The world of mobile apps is changing fast, with all kinds of design techniques and new trends coming out on the scene. Designers need to constantly learn and adjust their designs in order to maintain the popularity and attention of their products, and cope with increasingly stringent challenges.
Here are 12 design trends that will continue to grow in 2018. If you want to make your products more experienced and competitive, you should pay more attention to them.
When we interact with apps and websites, we usually have a specific goal in mind. The less effort you spend on the user experience to achieve your goals, the better the experience will be.
Linear user flow
UX processes also typically have a three-step experience of beginning, passing, and ending, with users getting closer to the end with each action they complete. Linear user flow is directed, clear and feasible to the user. This is where the user can estimate how long it will take to complete the task.
Show step by step
When your APP contains a lot of information and interactions, instead of presenting everything at once, you present the information and interactions only when the user needs them. This progressive approach reduces cognitive compliance and improves the interface’s comprehensibility.
In order to better attract users’ attention, content-centered user experience design has become a new requirement. Content-focused products like Medium even have a content strategist position. In the New Year, designers can try the following ways to design.
Reduce information noise
Reducing visual noise and improving consistency and comprehensibility are the primary design goals of many UX designers today. Prioritize key and core content, create a clear visual language, cut out irrelevant information noise, and prioritize critical information.
Clearer hierarchy
Making THE UI elements appear in a more explicit order makes the content easier to understand. Direct the user to interact with specific elements through strong visual symbols, such as action call buttons.
With the popularity of full-screen devices like the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S8, bezel-less full-screen experiences are the new design requirement. With more screen real estate available, it’s natural to expect a more “full-screen” experience.
Hd pictures and videos
It’s important to make your app fit the full screen, and the quality of these materials will directly affect the user experience. How can you ensure retention if you don’t meet expectations?
4. Matching of gesture interaction and dynamic effect
With the advent of full-screen devices like the iPhone X, the physical Home button is gone and interactions will increasingly rely on gestures. For designers, this means an increasing focus on gesture interaction and design.
For many users, the key issue of gesture interaction is discoverability and learnability. To solve this problem, UI and interaction designers need to focus on the design of dynamic effects and microinteractions.
Using motion effects, designers can make gestures more explicit:
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Help users understand which elements and areas are interactive (animated hints)
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Articulating spatial relationships between UI elements (transitional dynamic effects)
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Provide visual feedback about the interaction
In 2018, we are bound to see more mobile apps with excellent emotional design.
Better means of expressing emotions
For people, the expression of emotions is natural, even if it is only a string, people can use emoticons to express emotions. In the era of mobile apps, we have more ways to express emotions. Examples include facial recognition technology from the iPhone X and Animoji, which allows users to send animations of their facial expressions.
Natural interactions in apps
Gesture interaction has changed the way we interact with the interface, and the accompanying voice interaction is gradually maturing. With the help of AR technology, we have the possibility to interact with virtual objects. Our interactions in apps will become more natural and varied.
Emotional UI feedback
As humans, we have an emotional connection to the products we use, so when we interact with an APP, we expect “human” feedback. Even though we know our apps aren’t human and don’t have emotions, we still get excited when sentient UI feedback comes in.
According to HubSpot, video content and video elements as marketing and presentation have increased significantly over the past 2017, with more than 78% of users watching video online on an average weekly basis and more than 55% watching video every day. Video content is becoming the trend.
Short video made for fragment time
According to statistics, the average attention span of humans has gradually decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. Such a situation makes short video become a new way of content delivery and more in line with the fragmented information acquisition channels of current people’s life.
Biased video content shot by people
According to Luke W’s statistics, 94% of content captured on mobile phones today is personal-related content. This means that video content has to be consciously shifted in this direction as well.
Biometrics are becoming more mature and an important part of today’s authorization and management systems. From fingerprint recognition, which is now ubiquitous, to cotton recognition, voice print recognition, we are becoming our own password.
More biometrics and authentication
Biometrics is not entirely new. Fingerprinting, for example, is a mature technology. According to Apple, the average iPhone user unlocks the phone 80 times, and 89% of those users use their fingerprint. In 2018, we will see more and more biometrics, and designers will be able to fully utilize these technologies in APP design.
Face ID will gradually replace Touch ID
Facial recognition technology, represented by Face ID, has become a new trend. IPhone X users have become adept at using their faces to unlock the interface, and it is expected that more enterprises and service providers will join in the popularization of facial recognition technology.
8. Bright colors
Color is one of the most powerful tools a designer has. Colors capture the user’s attention and influence their mood and behavior. For mobile applications, color is the first information users get, and bright colors have a huge and obvious impact on users.
Use color as a functional element
Color is not only aesthetic, but also shapes function and experience. For example, designers use color to distinguish between different types of buttons and notifications. The use of color usually needs to be combined with color psychology and color matching rules to use, and the popular bright color, should pay more attention to.
9. Conversational interface and interaction design
According to comScore, the top three apps used by the average user include at least one messaging APP. People love to talk, which is why the most common forms of pervasive AI are chatbots and voice-activated assistants. There is no doubt that conversational interfaces and voice interaction will be the star trend of 2018.
Chatbot platform
While chatbots aren’t likely to replace graphical interfaces, they will serve as a major tool for companies and service providers to communicate with their users.
More sophisticated voice assistants
Natural language processing technology has improved dramatically, which has allowed voice assistants like Siri and Alexa to long exist as portals for voice interaction. A 2016 Google study found that 20% of mobile searches are already made using voice commands, which helps explain why tech companies are pushing into voice assistants. Voice assistants have certainly improved the user experience, and they have great potential for development.
Increasingly important copy
The text in UI interface is more and more important, and the text carried by voice is also the text content. The information interaction between ChatBot and user is essentially text interaction, and it is needless to say how important copywriting is here.
Like conversational interfaces and voice interactions, augmented reality provides users with new and usable ways to interact. 2018 will be a year of explosive growth in display enhancement technology, as every user’s phone lens becomes a bridge to the virtual world.
Easier to implement AR experience
At present, there are more and more AR applications, and large enterprises such as Apple and Google have also launched AR design specifications and corresponding materials, so that designers and developers can design AR apps with better experience.
Entertainment with AR
AR applications represented by Pokemon Go let us see the huge potential of AR in the field of entertainment. Not only can it be used as a game, but it can be integrated into various applications to provide a more engaging user experience.
Use AR to solve real problems
AR technology exists to deal with specific problems since its birth. Applications such as AR Measure are developed to help users Measure the dimensions of various real objects.
Personalized user experiences will be a hot trend in 2018.
Provide content based on the user’s location
Since mobile devices usually change with the location of users, it is not difficult to provide users with different content based on different geographical location information, and it has even become a fixed direction of user experience optimization. Service providers such as Starbucks have built such features into their apps, allowing users to enjoy different discounts at different stores.
A customized user interface
Personalized design in UI interface is not only about content, each user is very different, not only different preferences, users have obvious differences in vision, needs, hobbies, cultural background. Personalized UI should be individually tailored to each user, with built-in sensors and other auxiliary information to achieve deeper customization.
12. Mobile payments
China’s mobile payment has taken the lead in the world, and the frequency of cash use has been quite low, while mobile payment has become the main means of daily payment.
Mobile payments are a huge change for the entire business and financial system, and a major trend that can’t be ignored by mobile UI and UX designers.