With thousands of apps being released every month in every category in both the Play Store and the App Store it is no longer enough to make a functional app. In order to stand out it is important to delight your users by going above and beyond with both your design and UX and have a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. In this talk we will go over things you need to do to make your apps delightful.

Outline

We will go over common issues from widely used apps and things you can implement to make your app fun.

Why should you care.

Literally thousands of apps are released Every.Single.Month. Whether you are an indie developer who is targeting a niche or a billion dollar company it is not enough to be functional. You need to stand out.

Common/easy-to-fix UX pitfalls on mobile

• Fonts that are too tiny
• TextViews that don’t fit when your user increases their device’s default font size
• Loading screens that prevent your user from doing anything else on your app while that long upload goes on
• Long tutorials/onboarding/information overload
• Permission request overload
• Too many notifications

Things that are harder to implement but would set your app apart

• Using Awareness APIs and geofencing to make your app aware of the user’s context and thus adapt to their needs
• Avoiding feature creep and staying focused
• Making your app available to users not just from the launcher but in other contexts coupled with using transparent activities to make your app available as an overlay over other apps
• Adapting your app to the user’s country and language using Firebase Remote Config.
• Fixing UI jank
• Adapting your app to both landscape and portrait, something most app developers are guilty of not doing. (This can tie in pretty well with Saket’s talk - https://fragments.talkfunnel.com/2017/15-my-app-crashes-with-nullpointerexception-when-the-)

Animations

There are a LOT of possibilities with this and we will briefly touch upon all of them. We will also talk about custom animations with Lottie.

The slides will be interactive with gifs, videos and code samples. From a code standpoint I will focus on Android but where possible I will mention the iOS equivalents.

In the coming 3-4 days I will flesh out the outline and add slides.

Speaker bio

I have been working on Android apps for the past 3 years. I work with Android, Python and Javascript at Fireframe.io as a software developer. You might know me from other events like PyCon 2014 where I presented a poster on Creating a Fall Detector using Raspberry Pi and Python or from my talk at Droidcon 2016 or from my indie app Search for Reddit.

Links

• http://chaitanya.im
• https://github.com/chaitanyanettem