Let’s face it – the most important part of your website is most definitely the user experience (UX). That’s what brings you customers and what helps you stay relevant in the market today. When people can’t seem to find their way around your website, you lose visitors, search engine ranking and ultimately – money. Having a clear and functional, easy-to-use interface for your visitors to use should be somewhat of a priority when you decide on building your brand’s website.
With that said, it’s not that easy to simply sit down and make a UX design from scratch. There are certain things you must understand, and some aspects of general design you must learn beforehand. Luckily, we’ve searched the web and we’ve made this list of some of the most useful and most commonly used practices for UX and UI design. These trends should help you out understand what people look for when it comes to the user experience, and what to look for in the future. So, without further ado, let’s get straight to it.
Mobile-first design
One of the things you must keep in mind is that visits to the internet from mobile devices have surpassed those from desktop PCs more than two years ago, and there is practically no mobile device that doesn’t have access to the internet. Mobile-first design represents the type of design where you first develop the design for mobile devices like smartphones or tablets and use that design as a base to develop designs for desktop, laptop, and other large screens.
Mobile-first design helps you adapt the existing and already fully functional design and add to it as much as you want, once you start your development for larger screens. Knowing how many new devices are released almost every single day, you may understand the importance of mobile-first design, and how to use it to your own advantage.
Content-focused design
In the world of digital marketing content is king. Good content can help you boost your internet traffic and your position in the search results. As a consequence, your website will be able to focus more on the concrete needs of your users and customers. Knowing this, it may not be the best solution to try the traditional way of web designing and implementing content afterward.
When visitors go to your website and notice a lot of content, they stop looking at it like it’s a tool for selling them something. It becomes the reflection of your professionalism and it’s much easier to grab your visitors’ attention this way. The content-focused design is used to help boost your leads and expand your business reach. It helps your website look better, and it can really help with the business development. Basically, what it represents is a well-organized approach for developing a content-rich website.
Progress spectrum:
Another trend that may become a thing of a future is definitely the improvement of the progress bar. The progress bar hasn’t been changed since it became a part of the UX, but the technology and trends did. Designers tend to use progress bars to show how we’ve advanced along the path, but there is a more natural way of doing this. It’s called a progress spectrum and it should provide the true reflection of users’ experience.
With the progress spectrum, the progress of your users gets experienced on a continuous spectrum and events simply flow one into another. This way there is no segregation of the experience steps, and the entire process seems more natural and user-friendly. First of all – users get to decide on how far they are in the process; they don’t like being told they would like to have a saying in that. LinkedIn designers did an amazing job with incorporating progress spectrum for their profile strength gauges. You can’t fill it up completely, but it’s also never empty. It represents how the profile is never completely blank, but there’s always something to do with it.
AI and machine learning:
One of the amazing things modern technology has brought to light is artificial intelligence. It’s something that can help us with numerous tasks in the future, but it can also prove to be extremely helpful right now. There are already various significant attempts to include AI and computers capability for machine learning in the world of design. A company named Logojoy has created an AI that can do a logo design, which is a great step forward.
It’s not that likely that AI and computers will take over UI and UX designers’ jobs anytime soon, but there are some great advantages they can bring to the game. While human UX designers have the so-called “Insider information” about human needs, and while they are still more efficient in their work, AI could play a big role in the evolution of UX design. It can speed up the process of picking color schemes, designing logos and finding the perfect layouts, so it may be something that can significantly affect us during 2018.
Voice User Interface (VUI):
One of the most important things you have to understand is that you need to really think about what you want to achieve. Finding a professional help is almost always exactly what you need to get a truly amazing web design. Australian Web Design Experts from Perth and other leading web design companies agree that VUI is here to stay. Google has developed OK Google, Amazon has Alexa, Microsoft has made Cortana and Apple has Siri.
Having a VUI has proven to be extremely time-saving, while such model of the interface is practically irreplaceable for those with impaired vision. This type of interface is also extremely important for drivers, as their visual attention is occupied. The future of good user experience may be in the strategically placed and well thought of VUI elements.
Wrapping It Up:
No matter where the future takes us, user experience and user interface will always be extremely important part of any presentation. In order to follow the latest trends and in order to stay on top of the UX designing game, you need to do some research. Talk to your customers and your visitors, engage in discussions and follow UX/UI designing forums and websites. This way you will soon get to understand what exactly you need to make your website stand out.
