When you’re developing a new app or optimizing the existing one, designing an app is more about solving a problem, than how the app looks.
We recently released an article on the cost of developing an app. Now, it’s time to estimate the cost of designing a mobile app.
Considering some of the top tier companies like Airbnb, Uber, Google, and Apple dedicates a good part of their success to their user-centric design strategy for delivering extraordinary user experiences.
In this blog, we will outline the essential steps involved in app design, the factors that influence the mobile app design cost, and everything to help you get started with mobile app design. And analyze how much does it cost to design an app?
What is the mobile app design?
Mobile App Design is a process of designing mobile apps, encompassing faster loading times, accessibility, and overall user experience.
According to Adobe, App design combines the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). While UI lends itself to the overall style of the app (including the colors, fonts, and general look and feel), UX focuses on the actual functionality and usability.
What are the stages of mobile app design?
An effective app design process revolves around delivering a great user experience and problem-solving approach. The basic steps of the mobile app design involve research, analysis, prototype designing, UI/UX, testing, and branding.
1. Analyze app idea
Estimated time: 20-40 hours with a maximum of 150 hours
App development starts with an app idea discovery and brainstorming. The very first step of app design is to convey the app idea correctly to the developers. During each stage of the mobile design, do substantial market research, study your audience well, create user personas to segment your users, analyze the actual user demographics, and behavior patterns.
This phase is crucial because designers work to take the client’s requirements and no one likes to pay the redesigning cost.
2. Work on the prototype (UI UX Design Cost)
To understand the app functions and future scope, try to focus on app usability, project complexity, and navigation. This stage includes App sketching, Wireframing, and User Experience (UX), and App Animation guides.
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Sketches
To design a great mobile app, sketches are used to display complicated app mechanisms. Popular sketching tools are Sketch, Buildfire, Adobe XD etc.
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UX Wireframing
During this process, designers create interactive layouts to structure the app screens and showcase app screen connectivity with the help of some of the best mobile UI design tools for app designers. UX Wireframing ensures the app flow and gets the visual concept of an application that gives a general understanding of an app and all the functions it does.
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UX Wireframes with Native UI Element
The mobile app UI design cost varies from app to app. To give an idea of the basic app interface and more detailed design structure, add distinct fonts, buttons and control styles, and other native UI components constitute the UX wireframe. Finally, the prototype phase ends with usability testing and validating the concept. Special tools like MARVEL, Balsamiq, and Photoshop are used.
3. Create Visual Design (UI)
In mobile application development, the visual design consists of UI mockups, that help users to understand the basic idea behind the app. It gives a clear idea of different approaches to style, use of different elements, forms, shades, color schemes, and others.
It’s important to know that visual design and branding are inter-related. Visual design is about creating a cohesive product style and includes an app’s logo, a mobile app icon, and screens.
To sum up
With this, we have reviewed almost all the important aspects that influence the cost of designing a good application for iOS and Android.
Apart from app complexity, Android/iOS app or both, type of the targeted devices, designer experience and geography, etc., there are as many things that need to be considered, before designing a good mobile app for your business.
If you have a great app idea in your mind, let’s give it a quick shape. Get inspired by some of the top app design agency that have successfully created a global presence and are working to empower human ideas through the well-crafted website and mobile app designs.
Content Source: https://www.mobileappdaily.com/cost-to-design-a-mobile-app
