In any industry, slants by one means or another mirror individuals' ordinary needs and behavior. This endless procedure of adjustment tails us wherever we go — and portable application improvement isn't an exemption.
We will briefly review trends in the UX design of mobile and web applications that have been outlined and strengthened in recent months and are likely to remain determinant in the near future.
Leave the past for flat design
The concept of material design, proposed by Google, has been gaining momentum for several years, and in the coming year, it may finally displace flat design as the dominant style in mobile applications.
It can be distinguished by some specific features:
Three-dimensionality: the design regains its depth due to the use of textures and shadows;
Polygraphicity: when creating and organizing visual elements, the rules of traditional graphic design are observed;
Adaptability: the basic feature of this type of design is its uniformity on different types of devices.
Interactive interfaces
As studies show, users gradually become like cats: in order to attract their attention and interest, the element should move. Designers have noticed this pattern, and designs are becoming more dynamic: buttons, fields and icons are increasingly flickering, rotating, changing the texture or just popping out of nowhere, to give us certain information in the language of the movement.
Personalization
Individual approach to the user already and now begins to be perceived as a norm: people expect that when interacting with the application the information they provided in previous interactions will be more or less accounted for in order to facilitate their life.
In a poll from Monetate, 78% of respondents said, that they do not pay attention to proposals that are not sharpened for their individual profile. It's no surprise that companies race and implement artificial intelligence technologies in order to conduct an in-depth analysis of data and to target with all possible accuracy.
Fast download
Meet new lazy loading method, in which graphic content is loaded in stages, as the user scrolls through the page, thereby shortening the waiting time. The trend towards acceleration also touched on mobile applications: widespread access is now provided to tools that allow you to freely work with functionality without installation - Progressive Web Apps, Android Instant Apps.
Simplified Authentication
Today, authorization can be called with certainty a pain point in the sphere of UX. Most users are not very consistent with this problem: on the one hand, they want to be sure that their personal information will not fall into the wrong hands.
Companies try different ways to get out of the situation: somebody frees users from having to remember input data due to one-time passwords in combination with captcha, someone at all refuses from the classic password-login pair in favour of authorization via a device or mail, then hopes for developing technologies for recognizing faces and voices.
Simplified navigation
With the acceleration of the pace of life, interactions are also accelerating, which means that there is a need for clear, transparent navigation that will lead the user to the goal in a direct way and will not let him deviate from the course. Ideally, the user flow should have a linear form and consist of a chain of unambiguous, logically related steps.
Voice control
As it is easy to guess, the management system in modern realities requires all the same: simplicity and intuition. Starting from 2016, the popularity of voice commands is steadily on the rise, which is not surprising: the ability to conduct a dialogue with your device bypassing the interface is perhaps the highest degree of intuition, which can be achieved without telepathy.
The most popular operations for which people prefer to "read" commands are calls, route refinement, searching for information, playing music. Now, when technologies provide high (more than 90%) recognition accuracy, their implementation will be even more active.
Conclusion
Ten to one, you've seen that all up and coming patterns infer a hot battle between the past experiences but unexplored highlights. Portable engineers alongside UX/UI fashioners by one means or another make our present and our future. In 2018, the design promises to be adaptive, personalized, interactive, content-intensive and content rich. Let’s see, how it will be possible.