9 things to watch when you’re looking at other apps for inspiration. (Part 3 of 3)

Welcome Screens

How much or how little information is the app trying to show you when you first open it up? What are they highlighting… what do THEY think is important for you to know? Also, how/when do they ask you to create an account, sign in, register, or upgrade for premium features?

Onboarding / Account Setup

After you create your account, how much are they trying to explain to you and how much information are they trying to collect? When it comes to payment, I HATE putting my credit card in — even if it’s for something I want to use. So when the payment can be added by simply snapping a photo of my card like with the Bird app, that’s a nice surprise. 

Another thing I like with a new app is when they give you a short guided walkthrough that shows you where to enter certain details. 

Studies show that if your users enter a bit of information, pick some preferences, or add some friends they are much more likely to keep using your app.

Tap Bar

The tap bar along the bottom has become almost a standard design feature. Watch how different apps organize their tap bar, which areas of the app you’re able to navigate to quickly, and what kind of information they save for a more traditional navigation. Which brings us to…

Navigation

What information are they hiding away in a more traditional menu? Is the menu on the right or the left? Drawer style? What do they call each section? Where does the app slide or scroll? When do they decide to use filters?

Account Editing

This is often overlooked and this is one of the areas that breaks most frequently when we take an app through the QA process. If anything breaks in this part of your app this is a trigger for your users to feel like it’s not safe and secure.

Content-heavy sections

This is a true test of how thought-through an app is… how well do they display content when there is a LOT of content to display? Do they use sections, tables, graphs?

Content Collections

Content collections are different than content-heavy sections in the fact that they auto-populate based on new content being published to the app. Peloton is a great reference for this — notice how they display all of their various classes sorted by instructor, length, etc.

Copy

By copy, I’m referring to the actual WORDS they use on the different screens. Sometimes an app will have a more playful and conversational tone — sometimes they are serious and buttoned up. Either way, the words you use have a huge impact on what a user feels as they go through your app.

Custom Design Elements

What kind of elements are they adding to give the app an extra bit of personality? Specialty fonts? Gradients? Custom icons? Illustrations? Animations? Sometimes a little goes a long way with these extra elements.