Higher design bar

From the humdrum of the mid-2000s web apps, Apple radically changed the mobile world with the iPhone, offering well-designed apps of their own and curating apps that were accepted into the App Store. Thanks to Apple's higher standards for design, consumers began expecting intuitive, well-designed apps. That influence has been far reaching, prompting Google to push their boundaries and develop material design, a design language that has become the distinctive hallmark of Android apps.

Compared to the web world where some popular apps could get away with mediocre design, mobile apps face a higher design bar.

A Lean developer is trying to validate an initial concept with a simple experiment. However, the underlying value of the app can be clouded by poor design and experience, resulting in false negatives.

On the other hand, fear of false negatives can lead the developer down the path of adding far more polish than necessary in order to test out their hypothesis.

As we will caution later, it is important to avoid analysis paralysis and early onset perfectionism. The goal is finding a sweet spot between a poorly-designed prototype, which could interfere with testing and data, and an over-polished app, which could cost you time and money.