How do you usually gain brainstorming idea on how to design Android mobile app page

Question

My background is developer and I do not have any experience in real UI/UX design.

Often, I'm pretty clear what kind of task I want to help users to achieve in my mobile app.

• I want users able to input this and that.
• I want to show users this and that information.

However, often, I lack of idea, on how to present the mobile app page, in a beautiful and elegant way.

Usually, how I kick start my idea brainstorming, is to look for relevant keyword in Dribbble and Behance.

For instance, I want to develop a charting to show the summary of user stock investment return over the time. Hence, what I will be really doing, is I will search for keyword like stock market, finance app, charting, ...

With result from Dribbble and Behance, I can derive my own design idea, based on others' work.

Besides the above ways, is there other ways, where professional UI/UX mobile app designer gain their brainstorming idea?

Answer 1

One of the first things to do when attempting to design a UI is to determine what information you need to display to the user, and I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but it's actually a very important step. Once you have a list of this (for you something like "stocks, return, time period, etc.") you can begin to see how the different data sets or informations are related. It happens far too often that people don't carefully consider how UI elements are related contextually and it leads to a poor design in my opinion. Different stocks can be shown on the same page/element for example, but account information for the app has little business being there.

Once you have found a way to logically group all of the different information it's really helpful to then evaluate how these different information sets (for lack of a better word) are related. You shouldn't have to swipe through five panes in your app to find another visualization of data or information directly related to the page/element you were just looking at.

Now that all of the relations have been considered the hard work begins. Designing a great looking UI is hard work in my opinion, but I think that simplicity is something to strive for. If things are easy to use and the product does what you say it will, then customers are typically fairly happy.

Color combinations are obviously important as well, and I often use online resources to help with this because I don't really have an eye for it.

Besides this, I also find the guide on style from the Android dev site pretty helpful, and if you google around you'll find plenty more about how to design a decent UI/UX.

Answer 2

You have talked about what you want the user to do, but you haven't described it in terms of what your user actually wants to accomplish. Your user does not want to input anything. They might have to input something as a means to their end. You haven't described their end. "A summary of stock performance over time" also isn't the user's goal. It might be something that helps them accomplish their goal, but it's still not their goal.

In your financial example, the user's real goal could be any of the following (or others!): * Buy a new home * Pay for an unexpected expense * Be able to pay for school tuition for their children

Now, with real-world user goals in mind, how does your app fit into their goal? What information do you need from them to help them achieve their goal? What information do you need to display to them, and when, to help them achieve their goal?

User experience is about considering your application from the perspective of the user, and determining how your app helps the user achieve what they really want to achieve. If you solely focus on what you want the user to do, or what information you should show the user, you might create a good app. If you focus on what the user wants to do and how your app fits into that, you have a much better chance of creating a truly great app.