Designs transcend the concept you create and validate. Effort and money spent on designing an ideally user-friendly app always result in bountiful outcomes. Nevertheless, it is an entrepreneur and investor instinct to concern, “How much would it cost to Design a Mobile Application?” Each day thousands of entrepreneurs crave to design a groundbreaking mobile app, search to answer this question.
For an estimated cost of designing a mobile app, you can count on a well-versed mobile app development company. But if you want to apprehend why the price is whatever it may, you have clicked on the right link. The blog is summarizing the apparent aspects of the mobile application designing cost. It will surely help you to presume the value of designing your mobile app afterward!
So, let the quest begin!
What Does Mobile App Design Cost Cover?
Many of us misinterpret design means what you see on the screens, while it shows how your app works in reality. That’s why Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
App designing is beyond laying out features and creating visuals; it includes research, mapping the journey, mockups, and significant iterations. Without any doubt, the center of attention in the pursuit of app designing is its users. For user-centered design, you need a user perspective, and to gain this perspective, you need to learn your users.
The journey of a user-centric app design!
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User Research on the Market trends
It is relatively easy to design for the perfect cases, when everything goes right, or when all the information required is available in a proper format. – Donald Norman
How simply Don Norman portrayed the importance of research and knowledge in designing with the above quote. Customer analysis, competitor analysis, and market trend analysis are three pillars of your research for better app design.
In-depth user analysis helps you define your end-users preferences, pain points, and goals. Exerting the analysis, you can create a mobile app design tailored to your audience’s needs. Meanwhile, competitive research and market trends analysis produce a benchmark and help plan strategies to cross the benchmark.
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Exploring buyer personas
A successful mobile app relies on user-centric design rather than a technology-based design. The idea should be to design a product around users and not teach them how to use it. To do so, buyer personas are required to create.
Buyer Personas is a tool used to encourage decisions based on a real person’s needs rather than a generic and undefined “user.” Demographic data, social standing, and behavioral research of users are vital things used in creating personas. Personas make it easier for designers and developers to understand your app’s problem from a specific perspective.
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User journey (UX)
Mapping users’ journey is a visualization to understand how a user will access the app. It demonstrates how a user would interact with the app’s features, what it will display, and where it will lead them. User story mapping aims to enhance app navigation by focusing on business value and customers’ needs.
The practice can be performed by sketching and placing elements on the app’s screens that appear more like an app skeleton. If you are not good at sketching, you better create low-fidelity wireframes using simple Sketch or Framer like wireframing tools.
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Interactive prototype
Without app prototyping, it would be challenging to accomplish the engaging and user-friendly design. Designers create prototypes for each screen of the app, including animation effect or custom transitions. The prototyping agenda is to ensure the flow between features and screens is natural and slick on inherent devices.
Above all, prototyping lets you share your app model with the real audience to review and rate your app. You can analyze feedback and make changes in the prototype accordingly and retest the same. It may take several iterations, but eventually, you will have a user-tested prototype.
This exercise reduces the risk associated with the launch of a new application as it upholds design goals and meets user expectations. Ultimately, it leads to an elevated and user-friendly end-product.
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Final design
The app prototype is a simulation or sample version of the final product that illustrates the user experience. Once the prototype has been successfully tested, designers start working on the app UI. The user interface is associated with operating systems, iOS, Android, or which you may choose.
If you want to tailor your mobile application for tablets or wearable devices, it is designed simultaneously with the main design. And voila! Your app’s functional model is ready to hand over to developers to code the functionality.
We Calculate The Average Cost To Design An App Based On These Elements
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Cost to Design a Mobile App for Android and iOS
There is an apparent difference in the cost to design an app for Android and iOS for some reason. Both OSs look and operate differently; they have different resolutions, formats, and guidelines to comply with, and various devices to focus on.
Android app designing is comparatively higher than iOS as Android devices are constantly changing, and so the Google Material design process. To keep up with the changes, designers have to adapt to new frameworks and design ideologies that impact the cost.
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Cost to Design an App based on app complexity
Simple, Moderate, and sophisticated are the three primary complexity levels considered throughout the app design and development cost estimation. Let’s calculate the cost of designing the app based on complexity at a $50/hour rate.
1) A simple app may take about 100 to 160 hours to design, and the cost starts at $5000 per platform.
2) Moderate complex apps may take about 320 to 640 hours, and the price starts at $16000 per platform.
3) Sophisticated apps with custom animations may take 1000+ hours that cost around $50000 and up.
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Mobile Application Design Cost by Country
Whether from companies or freelancers, designers charge for the service hourly, and the rate differs across the globe. Hence, the cost of designing a mobile app relies on the location of your designer partner’s region and the time spent. We have curated rates of several techie countries with an excellent pool of designers below for your reference.
- $10-20/hour – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
- $25-45/hour – Eastern Europe
- $40-60/hour – Western Europe
- $65-130/hour and up – United Kingdom
- $150-200/hour and up – United States
If you have special requirements for your app designing, feel free to catch up with our UI/UX design expert!
