Apple was the first to introduce a complete touchscreen smartphone to the world back in 2007. And since then, most smartphones have between 3-5 buttons or not at all. Though Apple did not invent the touchscreen themselves, they indeed made it accessible to the worldwide audience.
Today, most smartphone manufactures encourage their customers to interact with their smartphones primarily by using Gestures. In fact, in the last ten years, mobile gestures have become mainstream to navigate through a smartphone and apps on it.
Gestures are nothing but touch mechanisms & activities. In simple terms, it’s the physical activity you perform with your finger(s) on your smartphone, and touch activities are the effects of a particular gesture.
Nowadays, everybody knows that mobile gestures play a vital role in smartphones, whether calling a friend or using an app. But, do you know the importance of mobile gestures and the benefits of integrating them in your mobile app?
Whether you’re creating a business app, an eCommerce app, or a fitness app, integrating mobile gestures in your mobile app is a must, especially if you want to nail user retention.
In today’s article, we will share three essential points of how mobile gestures affect your app’s user experience in a good way.
How Mobile Gestures Affect User Experience
#1 – Mobile Gestures Make User Experience (UX) More Lively
With the rise of mobile apps, the demands of modern users have also increased. Nowadays, users do not just want a mobile app that is only useful; they also wish mobile apps to be attractive.
The best way to accomplish this is by making an application easy to navigate through mobile gestures.
This kind of design blended with gestures offers multiple benefits:
- Users can interact with content right away.
- You can add smooth animations on touch activities that make your app more enjoyable.
- Lastly, by integrating mobile gestures, you can create a clean, mesmerizing, and minimalistic User Interface (UI).
#2 – Mobile Gestures Make Your App Cluster-Free
In every smartphone, screen space is always going to be limited. And you’ve so much content that you want to show all at once.
What now?
This is where the mobile gestures come to the picture. Mobile gestures are the best way to free up space by replacing excessive buttons with custom gestures. You can also hide the menu and still provide access to it with a simple left or right swipe gesture.
While these are the basic gestures you might already be familiar with, implementing them in your application can allow you to put your most valuable content in the centre of your users’ attention.
Additionally, since there will be fewer buttons and navigation elements, your app users can concentrate more on utilizing your app without too many distractions.
#3 – App Design Blended with Gestures Provides Seamless Interaction
For today’s modern smartphone users, swipe gestures are natural. Therefore, implement the same gesture activities for basic gestures such as:
- Pinch in & out for Zoom in & out.
- Swipe left & right to open menu and to go to back screen.
- Double tap as a click even such as “like”.
Though you can still use custom gestures for various navigations inside your app, while doing so, keep in mind to educate your users with a demo tutorial while onboarding.
Now, if your app contains multiple custom gestures that you cannot teach all at once initially, you can also provide tips in the context of an action. For example, you can show instructions for using your custom gestures as they explore your application. You can show specific hints as a user reaches a section or feature of your app.
Bonus Tip:
If you’re planning to build a mobile app, make sure to design your app interface to give users a clue about in-app gestures. In simple words, plan about the custom gesture beforehand so that you can design the UI of your mobile app that provides clear visual clues on how they should interact with your app.
Conclusion
Mobile Gestures serve as time savers. And to design a meaningful yet easy-to-use gesture, you should tie an action to that particular gesture and also provide an explicit hint of a possible action to guide your users.
So, now that you know the power and importance of mobile gestures in a mobile app think ahead about the gestures you want to implement before you start creating your app design. And if you can’t plan for it, hire a mobile app design & development agency having experience & expertise in integrating such gestures to make your app’s interaction much easier.
