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Best User Experience Native Apps or Progressive Web apps

Case study -Ketaki

As a Product owner or CEO, you definitely would have thought about providing the best user experience to win the audience and what mobile strategy to apply: whether to build a responsive web app or Native application. There’s no specific answer, as both options have their pro’s and con’s also it depends on a number of factors including your business plans, your resources, and the web properties you might need.

To opt for right decision thorough understanding of how both UX strategy works and how it affects the final product; UX/UI is required.

What is Native application design?

To design for specific mobile operating system like Apple iOS or Android OS.

Advantages of a Native app

#Faster then web apps
Any application can make into stores only after they are approved by App store or Google Play. Both of them have their own respective guidelines build to have an app which has a high standard of design, functionality, and UX or else it won’t be approved. So the app is designed and developed using a platform’s core programming language and design guides which makes them more efficient on that platform.

#Easy to use
Mobile is an essential product in today’s time, People are used to the user experience of their own phone. So UX/UI designer knows exactly which grade of experience will make their end users happy and even UX standards of the guideline should match so an app is created with a specific purpose in mind.

#Can be used offline
Some apps can be used without an internet and in some scenario few features of an app can be used offline it depends on their purpose. Which brings an interesting challenge for UX designer to give seamless experience even when connectivity is lost as the user will expect everything to sync and work.

#UX can be more Interesting
Features like Cameras, microphones, and compasses, along with many other features are in a built-in device into the experience, which gives freedom to the designer to makes the whole process a lot more creative when it comes to mapping out user journey.

#Pull users back in for more
Push notifications are a great way to facilitate because In today’s time app market is quite busy and every user has more than 20 tools in their device, to promote your app and remind people to use your app installed in their device.

Disadvantages of native apps

#Costly
In a native app, a user expects the UX similar to the platform behavior. This means that mobile app must be designed in different ways for different platforms, which adds work efforts and, therefore, the cost. Maintenance cost of the app also goes higher especially when it is built for more than one mobile platform.

#Time-consuming
Set of assets for each platform sometimes are slightly different, which make it a time-consuming task. Where possible, I make sure to create my designs flexible enough to be utilized across different platforms.

What is a responsive web app?

The design layout is created such that it can shuffle and moves the content around the screen in order to fluidly fit the device window of any size from 7” to 3”.

Advantages of Responsive web app design

#More cost-effective
Responsive design is considered to be more affordable because it requires to design and build for one specific size and not for multiple platforms. Sometimes it depends on the complexity of the app, in such case UX/UI designer needs to give attention to the visual hierarchy of the design and how to shifts features around.

#Accessible to everybody
Web apps can be used from any device at any time and anywhere through any browser. So there’s no need for the create different/specific design only one time UX/UI works best.

#Always up-to-date
For designers to come up with new ideas and functionality and integrate the same turns much easier, even solve problems related to the UX — and much quicker as they need to modify once only. Which also helps to reach users with updated version easily. The user always gets an experience of a web-based app in the latest version.

#No need to be downloaded from an app store
As web app can be accessed from any browser anytime so there’s no requirement for people to search around an app store or play store and not even download anything, including updates. The web app has to be placed in one place and is updated also in one place, so it’s easier and cost effective for everyone

Disadvantages of web apps

#Lower user expectations
People don’t get the similar experience of UX/UI in a web app like a native app on mobile or tablet devices, so it takes a bit of time to get used to the differences in few distinctions of functionality which are there in a web-based experience.

#Time-consuming to test
To ensure full compatibility testing is necessary no matter whether it is the platform, design or build to bring constant and seamless experience in any platform. Testing has been done in multiple browsers for every user which is a painstaking process.

#Slower than native apps
Generally, web apps are slower than native apps because all browsers will not perform at the same rate of speed as a smartphone of today’s time. But design can be approached in a different way so as to reduce the load times and doesn’t affect UX much.

#Limited gesture support
Pinching, swiping and force touch are available for progressive web apps, however, their support is somewhat limited. Indeed, not all apps need mobile gestures, but those that do will be better utilizing the native format.