Although many eCommerce businesses are struggling to survive the post-coronavirus pandemic, businesses with a strong digital presence are growing at a rapid pace.
According to WHO prediction, COVID-19 might become an endemic just like Ebola & HIV, and mask-wearing & social distancing could become a new normal along with online purchases & digital transactions.
In other words, the need for digital transformation through mobile apps & mobile web apps will witness an exponential surge in the near future.
Now, mobile app development is both an expensive and time-consuming process. In addition, you also need to make sure that your mobile app is perfectly in sync with your eCommerce store with a uniform user interface and user experience.
Fortunately, there is a new way to serve your customers on the mobile app as well as mobile web platforms without having to develop a native mobile app from scratch.
Enter Progressive Web Apps!
What is a Progressive Web App?
Progressive Web App, also referred to as PWA, is an ideal substitute for a native mobile app.
In simple words, it is basically a hybrid of a mobile app and a mobile website that is built using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc but behaves like a mobile app.
When you build a PWA store, your customers can access it even when they’re offline and send push notifications. And the best part is, PWAs don’t take much storage space in customers’ smartphones like native mobile apps.
However, when you’re developing a PWA store, it is of utmost importance to ensure that it has a uniform user interface & user experience on your eCommerce website & mobile web.
For this, you need to utilize the best PWA builder to give your progressive web app store the native app look, feel, and features.
But more importantly, you also need to truly understand your customers to design a seamless user interface & user experience for your PWA store.
Below, we’ve shared 6 tips on how to build seamless UI/UX PWA Apps for Mobile & Desktop.
6 Tips to Develop a Seamless UI/UX PWA App for Mobile & Desktop
There is a lot of rush in the mobile app industry. And if you want to ensure that your PWA store attains success, it is critical to design it brilliantly.
The following tips will help you ease the PWA designing process and build a seamless & uniform UI/UX PWA app for mobile and desktop.
1. Provide Offline Access
Since PWAs are built on JavaScript – a truly dynamic technology, you can easily integrate customers’ expectations as well as business goals while designing the PWA UI/UX.
This includes offline access to your PWA store. However, it is recommended to only choose features that are supremely important & are mostly used by your customer for offline support.
2. Plan the Thumb Zone Reach Effectively
Desktop screens are pretty wide and accessed with a mouse. Smartphones, on the other hand, have limited screen space and customers use their thumb to click on screens.
Therefore, you must plan your PWA store’s UI/UX accordingly to ensure everything is within thumb’s reach and customers don’t have to stretch to access it.
For instance, you should remove the footer of your PWA store from every page to remove unnecessary elements and create sufficient screen space for designers to organize essential buttons.
3. Plan the Back Functionality Thoughtfully
When you’re planning the back functionality, there are two things you need to remember:
- The back button is often placed at the upper end of the screen;
- Customers usually click on the back button when they don’t see what they desire or when they need to go back and search for the right product.
This means, when you plan the back functionality, you need to make sure that you take them back exactly where customers were before and that they can resume their product search without any difficulty.
This, in turn, will ensure that your PWA store doesn’t deliver an irritating or unsatisfactory shopping experience.
4. Provide App Interactions
In other words, you need to provide acknowledge to your customers that your app has registered their actions.
This may sound like a small thing but is critically essential especially during high traffic times when your PWA store is having a slow response rate.
So, your need to ensure that your PWA design team provides visible app interactions during the design process.
5. Avoid Screen Jumps
In any website or native app or web app, the most annoying thing is when a customer clicks on a particular page, the page takes time to load because it is not cached, resulting in images loading at last, and the page jumps the content and annoys the customers.
So, when you design your PWA UI/UX, make sure that the blank image spaces are replaced by blurred thumbnails till the time the images are properly loaded so that the content doesn’t jump and annoy your customers.
6. Create a Live Splash Screen
A splash screen is basically an introduction screen that is displayed when customers click on your PWA store icon. The splash screen usually stays till the store loads.
Therefore, it is crucial to assure your customers that your PWA store is loading normally and is not stuck.
And to provide this assurance, it is recommended to use some sort of customizations such as designing a live splash screen.
Summary
So, these are the top 6 tips you can keep in mind when designing the UI/UX of your PWA Store for mobile and desktop.
We hope that you found this post helpful. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below.
And if you need our professional assistance with PWA Development, feel free to contact us at any time and we’d be more than happy to help!
