens. Lastly, place the most important icons at the top or bottom to ensure easy access.
Usability
You cannot call an app usable if a user downloads it one fine day and keeps it idle for months thereafter. Developers may consider doing an app performance analysis once in a while to understand whether the usability has increased or decreased. A usable app helps users meet their requirements in about 2 seconds. In addition, the time taken for task completion should also be counted to calculate how useful the app is.
Discoverability
Users compare and consider a specific app out of millions for a key reason: discoverability. This is one of the overlooked best practices a successful app must follow. An app must instinctively help its users seek their necessary information in a matter of seconds. Apps that have a significant delay in loading or switching from one page to another are often discarded or ignored by users for better options. Think of it as a restaurant menu- you’d be able to easily skim through it and order what you prefer. Similarly, an app should be able to meet your needs with sharp navigation features.
Credibility
Have you ever thought why users uninstall some apps in a matter of days, no sooner than they install them? Simply because they’ve found better options that perform better than the former. To cut it short, the less time they take to find the information needed, the more credible your app is.
Brand Perception
Brand perception influences the user’s thoughts and emotional connections with an app and makes it stronger. Improving user experience happens when a customer of the app is emotionally bonded with the app, they become a loyal user of the app, and thus the user experience gets enhanced. Some of the winning tactics to change brand perception for the better are keeping the brand voice and tone consistent and sharing the community's life experiences. Balancing the UX factors assures an unforgettable experience, keeping the users loyal without switching to competitors.
The Best Apps with a Captivating UX
Here are the top-tier apps with an appealing UX design that have been users’ favorites for the longest time:
Spotify
Who could reject a personalized, non-stop playlist on their mobiles and laptops to keep their day better? With 276 million subscribers worldwide, Spotify is famous for its custom playlists and instant recommendations that are based on the user's history. Besides, it is also the app that best fits the mobile user behaviour, for those who need a simple and quick way to locate their top picks in the search bar, either automatically or manually.
It also lets you put the song on loop or switch to your other bookmarked songs, even when you’re at work or are running urgent errands. The app also features an engaging design and a dark interface, perfect for those who love dark mode. And the best part? Spotify queues your top picks one after the other and plays them on loop.
Another major reason why avid music lovers consider Spotify their go-to entertainment app is its dynamic animated backgrounds that enhance the song experience, keeping the users visually engaged.
Slack
We’ve all wished for an internal communication platform that is simple to operate, enhances communication, and makes information sharing the simplest. Slack is the app that makes all of this possible and keeps the workflows secure and systematic. In addition, the colorful interface with navigable features makes the app a unique, trusted one amongst the others.
Slack is a go-to for many organizations because it provides undoubtedly successful app features, precisely placed skillfully. On this app, you can also create separate channels for communication, each channel allowing you to share bulk files, images, or audio through a single message.
This platform also makes work fun by introducing communication features like emojis, adding bulk work files or voice notes along with messages, and even adding GIFs or images for easy access and reference for users. Slack ranks 33rd out of the top 100 communication platforms for its systematic arrangements and effective search features.
Medium
Medium is one of those globally accepted publishing platforms that share insightful content like blogs, articles, and stories. The best part of its design is its readability. It is the most unique social media platform that allows users to react effectively to the content on their feed through emojis, commenting, and even sharing it without any difficulties.
With a responsive mobile design, hovering features, and presentation of content, Medium delivers an interactive reading experience in a sophisticated manner. Once you start becoming a regular user of the platform, it also offers you curated content for easy and daily reading. Moreover, it also comes with a display of estimated time of reading, by which you can decide whether you’d prefer staying on the same article or skipping to the next article.
Apart from all this, Medium also nourishes your writing skills through a simple wordpad feature, which allows you to write, edit, and share your creations through easy editing options. Its drag-and-drop options allow you to easily add images and content from your folders to the article. Also, if you’re someone who takes writing as a passion, this is just the right pick for you, where you can view, edit, and remove fluff from your writing even after you’ve published it.
Let’s admit that many of us find scrolling reels and double-tapping on a post as a hobby rather than just a social media activity. But have you ever thought about why this platform is so addictive and best-loved by people of all age categories? Of course, because it adheres to the basics of designing and app design psychology that appeal to all user groups.
One of the standalone features of Instagram is its niche-specific content delivered through the ‘Discover’ feature, which allows you to view and share content that you prefer more. Moreover, it is a portal that facilitates effortless activities and provides access to information without requiring any prior knowledge. Essentially, it lets you quickly and easily like, share, and download the content that you love.
Instagram is the best learning place for content creators, allowing them to edit their creatives, add music, captions, hashtags, and enhance their posts on a single page altogether.
There’s more to it—the app allows you to pin important or interesting comments and even turn a simple image into a post, reel, or carousel within a few clicks. Therefore, it simultaneously provides a magnificent user experience, keeping users engaged for hours without needing to switch tabs.
YouTube
YouTube is recognized as one of the top-performing apps, providing a wide variety of meticulous content based on age and interest categories. It also offers a personalized entertainment experience, letting you view, preview, and even revisit your favorite content on a single page. Every like, dislike, and comment you add to a video is counted as a metric to evaluate the quality of content and improve it over time.
It is also counted as one of the top-performing apps for its elaborate desktop view, allowing you to adjust your screen size horizontally and vertically, too, through auto-rotate features. It also enhances your watch experience by creating folders to watch later. Moreover, if you’re too lazy to sit and watch the entire video, you can also effectively hover around the video timeline to preview the upcoming scenes. If you’re too lazy to wait for the twists and turns of your video, you can even double-tap your screen to fast forward your content and enjoy the most-awaited snippets.
Another major valuable strategy in YouTube is the concise content, which you can scroll through as you go, is YouTube Shorts. This feature enables you to view continuous and bite-sized content from various niches without any ad interruptions. These are a few of the major reasons why YouTube remains the prime entertainment app choice for users.
Tips to Create Apps with Irresistibly Engaging UX
Now that you know that UX is one of the key ingredients to an intriguing app, here are some quick tips that could help you make it even more interesting while aligning with the future of web design and development:
Define the USP.
Unique Selling Proposition is the rhythmic evaluation of user likes and dislikes at regular intervals. Understand what your user wants and spend enough time capturing their suggestions, recommendations, and feedback, and use them as a base during UI design and development. When the downloads, upgrades, and payments start increasing, you know that the UX has clicked!
Focus on Experiences, Not Solutions
If you’re specific about delivering impactful mobile app development services with a captivating UX, start with practical research, not a theoretical one. Go out, talk to potential users, and intensely understand their needs. Examine what their long-term goals are and provide an impactful solution that they can use from the present through the future.
Fix the Metrics First
Find out how you can deliver an engaging UX. Focus on the design success rate, time spent on task, error rate (the time spent by users in spotting errors in the app), customer satisfaction, and session recordings (the start and end time of app usage). Tracing the lagging metrics can help you fix the app UX quickly.
Foster Feedback
Post launch, make sure that your users share their feedback and you go through it thoroughly. Some easy ways to foster simple feedback are star ratings, pop-ups for open reviews, and live chatbots with quick and concise questions about the user experience.
Make Research Creative
Remember, your app is first experienced by you before your users. So start with deep and creative research and use all possible platforms to know your audience. Starting from polls, surveys, and questionnaires to even understanding the user mindset from Quora and Reddit platforms, find out what the users expect from an app and build yours accordingly.
Punctuality Beyond Perfection
You always have time to make your app more appealing and sharper, but make sure that the looks don’t delay your launch. UX designers have the goal of upgrading the clarity and beauty of their applications, but they have to be careful not to waste too much time. Continue modifying and improving your application and release the best one possible by the due date. You always have more time to update post-launch.
Start Making Personas
If you find it too time-consuming to go out and talk to your target audience, then start making customer personas. Start with a simple persona and inculcate every possible detail you can find. Start by documenting your user age categories, their behaviors, needs, and responses towards the app. Include their profession, lifestyle, and pain points in using the app as evaluation criteria. Accordingly, categorize your audience based on their common requirements and start building user-oriented solutions.
Create Customer Journey Maps
Customer journey mapping is one of the inevitable UI best practices of identifying the user needs, tracking the user journey by understanding what made them choose a specific app and ignore the others, and comparing the efforts you’ve put into the UX and removing the unnecessary details that the users may not find gripping.
Weigh Your Competitors
Even though you’re almost done with the UX design process, take time to look at your competitors’ apps and weigh them against yours. Similarly, evaluate the market landscape for one last time before launching your app. Make sure that your app stands out from the competition and includes every possible feature of your competitors.
Review Everything
Have a few more minutes on hand before launching the app?. Check for any last-minute updates that could add to your USP. Take a glance at the architecture, content, buttons, responsiveness, and loading speed of features. Are they all on the same page? Great! Then get going with launching your app.
Wrapping Up
A great app is a lot more than functionality. Do you also wish to create an irresistible app that users won’t want to put down? Partner with a leading mobile app development company in India, and make sure that you uncompromisingly ask for good UX support too. In today’s app economy, the UX isn’t just a part of the app; it is the solid foundation. This helps in uniting the targeted users, enhancing customer satisfaction, and confirming the long-term success of the app.
