Feeling rejected? You're not alone!

Richard Stone explains the importance of user interface design in the development and deployment of engaging enterprise apps.

Apple’s recently released statistics for common app rejections make for some interesting reading. Of course, there are some obvious reasons for apps being rejected – crashes and bugs, broken links, etc – but there are also some that are more subtle.

One in particular caught my eye: "Substandard User Interface," which accounts for 6% of all rejections. Although the wording may sound harsh, it highlights a core design principle that now applies to every app, irrespective of what it does, what mobile device(s) it’s designed to run on, and who the target user is: The User Interface is King.

Building a great-looking UI

Designing engaging UIs is not something that comes easily or naturally to most people, including mobile application developers. The use of shapes, colors, and fonts is just the start –unlike the PC experience, mobile UIs must also take into account things such as screen resolution and device orientation, gestures and "hit targets," and a dozen other more subtle things such as how to get users to wait without them actually realizing that they’re waiting.

Apple does a great job at providing iOS developers with the information they need to build great UIs, even though 6% of developers appear to ignore their advice. But even for the other 94% of developers, building a great-looking, great-performing UI can still represent a complex and time consuming effort. Worse, when the developer wants move the app to another platform such as Android, they have to start the UI coding all over again.

UI help in MADP

So how can developers leverage great UI designs quickly and with minimal coding, and then run them on any mobile platform without additional work? For an increasing number of mobile developers, the answer is to use one of the latest generation of model-driven mobile application development platforms (MADP). These platforms not only offer pre-built templates and themes for the UI, they offer a visual programming environment to minimize coding effort and most importantly, they are device agnostic. This means that the developer can "write once," and at the press of a button (or the click of a check box), the platform can build native or web-based apps for any form-factor of iOS or Android device, all using exactly the same UI.

A good model-driven MADP enables developers to build engaging apps which are indistinguishable from native and web-based apps built using traditional development tools, but in a fraction of the time.

Our new webinar series will give you more information on designing UIs and building mobile applications the easy, fast, modern way. Start by watching the first video in the series right now: