Mobile design patterns are reusable solutions for common user interface problems in mobile applications. They help you create consistent, intuitive, and user-friendly experiences across different platforms and devices. But how can you ensure coherence in mobile design patterns across platforms? Here are some tips to help you achieve that goal.
Each mobile platform has its own design guidelines that define the basic principles, components, interactions, and styles for creating apps. For example, Android has Material Design, iOS has Human Interface Guidelines, and Windows has Fluent Design. You should familiarize yourself with these guidelines and follow them as much as possible to create apps that fit the platform's expectations and conventions. This will help you avoid confusion and frustration for your users who are used to the platform's standards.
Each mobile platform has its own design guidelines that define the basic principles, components, interactions, and styles for creating apps. For example, Android has Material Design, iOS has Human Interface Guidelines, and Windows has Fluent Design. You should familiarize yourself with these guidelines and follow them as much as possible to create apps that fit the platform's expectations and conventions. This will help you avoid confusion and frustration for your users who are used to the platform's standards.
While following the platform guidelines is important, you don't have to sacrifice your app's identity and uniqueness. You can still maintain your brand's personality, color scheme, typography, and icons across platforms, as long as they don't clash with the platform's aesthetics and functionality. You can also use adaptive design patterns that adjust to different screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions, such as responsive layouts, adaptive navigation, and progressive disclosure. The key is to find the right balance between consistency and adaptation, depending on your app's purpose, target audience, and features.
Some design patterns are common across platforms and can help you create coherence in your mobile apps. For example, you can use tabs, menus, search bars, buttons, sliders, and switches to provide familiar and easy-to-use controls for your users. However, you should also be aware of the differences and nuances in how these patterns are implemented and used on different platforms. For example, tabs on Android can be swipeable, while tabs on iOS are fixed. You should respect these differences and use the common patterns appropriately, without forcing them to work the same way on every platform.
The best way to ensure coherence in your mobile design patterns across platforms is to test and iterate your design with real users and devices. You should use prototyping tools, such as Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD, to create interactive mockups of your app and test them on different platforms and devices. You should also conduct user testing and feedback sessions to evaluate how your app performs and feels on different platforms and devices. You should then use the insights and data from these tests to improve and refine your design until you achieve the desired level of coherence.
Finally, you can learn from the best practices and examples of other apps that have successfully achieved coherence in their mobile design patterns across platforms. You can use resources, such as UI Patterns, Mobbin, or Pttrns, to browse and analyze hundreds of mobile app screenshots and see how they handle common design challenges and scenarios. You can also use blogs, podcasts, books, and courses to learn from the experts and influencers in the field of mobile design. You can then apply the lessons and inspiration from these sources to your own design projects.