First impressions are 94% design related. From competitor audit to UI UX app design, designing an app is a herculean task!
What’s seen is sold. Right!
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.
Designing an exceptional UX isn’t a cakewalk. It begins with “understand your user.” Now, what makes an app user-centered?
To design a high-quality app, it’s essential to figure out what are the necessary aspects of the product’s UX and market success that depends on many other variables. After all, the design is not only about how the app looks but how does it work?
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?
Let’s dive in.
Good design is good business.
~ IBM
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.
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.
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.
Now, you are ready with your app idea, the next step is to shape them with documentation and wireframing. How much does it cost to build an app prototype?
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.
To design a great mobile app, sketches are used to display complicated app mechanisms. Popular sketching tools are Sketch, Buildfire, Adobe XD etc.
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.
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.
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.
Branding is another essential stage of mobile app interface design as it includes the creation of logos, fonts, and brand illustrations. Branding begins with mood board creation and then shifts to logo design. Check out the top app UI design trends and keep your eyes on how your competitors are designing an app.
The cost to create the visual design is further divided into -
Here are the factors on what, app design cost depends.
The cost of hiring a designer depends on your budget and pocket. You can find a range of professionals, in terms of technology expertise, platform, experience, and pay range. If you want to hire a professional senior designer, you can have to pay up to $150 per hour or even more. At the same time, the less experienced designer can take only $45/hour.
There are two major aspects of app development, function, and appearance. If your users want the app to be highly functional, your primary focus should be on the app features and secondly appearance. Just go with the flow, follow the market standards, look out to your competitors, and invest more to enhance the app features.
If you’re looking to outsource your application designing, then services may vary according to the region. Although the cost to design an app differs between countries, we have listed out the average cost to design a good looking app from the most common hourly rates for design in US dollars.
Whether you’re designing an app or developing one, both processes involve complexity analysis. Firstly, let us show you what defines the app complexity?
Number of platforms you’re using to design an app (Web design, Android/iOS)
Further, we have divided the cost to design an app estimation into 3 complexity levels.
The development of native applications plays a fundamental role in deciding the cost of mobile app design. The cost of designing a mobile app varies from platform to platform, whether you’re going to design an Android App or an iOS app.
However, the cost of app design for iOS tends to be higher due to bigger payments on Apple App Store and more strict rules, as compared to Android. Let’s figure out what are the key aspects.
Every app is unique as compared to design, function, and number of platforms, we suggest you research your target audience well and decide which platforms and technologies you would like to work on.
IBM says
“Every dollar invested in ease of use returns $10 to $100“.
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 mobile app design companies that have successfully created a global presence and are working to empower human ideas through the well-crafted website and mobile app designs.
With a strong knowledge of the latest UI/UX design trends, Ayush, the creative head of MobileAppDaily, is curating enticing designs from the past five years. His work helped in achieving the desired user experience for many top brands. Right now, he’s at the helm of designing team and is leaving no stone unturned to devise futuristic designs.
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