We are about to bid adieu to 2015 and designers are anxiously looking forward to the new trends that are going to unfold in the coming year or beyond. Their expectation is likely to be huge as they have seen quite so many trends to flourish in 2015 alone. Though every new design takes a considerable time to manifest as a popular trend, we can see some early signs of where they are leading to. Practically, there is a lot to expect as far as evolving web design trends are concerned in the next year or beyond. Watch out these 7 trends that are likely going to flourish in the time to come.
1) Micro Experience and Micro Interactions
Within a website there are small sections to do different things. How collectively they contribute to your experience is important. For instance, a registration experience or experience browsing your products or experience in finding your stores on the map, all these are separately micro experiences.
Similarly, micro interactions are small and mostly overlooked interactions that users engage with every now and then. For instance, communicating the status, asking user to turn on the location sensor or push notification, etc are done with just a finger swap but these small interactions collectively can contribute to making user experience better.
As user experience has become a decisive factor for gaining traffic and business conversion, renewed focus on micro experience and micro expectations will dominate the web design scene in the time to come.
2) Material Design: A Richer Alternative to Flat Design
Material Design with shadow effects, movement and a sense of depth has already become popular to offer a realistic look and feel of the website. The primary objective of Material Design is to offer clean, lightweight design that focuses on user experience most. It offers all the simplicity, ease and usability of flat design but by creating more depth and shadow it makes the design livelier.
3) Responsive Design more Optimized for Mobile
When every website is eyeing for mobile audience first, how can responsive design be at backseat? Actually responsive design became popular for its easy and simple way to build a mobile friendly website. But over the years there have been lot of issues concerning responsive web design and everyone is apprehensive about how designers can address them. The following issues are likely to be addressed anytime soon to make responsive design even more optimized for mobile devices.
- Using responsive images instead of JavaScript and CSS image loading to reduce the weight on page loading speed.
- Optimizing third party scripts so that they cannot interfere in page loading speed and overall site performance.
- Using conditional JavaScript loading as many JavaScript components used for desktop version will not work in mobile devices.
4) Hand drawn custom illustrations
To add personality and very individual attributes to your site hand drawn custom illustrations can be a great design alternative. Hand drawn illustrations not only create a quirky and friendly feel but they also create a unique value of the design elements that just cannot be replicated by competitor websites. Moreover, often such custom drawn web illustrations offer an easy and intuitive way to understand the story behind a brand or service.
5) Interactive Storytelling
Nothing works better to grab attention and engage users than a storytelling design that let users interact in various ways. It is all about unfolding the story behind the brand and satisfying user curiosity gradually. Actually we all love stories that represent a reality with characters such as us. Naturally, to a storyteller we always look askance with the question “What happen next?” and by getting the answer through the story we become satisfied. Naturally, a design that works to quench this thirst is likely to remain valid and usable as always.
6) Use of Cinemagraphs
Cinemagraphs are images with moving parts creating an illusion of moving object or person. It quickly set the mood and grabs attention to the website. With cinemagraphs you can create a sense of wonder, mysticism and elegance. While cinemagraphs can just make similar effects of video it would consume less bandwidth. It offers the simplicity and ease of still photos and depth of a video at the same time. Cool cinemagraphs with a few objects or parts moving can make an intuitive suggestion and can quickly transport the message as well.
7) Lazy Loading
While a whole website takes immense time to load because of heavy load of contents you can let them use some contents that load earlier. It offers immediate loading of contents without requiring the user to wait for the loading of the entire page. Making content available for use in a gradual manner with the page loading, the user experience is likely to be better. It is particularly useful technique for content heavy and image heavy sites.
The Bottom Line
Finally, as the countdown to 2016 is about to begin we are excited to see the new design trends that are going to beat our expectations and predictions. For a creative and fast changing discipline like web design breakthrough approaches are common.
Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing iOS app development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lures him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.