You Can Code, But Can You Design?

Here at Kumulos, it’s not unusual for us to talk about app design. After all, it’s a hugely important part of the overall process of creating an app. Bad app design is one of the major factors in apps failing to garner a good sized user base and why many apps end up as drains on resources because they’re not viable to maintain any more with a small user base.

A well designed app can hook users into your system, can get them talking about it and get your development studio’s name out there; all things you want when you’re looking to make your living from developing apps.

It can be hard sometimes though, as a coder, to know how to improve your design skills; which is especially important if you’re working on your own or in a small team where everyone has to share the load.  After all, making something visually striking and good to use well is very different from coding the backend of it well. The two skills are not always interchangeable, but thankfully there are many coders out there with the exact same problem and they regularly post about it on Stack Exchange and other Q&A websites; and we thought we’d pull together some of the advice and also give you some of our own.

It’s going to take time

First and foremost is to realise that this isn’t going to happen overnight. Like any skill, being a good designer takes time to learn. There was once a professor in an art College who said as his first lecture to first year students, “You guys have thousands of bad pictures in you, lets start getting some of them out now.”

The same is true in app design. The first app you design is highly unlikely to be a work of art and neither are your second or third, if we’re being honest. But that shouldn’t put you off of making them. Every time you do you’ll have learned important lessons from the previous attempts. It helps to do research into good design, and good patterns to follow as you’ll start to get a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. More importantly though, do research into anti-pattern. We’ve talked about it here before and it’s very important as an app developer that you don’t fall into the trap of accidentally creating apps with UI anti-patterns in them.

Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. Yes, they suck and cause you problems in the short term, but because they suck you’ll learn to avoid them and how to handle them better in the future.

On the coding side of things, as design also applies in code in some ways, remember you’re writing code for something that is going to need maintained and bug fixed frequently as time goes on. So try to aim for getting the tidiest, cleanest and easiest to maintain code you can first time. Avoid the “just one more hack” mentality, as you’ll quickly find that your entire app is filled with little, ugly fixes that only work when nothing changes and does exactly as it’s supposed to. Code like that will just mean headaches for you and your users in the future, and headaches for users are exactly what you’re trying to avoid in the first place with good app design.

Finally, remember that you want people to want to use your app.

Ultimately if you wouldn’t use your app, why do you think anyone else will?

Make an app that you yourself want on your device, that you enjoy using. If you can design your app to be that, you’ve probably solved many of the problems related to design just through the natural needs of making an app you like. After all, you are an app developer, and no one is more critical of something than those who also create that certain thing.

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