BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, there is an app for everything, right from games to entertainment to photography to horoscope, almost. You name it and there is probably an app for it! Looking at the market prospects of an app --either free or paid, there is a sense of urgency and excitement to get an app out in the market as soon as possible.

Whether you develop it inhouse or get it designed by a third party, the goal is to get the app out as quickly as possible and on as many mobile platforms as possible.

In the rush to 'get the app to market', you might end up doing errors to the user interface guidelines that result in less user friendly and sometime downright annoying mobile applications.

The result is that you hear your customers say, 'Hey you know what, I really liked their website, I wish their new mobile app was at least half as good.' You then wonder what is wrong with your app!

The answer is invariably that it is hard to use, and one big reason a mobile app can quickly become hard to use for your customer could be that it has been developed without regard to developer and UI guidelines of the manufacturer of the mobile platform and specifically for the devices for which you are developing.

Such design and development standards are generally created by a joint effort of the platforms developers, designers, usability experts and hardware specialists. Failure to follow them may be either due to developer arrogance, laziness, ignorance or just plain lack of knowledge about them! In any case, the end result is a bad user experience while using the app.

So you may wonder what are these guidelines!