Top UX Trends That Will Lead the Designs in 2018
After a big response to “7 UX Design Trends to Watch out for in 2017”, we are getting a lot of requests to publish the Design Trends for 2018. So, here you go…
Innovations dominated the year 2017, from head transplants to 3D printed houses to space tourism to granting citizenship to a robot. It also turned out to be a rocking year for user experience with emerging technologies making strong inroads in the UX. In the past, you had the liberty to build and grow your product without spending a dime on User experience. But, now it’s a big mistake to ignore the relevance of UX DESIGN. Here are the hot, happening, and inspiring UX design trends that should be part of your experience strategy in the year 2018.
1. Minimalism and magic of negative space
It’s high time you ditch the bells and whistles in your design, as the focus in 2018 will be on removing any obstructions that distract users from completing the task. Each page will be designed with keeping a task in mind, and the trends like minimalism and white space will streamline the user’s journey towards goal completion.
- With minimalist trend, nothing will be placed in the design without a purpose. Hence, faster loading sites that will be desirable for both mobile and desktop users.
- However, minimalism doesn’t mean boring designs. Contrasting colors, custom illustrations, and bold typography will provide eye-catching yet clutter-free experience.
- White space or negative space will be used cleverly to draw attention to the content, creating a path to navigate through the content.
- White space is imperative for usability and accessibility, leading to increased engagement and conversions.
Why designers think that white space is as crucial as content in any design?
2. Mobile taking priority, literally everywhere
Mobile is not limited to entertainment and gaming these days, individuals are using their smartphones to access everything on the go right from shopping to business. In 2018, we will see mobile-friendly elements heavily influencing the desktop design.
- The influence of hamburger will fade a bit in 2018, but other design elements such as sticky navigation menu, clutter-free design, cards layout, and large typography will find prominence on desktops.
- The focus will be high on designing the platform agnostic experiences, giving users a flexibility to browse products on the app and completing payment on the website and vice versa.
- The experience will be frictionless everywhere, ensuring that the user remembers the brand and not the technology/device used to accomplish the task.
3. It’s time to say HEY to Siri and OK to Google
Forms, Email contacts, Phone numbers, or Mapped locations are not enough for millennials who like to engage through WhatsApp and Facebook. The trend in 2018 is inclining towards communication through smarter conversational interfaces. The bots have started appearing in many interfaces and will continue to create streamline interactions in 2018.
From clicks and taps, the experience will move towards embracing the voice user interfaces. There are multiple things to distract users’ attention these days and VUI will play a huge role in keeping their visual attention on the screen even if they are engaged in another activity. The recent developments in natural language processing and machine learning have ensured that VUI and chatbots can understand complex conversations and even predict your response beforehand.
4. Animation making a comeback in a different way
GIFs have become a mania in 2017 surpassing over 200 million daily users. This baby of static images and videos is set to make a huge impact in 2018 as well. They will create a huge value by bringing a dynamic life to images and not being performance heavy as videos.
- Cinematograph will emerge as a popular alternative to draw attention to the critical elements on the page. Elements will be programmed to spin or dance when interacted for boosting engagement.
- Scroll triggered animations that get alive on touches and scrolls, if well thought and implemented can give a modern appeal to your website.
- Smooth transitions will extend to logos in 2018, so we will be witnessing a lot of animated logos surprising the audience or telling a story.
- But designers will ensure that each transition has a purpose and is relevant to the task completion.
5. Smarter personalization
Personalization is already a popular trend but it’s now time to make way for some smarter personalizations. It’s going to be everywhere, from allowing the customers to set the color palette of the website to customizing the chat window.
- Instead of following the latest trends, user research will be done to find out the color and typography sensibility of the users.
- We will see more of interfaces that remember the audience, adapt to match their needs, and provide them tailored experiences.
- Voice interfaces that remember the voice of their user and tweaks the experience to match their taste.
- Age responsive design will find prominence as well. Hence, interface with vibrant colors and stylish typography for the teenagers while large fonts and sensible colors for elderly.
- Fingerprint and face recognition will also make authentication easier and more brands will ditch the need of remembering passwords.
Check out some personalization factors that are driving the digital game.
6. Below the fold or continuous experiences
The need to squeeze everything above the fold has long lost its significance due to the popularity of Facebook/Twitter-inspired infinite scrolling. Scrolling is getting popular on desktops too, however, the new trend is to offer something new to the user at every scroll. The information will be prioritized and bucketed in such a way that user needs are addressed at every scroll and still the flow seems continuous.
The navigation will also be content focussed so nothing distracts the readability. Content, information architecture, everything will work towards anticipating the user need and providing the most relevant information and features to the user at every step of the journey, boosting relationship and trust with users.
7. New age of feedback capturing
Our 2017 list comprised of new methods of capturing feedback, Electroencephalography to find out the type of user emotions and Galvanic skin responses to measure the intensity of particular emotions. But 2018 will see the evolution of these feedback capturing techniques and also how feedback can be employed to evoke the desired sensation in the person or enhance their experience.
Synesthetic feedback is the new kid in the UX design block, where interfaces will extend the scope of accommodating multi-sensory experiences. Synesthesia is a neurological condition of mixed sensation, where a stimulus elicits another completely different sensation in the person involuntarily. In short, hearing or reading a word can elicit a related sensation such as taste in a person. For example, an image of cappuccino can bring an aroma of freshly brewed coffee or its divine taste in the mouth. UX designers are planning to integrate synesthetic feedback into their user experience, but it will take some time before we see this technology in action.
Find some mind blowing UX research and feedback capturing techniques from our previous blog.
Conclusion
UX Design with a strong focus on accommodating emerging technologies will dominate the user experience space in 2018. At the same time, companies will focus more on evaluating ideas and designing products that user need. Therefore, design thinking will find more takers who want to put the human-centered design to bring their idea to life.
If you are aligned with our 2018 goal of providing an intelligent, fast, and intuitive experience, ensuring users complete an action in minimum time and in a limited number of steps, then give us a shout.
This article was first published on Inkoniq Blog.
