If you take a long sweeping look at the years of evolution that web design passed through, you will realize the twists and turns that shaped the design elements for better or worse. Particularly, in a span of the last five years, many of these changes took place or better to say, the rate of change has been faster in recent times. Naturally, every web designer wants to know what the future has in store for them.
Here we are going to predict some unmistakable trends that are going to take shape in the coming years of web design.
Intuitive and Interactive Interface
The most important purpose the modern technology serves is to allow optimum ease of use and flexibility, and this is where user interfaces have a keen role to play. Allowing users to complete tasks effortlessly are the key goal of any technology, and this is where modern UI developers can utilize several means and measures at their disposal.
Besides effortless interactions, intuitive navigation and rich interactions are increasingly important in making the user experience better. Customers, while visiting a web store, can now interact with displayed items by acting zooming, flipping, rotating, and even by matching it on their photo on the device screen and getting a fuller perception of the look and feel of the item.
Recently, such interactions are enjoying a wider scope as even browsers are capable of sending notifications to web users. Whether you have opened the website on your desktop, phone, or tablet, you can get notification from the browser and interact directly with them. Such features unleashed over the web can open up interactive scope for blogs, e-commerce products, promotions, and all types of content.
Integrated social proofs with the web store products and website contents is another key value addition that brought positive changes for the user experience. As and when someone from a location or a city purchases a product, other users can be notified of the events, and thus, their morale for making a purchase can be encouraged.
Progressive Web Application (PWA)
For years, the increasing popularity of native mobile apps over mobile websites has been a big concern for small business marketers who cannot afford to spend a huge sum on building their native apps for multiple mobile platforms. This is when Progressive Web Apps (PWA) as technology came to the rescue, which basically brought together the benefits of web and mobile apps together. Since then, we have only seen the rising popularity of PWA in shaping the web user experience of many websites across the niches. In the coming years, PWA is likely to enjoy similar dominance and popularity as the yesteryears.
From 2016 the trend of major business brands switching their native apps to PWA has started. Since the native user experience has become elementary to brand promotion and business conversion, no company can afford to undermine this in their digital strategy. But with PWA's help, they can actually bring the native user experience while still a browser-based website. This is equally time and cost-saving while great for shaping the user experience as per their expectations.
Custom Graphics and Visual Output
Websites today often struggle to keep the users engaged, and in doing this, their biggest alley proves to be the website's visual appeal. While pre-built templates and themes ruled the website design for years and over time became common, custom graphics and the use of hand-drawn visuals became very popular for their potential to catch attention and engage users at a glance.
In the time to come, custom graphics or particularly hand-drawn illustrations, will become more popular in terms of delivering aesthetic value and creating unique visual appeal. The use of stock photos and freely available graphics from various web sources will slowly go down as an unpopular trend.
Interactive Web Pages with Intelligent Chatbots
Already hundreds and thousands of web contents have been published on the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-powered chatbots for web user experience. Already AI-powered intelligent chatbots capable of interacting with web users are being used by leading websites across the niches all over the world. So, the trend of intelligent chatbots shaping the web user experience is already an established trend.
But in the years to come, this is going to be an even bigger trend shaping the web experience for websites of large multinationals and companies and small and medium businesses with limited resources at their disposal. The future of the web will offer a more level playing field for businesses of all sizes and stature with the intelligent and interactive chatbots becoming common across websites of all businesses.
UI for Bigger and High-Resolution Screens
Mobile devices and their screen real estate are evolving very fast, and already we have flagships from all leading brands loaded with ultra-high-quality resolution and big enough screens for user's palms. Since this trend is settled for the device makers now, websites catering to mainly mobile users have to optimize their UI elements to look equally blistering and sharp in all screen sizes and resolutions. This focus of UI design on meeting the demands of bigger and high-resolution screens will be the next big trend in the web design of the future.
Conclusion
The future of web design is loud and clear on one point, and it is going to be more focused on user experience than anything else. All the above-mentioned UI trends are going to indicate these user-centric design elements.
India is the world's leading destination for increasing digital footprints from small and medium businesses. Naturally, most of the prominent web design trends can be experienced in the enterprise IT scene of the country. The app developers in India are experiencing a high mobile penetration and constant flow of small and medium businesses shaping their web and mobile presence. Just as necessity facilitates innovation, this massive upsurge in demand is creating new scopes for innovations and out of the box approaches with UI.