While some features are hard for your mobile engineering team to deliver, product design determines user adoption and is responsible for the ultimate success of your mobile product. To design a simple app, strip away all the nice to have features until all that’s left is your product’s core value proposition. Incorporate smartphone features like the camera, GPS and accelerometer into your app to give users a better product experience. Gestures also save users time when they’re easy to discover and accompanied by buttons with the same functionality. Your mobile app should allow users to complete some tasks in fewer taps than competing web-only products.

Reviews can make or break your app. An intuitive user experience helps your early adopters understand what your app does and how to use it, reducing one-star reviews from people who can’t figure out how to use your app. When you build native mobile apps, follow Google’s Material Design Guidelines for Android and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS because users on each platform expect apps to look and work a certain way. While some user experience innovations like pull to refresh have come from third-party app developers, most of the thinking around each platform’s design language comes from Google and Apple. Follow their advice and create a simple mobile product that does one thing well.