Part 3. Output

What an app displays onscreen, its styling and the organization of content, are the most obvious aspects of an app’s output. Your initial reaction may be to consider this as simply relating to the user interface, but the output of an app comprises much more. The output from an app should also consider information architecture, visual design, interaction, copywriting, and accessibility, as much as the UI.

For a sighted person, the visuals in an app will have an immediate impact and set the tone, expectations, and association with the app and its usage. With very few exceptions, popular, successful apps have a polished, high-quality interface that both takes and shows focus and attention to detail. It isn’t that you can’t have success without a well-designed visual output, or that visuals alone will be enough for you to have success, but that the visual part of your app’s output is as important as the other five components.

It’s easy to focus on just the immediate visual parts of your app when considering output, but apps can take many actions to produce other forms of output, and these actions are just as important. Whether it’s sound or haptic feedback, content, or instructions sent to other apps or systems, all forms of output contribute to the experience of using an app.