There’s no doubt that immersive user experience plays a key role in conducting an online business while keeping the customers engaged. New trends keep emerging and changing in terms of sustainability, functionality, development, and website design. Conversational interfaces have become extremely popular using creating layouts and even AI.
Be it a rudimentary landing page or an e-commerce store, we have shared the list of web design trends that will make all the rage in 2021:
1. AI-powered Chatbots
A recent survey stated that 57% of the respondents preferred chatbots because of their instantaneous nature, where 95% believed that the best use for chatbots would be in customer service, while 15% would never go back to conventional chat-based support.
AI and Machine Learning have fortunately advanced enough that chatbots can now be smarter, more efficient, and more intelligent. Bot building technology has now become mainstream and there’s no question that it’s here to stay. The image below illustrates the potential savings by using chatbots instead of actual representatives for customer service.
2. Colour Schemes
High contrast with a minimalistic color scheme has become increasingly popular across digital platforms. UI/UX designers are now opting for more vibrant color combinations and effects, at the same time ensuring that the colors used are favored by everyone, including audiences who have trouble with colors. This may also include having various colorblind options. As a rule of thumb, backgrounds and information use soft and cool colors whereas action items use bold and warm colors.
3. Organic Backgrounds
Most designs used to be driven by a card-based User Interface. Nowadays, most web applications are pushing towards an aggressive organic design. Blobs, minimalistic shapes, and other such design elements engage users and can be made to follow the product’s philosophy.
4. Motion UI
Motion UI allows you to transform and make changes to any element on the website. There are tons of transitional effects available like a CSS image hover effect that makes the web application more interactive.
5. Full Page Headers
A popular header setup involves adding action item buttons to the left of the header with images on the right. This is done because the users usually glance at the top left of the page and then to the right. Discord is a good example of this. It has a quirky and fun image on the right while highlighting the benefits of its paid services on the left, with clear and bold action items.
6. Clean and concise storytelling
Compelling stories about the service being offered or for any marketing campaigns are a must in order to share the product’s vision with the consumers. This needs to be done in a minimalistic manner (no wall of text), with relevant images and action items, if any. Zume’s website is an excellent example. It tells the story of how they identified a problem in the marketplace and what it does to solve the problem.
7. Modular Design
Modular design can be thought of as building with a Lego set. Each piece interlocks with one another, without any hassle of rebuilding the individual Lego piece. When each “piece” is combined, the developers are able to build a web page that makes sense. Ultimately, this leads to a cheaper and faster development cycle.
Another analogy of modular design can be photography. A single base unit along with different attachable lenses enables different use cases to be executed, avoiding the need for a whole different camera for each use case.
8. Mobile responsiveness
Statista reported that between 2015 and 2017, the percentage of website traffic served to mobile devices increased from 35% to 50.3% and this has only continued to increase. Google has also now taken this into consideration and indexes sites by looking at the mobile version before the desktop version. Thus, mobile responsive development of web application ensures that your visibility does not suffer – it is no longer a nice-to-have feature but a must-have.
9. API-first Design
Conventionally, the backend team first starts working on the APIs, and handovers them to the frontend team once completed, who then build SDKs to test and check the APIs’ interactions. But this means that the frontend team usually lags behind and ultimately this process requires a lot of time and coordination to ensure the process goes smoothly.
10. AI and Cybersecurity
Much like Chatbots, Cybersecurity is also a field that can hugely benefit from AI automation. Most often, attacks are defused only after it has actually taken place. An automated solution powered by Artificial Intelligence not only ensures a proactive rather than a reactive approach but also has the potential for huge savings. Statista also forecasted that businesses around the world will spend close to 2.5 Billion USD between 2016 and 2025 AI that will prevent cybersecurity-related threats.
Conclusion
The points mentioned above can give a good idea of which technologies and methodologies to invest in first. User experience is the key here, and while the items listed above may require a higher initial investment, they are bound to keep the end-users engaged and give a higher return on investment compared to a more traditional approach in the medium-long term.
Reference: Ubisend, Fatbit, Dazeinfo, Webfx, CoreDNA, Statista
Nauman Ahmad
