To create user-friendly and authentic website experiences, website creators are deep-diving into the why, what and how of their projects. We take a look at how that’s reflected in User Experience (UX) design trends this year.
User journeys
A User Journey is a path a user takes to reach their goal when visiting a website. Companies are realising that researching and understanding the complete customer journey - when and why people are using the website - is imperative to provide successful online solutions.
Brand storytelling
Humans have always been hardwired for stories. In comparison to graphs or data sets, they lead to better comprehension, trust and emotional investment. No fairy tales here though - they have to be authentic and honest. With genuine, captivating copy, video and images. People are buying from brands simply because they love what they do, what they stand for, and the real-life stories that are hard to forget.
Personalisation
Much like those story books you used to covet as a kid, the ones that took your name and made you the main character, successful websites are doing the same. This is especially true in the e-commerce realm, where they know enough about who is using the site to offer a personalised experience.
They know customers by name, their past purchases and their purchasing history, which enables them to recommend deals and products inspired by customers Wish Lists.
Design systems
Changing a brand font on the website no longer needs to be a one hour discussion amongst the digital team. Companies are realising the benefits of having a Design System that enable ease of communication between client, developers and designers.
A Design System encompasses all the visual and functional elements of an organisation by gathering design templates, styles and fonts along with the uses of typography and all the elements of a graphical user interface (GUI). This includes the CSS styles applied to each element, which can control the layout of multiple web pages all at once.
User Interface (UI)
We’re seeing UI design trends move towards organic shapes, move forward with technological advancements such as Voice User Interface and Chatbots, and move on with mobile first.
Typography-based layouts
As copy on websites is distilled to be short, sharp and catchy brands are creating emphasis and attraction by turning towards bold typography in other aspects of their designs such as headers and calls-to-action.
Asymmetrical geometry, organic shapes
Unconventional diagonal lines assist in breaking up the age-old grid, while fluid shapes soften and give brand character.
Colour schemes with personality
We’re seeing a move away from the soft neutrals that have been popular in the past few years in favour of bold, bright, saturated colours make brands pop.
Voice User Interface (VUI)
With VUI, users search by asking a smart device such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri a question. Websites are increasingly designed with this in mind as users find and complete purchases much faster and more efficiently in VUI than using manual search.
Chatbots
Advancements in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have made chatbots more intelligent, efficient and cost effective to install - now a must on e-commerce sites.
Micro-interactions & transitions
With page load becoming more manageable and advanced parallax effects becoming easier to use, designers are incorporating vertical or horizontal section-based transitions and making specific elements or copy animated to stand out on the page.
Thumb-friendly navigation
As mobile browsing has overtaken desktop and as Google has ranked mobile friendly sites more favourably since 2018, today’s focus is on the main digit with design becoming increasingly thumb-friendly.
