Progressive web apps have become the bridging gap between websites and mobile apps; a mix of both but with better reach, performance, and user experience. Speaking of user experience, it is important that best practices are followed when designing your PWA. I gathered a few key points that can help you streamline your designing process.
1. Less is More – Embrace Minimalistic Style
The concept of keeping the overall UI/UX design simple and easy to understand apply perfectly to PWAs. Why? Because they are built to help users perform the tasks in less amount of time. For this, you need to stay clear of incorporating distracting elements on high priority pages. Since unnecessary animations or content would drive the focus away from your app’s core functionality.
Make sure your PWA has important content, call-to-action elements and any other key component highlighted on that particular page.
2. Keep the Fonts Simple
If that uber fancy font is speaking to you, then hush those voices and use device default fonts whenever possible. You need an app that loads faster and is optimized in all areas – that includes fonts as well. Custom fonts will not only slow down your app’s performance and increase the downloading size of your page, but it will also create distractions that will lessen the retention rate.
3. Offline Mode
Considering PWAs load instantly even without an internet connection, you need to make sure you are maximizing on this advantage by providing all key features offline as well. Also, consider PRP: an architecture for structuring your PWAs.
4. Keep It Simple
Since Progressive Web Apps take your mobile experience to a whole new level, it is important that its features are enhancing the experience, not completely distracting from it.
This warning was actually given by a UX expert working for Google by the name Ryan Warrender. Why was the issue of not getting carried away was brought to light? Simply because there are tons of exciting features like home-screen install, push notifications, offline mode, and others tend to make any developer excited.
After all, PWAs have become the ultimate experience of websites that behave like mobile apps and have a great impact. Anyone that has so many features at their disposal would want to incorporate them as much as they can. This is why a reality-check is necessary. [See point #1.]
5. Focus On Reducing Friction
Speed-optimization isn’t the only factor that reduces the friction of the over-all experience. There are many factors that can contribute to friction even after having a super-fast loading speed.
These ‘other’ factors need to be tracked down, addressed, and sorted. They could be anything from the frustrating check-out system at your site or form-filling that is complicated and leading to a high drop off rate.
Practice modern solutions like autofill, one-tap-sign-up, automatic sign-in, and integrated web payments to reduce friction. In other words, apply any solution that makes the process for a user faster, convenient, and hassle-free.
In addition to these solutions, leverage ready-made solutions for most of your design needs.
Bonus Tips:
Apart from these 5 UX practices I have mentioned, make sure you are taking full advantage of the home screen install feature. This particular element is a powerful tool for brand visibility. So invest in creating an eye-catching icon.
Moreover, do not forget the SEO aspect as PWAs have URLs that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. So apply best SEO practices to rank better and stand out in search results. Lastly, test your Progressive Web App through Lighthouse – an open-source performance management tool introduced by Google.
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