UX is good, but your app is better!

When you design your mobile app, you consider UX always on top as it is the primary demand for any application successfully running in the market. The usual procedure an app creator follows is

• You consider other apps in similar category and learn the UX they've made
• List successful app like Whatsapp, DropBox etc  and learn from what the key they made in UX innovation
• You split the UX areas into: App feature UX, customer acquisition/onboarding UX and app usability UX and look at them one by one

It's all good! But all of them should only be the references to your app and your app must be always "Your App". Never compromise your product with any motivational designs, challenging apps or success stories. If you do that, you will be just making an app copying an existing successful product and it's UX, but at that time the space for your app's success would be moved a lot forth. You think this way:

If Whatsapp can act as a motivation for your app this time, why shouldn't your app become a reference / motivation for many other apps in the future.

For that you should not copy / follow entire knowledge you scratched from a existing successful app, but you should create your app in your own way, to give maximum usability to your users in another space.

When you begin an Android app or iPhone app, you always consult with a Android / iPhone geek asking what are the expected behaviours?, how should the menu look like in a particular version ? et.al such so many questions. They usually come up with many regulations saying that, "you should not do this that way, that is not Android standard. Convention says that..."

You better stop there!

There is no conventional design, conventional flows, there is only your product.

This does not mean that you don't do any research or follow any standards. You take those parts which you think suitable for your app, and discard others, because the product is yours and the exact use case  is something you only know.

You can check with a normal user asking whether a proposed design is useful for them. Their feedback of course is valuable, and something you should take into account. However, giving them a new behaviour and ask them to become used to this, is NOT wrong. Because otherwise there won't be an iPhone or any of the apple products. Think on what Apple did, introduced some new behaviour, for an instance, a single home button to close all the apps and show the home screen in iPhone! For a non-iphone user, it may feel as a strange experience, but for the one used to, it is a precious feature.

Think this way, eat your product properly, let it digest fully by you. Once this is done, you make your way of prototype, if conventional way of integration is okay in your app, adapt it, break the rules for any areas you think the other way is fit, keep successful stories and good practices in mind, but just as a reference and use the freedom to violate it when your app demands.

Finally, or in an intermediate stage ask your users how do they feel, amend those you feel good in your app based on their feedback, and discard some on those areas where you want to provide a brand new user behaviour.

UX is good, but your app is better!