App design versus web design: what designers can teach each other

1. Avoid feature creep
App designers know that extra features can quickly become your worst enemy. Keeping your app tight and lean, with only the necessary, useful features, is a key to success. If you look at the most popular apps in virtually any platform's app store, you'll see that the majority have a narrow focus with only the features they most need.
2. You need to create something unique and fresh
App developers know that creating something that's different from the apps currently available is one of the most important elements of creating a popular and successful app. They need something unique and fresh if they want to stand out in the marketplace. Just adding a feature or two over what the competition is providing doesn't cut it.
3. Use standard GUI controls and patterns
While unique is good, the best app designers also know that there are certain standard GUI elements that are expected to do certain things. They deviate from these predefined controls at their own risk. The successful apps only do things differently when it works better than the standard GUI (which isn't often in most cases). And most of them present clear instructions when they do deviate.
4. Create useful error messages
This lesson can go both ways. Some app designers have fantastically useful error messages, as do some websites. But there are a lot of apps out there that don't have helpful error messages, and a lot of websites that are the same.
5. Pretty matters
This is something a lot of app designers could learn from web designers. Now, granted, there are plenty of pretty and useful apps out there. But there are also a lot of apps that have great features but are incredibly ugly and poorly designed. App designers need to think about how they can better design the GUI of their app, rather than just using the default design scheme of the platform they're building for. Sure, the built-in GUI elements aren't terrible in some cases, but they're also pretty generic. They're not going to help your app stand out from the thousands of others in the market. Even worse is the number of apps out there that use a custom design that's actually worse than the stock GUI.
6. Scalability is a must
This is something that web designers have down pretty well. We know that at any point in time, our website could suddenly see an influx of traffic and need to remain usable by a larger number of people. All it takes is a bit of content to suddenly go viral, or even just get one or two retweets or shares from influential people. And to an extent, it's not that hard for a standard website to become more scalable (it's mostly just a matter of choosing a host who can provide servers that will scale along with your traffic). The other issue with scalability is predicting how users will use a site or service. With most websites, this isn't as much of an issue. But with apps, how a user interacts with the app is paramount. A small number of power users who really stretch the capabilities of the app can cause issues for other users, or just have a bad experience themselves. Apps can be much harder to scale than websites, depending on the infrastructure. Scaling purely for an increase in the number of users isn't that much different than scaling a website; it's just a matter of bandwidth and processing power. Where app scalability is more difficult comes down to how individual users end up using the app. There's been an interesting discussion on Google+ in the past week going on between Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose. Scoble is having issues with duplicate content ("noise") cluttering up his feed, and was publicly saying that Google+ should come up with some kind of filtering system to help weed out all this noise. Rose argues that it's only because Scoble is a "fringe case" user, and that most people won't run into the same issues because they don't follow thousands of people. The question remains, should a web app like Google+ (or an app for a mobile platform) be focusing on scalability for those fringe users, or just focus on the more "average" users? It's a debate that's unlikely to be solved any time soon, but it is something app (and website) developers and designers need to be aware of and decide how they want to handle on a case by case basis.Conclusion
Whether you're a web designer or an app designer, there are things you can learn about good design from other spheres of design. Look beyond your own narrow focus at how other designers, in other fields, are handling similar problems, and then adapt those ideas to fit your own challenges. What do you think? What other lessons can web and app designers teach each other? What lessons do both types of designers need to learn, and where can they learn them? Let us know in the comments!Read Next
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