Importance of Mobile Gestures in Terms of User Experience

Apple was first to introduce a fully 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, but they indeed made it accessible to the worldwide audience.

Today, most smartphone manufactures encourage their customers to interact with their smartphones mostly by using Gestures. In fact, in the last 10 years, mobile gestures have become a 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 that you perform with your finger(s) on your smartphone, and touch activities are basically the effects of a particular gesture.

Nowadays, everybody knows that mobile gestures play a vital role in smartphones, whether you’re 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 3 important points of how mobile gestures affect user experience of your app 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 want mobile apps to be attractive as well.

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 picture. Mobile gestures are the best way to free up space by replacing excessive buttons with custom gestures. Plus, you can also hide 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, but implementing them in your application can allow you to put your most valuable content in the center of your users’ attention.

Additionally, since there are going to be less 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, but while doing so, just 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 in the beginning, you can also provide tips in the context of an action. For example, you can show instructions of 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 in a that gives a clue to users about in-app gestures. In simple words, plan about the custom gesture beforehand so that you can design UI of your mobile app that provide clear visual clues on how they should interact with your app.

Conclusion

Mobile Gestures basically 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 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, make sure to 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.