10 Leading UI/UX Design Trends to Dominate in 2022
What UX/UI trends will dominate this year? Let’s discover the 10 most important of them with examples and detailed explanations.
January 2021. Over 1.83 billion websites on the Internet. Over 4,66 billion users of the Internet. The number of web surfers is only 2.5 times higher than the online places they can visit. The choice is incredible.
While the number of websites is growing around the clock, standing out from the competitors is hard to crack even if you follow the latest UX trends and UI features. Most of the websites look the same, and users are confused — what makes brands different if their online representation is almost identical? The design is a magic tool to help differentiate, identify, and build a strong brand image.
Joel Spolsky, the creator of Trello says, “Design adds value faster than it adds costs.” Sure thing, the good design adds value to your website or app and makes your customers purchase, order, and buy things. And if you use current UX design trends, your website or app becomes even more valuable. Design, like any other digital branch, is changing all the time. Each year, UI trends change, new features appear, and outdated solutions lose their way.
In this article, we will talk about UI and UX trends 2021, define the features that improve website performance, and give you some examples to easily understand how these trends look and where to implement them.
UX and UI create a basis for website design. However, the difference between these design spheres is quite vague for many of us. It seems that both UI design trends and UX contribute to the comfortable and satisfying usage of websites. And they both do, however, in a slightly different manner.
Jonathan Widawski, CEO at Maze, compares the implementation of UI and UX to building a house. “UX would be the foundation, and UI would be the paint and furniture.”
Using this metaphor, we can clearly understand the difference between UX and UI. To build a house, we need a foundation first. In our case, this is UX. It will help us plan how the rooms (website pages) will be connected, where we need to put doors, stairs, and windows (features) so that our house will be comfortable for use. Of course, a website or an appropriate app design trend will help us get better results! When the foundation is ready, we start to think about how it will look: what kind of furniture we need (icons), what color to paint the walls (site colors), how to organize the kitchen (typography), etc. This is UI. So UX is the logic, and UI is the emotions; they both serve the same goal — make a website look and feel good.
What Is UI (User Interface) Design? We have already defined how UI, or user interface, works. But what is it?
According to Abode , “ The user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. UI is an integral aspect of user experience (UX) that consists of two major parts: visual design, which conveys the look and feel of a product; and interaction design, which is the functional and logical organization of elements. The goal of user interface design is to create a user interface that makes it easy, efficient, and enjoyable for users to interact with a product.”
The user interface is where clients start to interact with the design. It can be based on graphics, voice, or even gestures. We can also apply these to both desktop and mobile app design trends.
- Graphic UI is interaction with visual elements
- Voice UI is interactions with voice
- Gesture UI is interaction with movements (widely used with VR technologies)
What makes a good UI? First, it’s usability. Despite how beautiful the interaction may be, users do not come to your website to look at the icons and combination of colors. They need to solve their tasks, and they want to do this quickly and with minimal effort. What does it mean? UI should be ‘invisible’ when making a required action — place an order, or buy something. It should not distract your client. And that’s also the basis for UI UX trends 2021.
Secondly, it’s enjoyable. In best UI design, users start to enjoy your design when it predicts their needs. They like personalization and immersive experience. They like gamification. And when a website encompasses these, it makes users stay longer at the website because they enjoy their pastime.
Thirdly, it causes emotions. When users are satisfied with your website, they transmit this feeling to the whole brand. The associations are so strong that they may become a decisive thing when making a purchase.
Words cannot describe a good modern UI design. But the UI itself can. Here are three websites with great UI.
1. Dribbble and its card design.
Card design is one of the latest UI trends, and it is used to demonstrate a huge number of projects that designers upload to the website every day. Many of the previews are not static, which adds an extra thrill to scrolling and watching the ideas.
2. Dropbox and responsive colors.
Dropbox is using one of the mobile design trends — responsive colors. It means that a site has a dynamic color system, due to which the user stays engaged.
3. Pinterest and waterfall effect.
Pinterest gives each card a shade when interacting with the mouse. Due to this, each element gets the perception of clickability.
What Is UX (User Experience) Design?
UX, or User Experience, is less about beauty and decorations but more about functionality. Martyn Reding, Head of Digital Experience at Virgin Atlantic, “User experience design is the culmination of content, research, design and strategy and its effect on the delivery, selling and use of a digital product or service. In many instances, a user experience happens by the incidental smashing together of code and assumptions about people, so I think the distinction is in brands that recognize the value of a carefully crafted digital experience. In many ways, it is the fulfillment of a brand’s promise and recognition that how customer’s feel has a huge commercial impact.”
To understand what makes an experience a good one, Peter Moreville developed a great visual to highlight elements of good UX design.
In a nutshell, according to Peter Moreville, a valuable UX design should be:
- Useful. A website or app must fulfill users’ needs.
- Useable. A website or app must be simple and easy to use.
- Findable. A website or app must have clear navigation.
- Credible. A website or app must be trustworthy.
- Accessible. Users with disabilities must have the same experience as all other users.
- Desirable. A website or app must be attractive.
Now we understand what UX is and what makes it good. But what about examples?
Google and simplicity.
No need to add extra elements to the search. We all know what to do: enter the request and press Enter. Minimal efforts guarantee the result!
Apple and elements comparison.
Apple comparison feature allows you to check all details and features right on the page. You do not need to open new tabs to compare goods. This is a great example of modern UX design.
Zoom and virtual meeting
Zoom has changed the world of UX by introducing voice communication for many members as its main feature. So now, when we know what UI and UX are, and understand their differences and similarities, we can learn the trends — how your website should look in 2021 to make your clients feel good.
Minimalism
Less is more, and for a website, this is a golden rule now. Minimalism is not one of UX design trends 2021 exclusively. It’s been around for several years already. An average user sees many ads, apps, sites, emails, and other interface elements. Therefore, a user is already overwhelmed with information. Designers are always looking for new ways to simplify the way they present information. For example, they try various compositions and promotions, limit the number of colors they use.
Simplified UX
Users do not come to the websitу to browse pages to find what they’re looking for. While creating site UX, it’s important to shorten the customer journey and simplify UX by all means. If you can omit unnecessary steps, do it. If you can omit some fields in the form, do it.
Blurred, colorful background
Blurred and light gradients in website UI design help the website look more stylish and, at the same time, more exquisite. The main trick is to use more colors than we’ve got used to. 10 will be just ok! Stripe, MyMind, already use colorful backgrounds to make their UI more sophisticated. However, you need to be careful with the gradients. The matter is that 2–3 colored gradients were popular in 2010'ies, and they did not look like gradients of 2020'ies. The website might look out of date if the gradient is too saturated.
Unique and absurd 2D illustrations
The 2021 trends are for experiments with illustrations. Although minimalism is still the biggest trend, it’s not the time to be too minimalistic when using illustration. Bright colors, unusual angels, absurd proportions — unusual illustrations may become the distinctive feature of your website.
Voice User Interface (VUI)
Design is not limited by visuals. Voice user interfaces keep growing in popularity. Of course, the implementation of VUI onto the website or app is not an easy process, but if you use it, be sure your customers will be impressed. How to use VUI? For example, VUI is widely used in apps for translation. The app hears the voice in your language and translates it into the language you choose. Also, VUI is used for voice control apps, like Alexa, Siri.
Pastel colors
Minimalistic designs and pastel colors are a perfect match for the best UI UX design. Pastel colors do not overload the design; it helps to accent the lightness and simplicity. Additionally, they help to set the right atmosphere and draw attention to the content.
Mobile-first approach
There are 5.27 billion unique mobile phone users, and 4.33 of them actively use social media on their devices. It means that they use mobile phones to browse websites, download, and use apps. Just imagine the situation where you ignore mobiles and create websites that look beautiful only on a desktop. And now imagine how many users you lose just because you don’t know about the mobile-first approach.
Billy Gregory, Senior Accessibility Engineer: “When UX doesn’t consider ALL users, shouldn’t it be known as “SOME User Experience” or… SUX?”
So if you are not sure that your website looks perfect on all devices, we have bad news for you.
Different UI and UX elements can be used for communication with users. For example, icons — when they have top UI designs and UX, they can replace words! In 2020, Apple redesigned system icons and made them more clear and easy-understandable.
Onboarding
Let’s be honest. Many customers cannot catch the functions of the app or website at first glance. They need some help. Onboarding can become a helpful feature that can explain how the product works, how to take necessary actions to get the desired result, and what leads to certain actions. If you decide to introduce onboarding, remember that it should be simple and entertaining.
Glassmorphism
A combination of skeuomorphism and flat design is called glassmorphism. Due to this effect, customers look at the elements as if they are looking through the glass. Interesting to know. Skeuomorphism is the design concept that shows objects of interface mimicking their real-world counterparts. Glassmorphism helps to enhance UI and make it more stylish, clear, and elegant.
Find your style
In 2021, UI/UX design trends keep concentrating on making the user experience less complicated, more diverse, and delightful, and satisfactory. There’s no need to mix all trends — it will be enough to use only some of them to change the look and feel of your website. As we remember, minimalism is one of the biggest trends for 2021, so let’s follow it when using different trends in design.
If you have any hesitations on what trends will be better for your business, you can always ask for help. Fireart Studio will gladly help you improve your website or app design or create a totally new vision for your product. Give us a call or leave a message so we could discuss the design things!
Originally published at https://fireart.studio on May 19, 2021.
