6 of the Latest UX Trends in Web and Mobile Design
The user experience (UX) of your website, web application or mobile app are absolutely vital. Good UX tells the user whether your company is trustworthy, whether you have their best interests in mind and how hard you’re going to work to cater to their needs.
When it comes to UX design, there is no room for cutting corners. You need to get it right or you risk turning customers away. That’s why we’ve put together this list of the latest web and mobile design trends, so you can find out what your users are expecting from your UX.
Different Types of Media
One of the biggest challenges that UX designers have today is figuring out a way to keep users engaged and on the page/in the app. Luckily enough, there is one simple way of doing this: use different types of media.
The most shared types of content across the web are pictures and videos. Users love the visual medium as it can help to illustrate a point or just give them something else to look at other than giant walls of text.
That’s why your UX should accommodate all different sorts of media. You can include videos and images that will keep users on your page and not send them to someone else’s.
Micro Interactions
Micro interactions are also keeping users engaged. Microinteractions.com explains that “Every time you change a setting, sync your data or devices, set an alarm, pick a password, log in, set a status message, or favorite or “like” something, you are engaging with a microinteraction.”
Micro interactions can be as miniscule as the pull-to-refresh feature in the Twitter mobile app, or the ability to ‘like’ a post on Facebook. Although they are small and barely noticeable, they can make a huge difference to the UX.
One reason that we love micro interactions so much is because they allow us to have a tangible effect on the apps themselves. We feel like we are in control and in some cases they can make an app more practical or more fun to use.
Simplicity
Another way that you can boost user engagement is by keeping your UX simple. This is easier said than done but now that users have shorter attention spans than goldfish, it’s important that you don’t distract them with unnecessary design elements.
By keeping things simple, you can draw the user’s eyes to where they really need to be. For example, one way of keeping things simple is to use a lot of white space. In using white space, you can use bolder colors or fonts to capture their attention.
On top of that, making your UX simple also keeps it ‘skim friendly’. Users don’t like it when websites and mobile apps are cluttered — mostly because they don’t have time to look at everything. If you keep your UX simple not only does it allow them to get to the need to know information quicker but will also show them that your website or app is a trusted resource.
A win-win by all accounts.
Mobile Friendly Sites
One of the biggest things that website owners overlook is whether or not their site is mobile friendly. It might look fantastic on a desktop but how does it look on a smartphone or tablet?
Website owners will need to find an answer to that soon as Google’s upcoming update will actively punish sites that aren’t mobile friendly. The search engine giant already adds a helpful ‘mobile friendly’ banner to sites in their search results but soon websites will find themselves pushed down the ranks if they don’t look good on mobile. For many websites, this will cause a huge dent in traffic and could seriously harm revenue.
Google’s mobile friendly changes went live on the 21st of April, 2015. You still have a chance to take Google’s mobile friendly test and see if your site is designed for mobile devices.
Material Design
Material Design is a design language created by Google and used by the developers of Android apps. Its core principles are bold typography, bright colours and physical surfaces and edges.
Google already uses Material Design in most of its own apps such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps and all Google Play-branded apps. It has proven to be a success in these apps as users like the way that it resembles real materials (Google based Material Design on paper and ink). Users like that everything is clear and they enjoy the fact that the visual experience feels sleek.
Another big benefit of using material design for your UX is that it also scales tremendously well too. Google has revealed that one of their biggest goals with Material Design was to create “a system for design that would work across all our platforms” and with the mobile and desktop versions of their apps using Material Design, they seem to have done just that.
A/B Testing
However, while these trends may be popular right now, it’s also important that you test them out. One effective method of testing is A/B testing in which you test two different versions of a product (or in this case, UX design) and see which ones your users like best.
You can use surveys, landing pages or feedback forms to do this. The gathered data can help you implement changes and tweaks that suit your users’ needs.
