Rapid evolution and innovation propels the digital marketing landscape. For this reason, it’s vital for all UI and UX designers to stay up to date on current trends consistently.
By monitoring UI/UX design trends, you can identify currently relevant content and design techniques that captivate your target users. What’s more, you can implement said design trends into your own digital products to increase your target users’ engagement.
That brings us to the topic of today’s guide—design trends. Specifically, we’ll address and explore current UX and UI design trends. Additionally, we shall also explore the latest trends in web design, color schemes, and mobile applications.
By the time you’ve finished reading this article, you’ll have a clear understanding of the top design trends!
The Current UX Design Trends
To start, we’ll examine the current UX design trends. From the trends we’ve explored below, you can generate valuable insight that will shape your creative design process.
Sustainability
Choosing to conduct eco-conscious practices is a great way to fulfill your environmental responsibilities as a UX designer.
Let’s delve into eco-friendly digital practices further. It may surprise you to know that every interaction with a digital interface requires energy. What’s more, every element in a digital ecosystem produces carbon emissions. For this reason, sustainability isn’t just a trend; it’s a must-have facet of UX design.
UX designers adhere to this trend by utilizing lightweight graphics, minimalist designs, and technologies that minimize energy use.
AI-Integrated Design
For years, UX designers have used AI-driven tools like Figma to streamline the design process and create realistic prototypes. Artificial intelligence has simplified the process of generating design solutions and user research plans.
For UX designers, AI can automate repetitive tasks like creating responsive designs. By spending less time on such tasks, UX designers can make 2024 the year of supercharged user-centricity.
However, AI-integrated design doesn’t just benefit UX designers. UX designers can employ AI-driven design to personalize the user’s experience further. By utilizing data from the user’s behaviors and preferences, your product’s content can become more engaging and valuable for users.
Cross-Platform UX
Admittedly, UX design that offers a consistent user experience across several different devices isn’t new within the UX field. However, 2024 will see UX designers take cross-platform UX to the next level!
Given the popularity of hyper-personalization in the UX field, the cross-platform is adapting to relevant content strategies.
Let’s look at YouTube as an example. According to the Social Shepherd, 40.9% of watch time occurs on mobile devices. To make their product appeal more to mobile users, YouTube created a ‘Shorts’ feature. This feature offers a short story format reminiscent of Tiktok’s content.
Microinteractions
Microinteractions guide users towards accomplishing their tasks, usually appearing as subtle animations that provide visual feedback. These single-purpose microinteractions serve the purpose of driving user engagement even as they complete mundane actions.
Whether your users hover or swipe through your product, employing microinteractions enhances your product’s navigability.
Aside from their functional uses, you should utilize visual, audial, or even tactile microinteractions like vibrations or subtle color changes. By doing so, you’ll create a more immersive, engaging user experience.
Emotion-Driven Design
A trend of substantial importance, emotion-driven design focuses on how the user feels when they interact with a digital product. Happiness, excitement, anger—all of these emotions can affect how the user completes specific actions. Due to this fact, UX designers have started to focus more on the user’s emotional state.
Here are a few tips to help you create emotionally intelligent designs.
- Empathize with your user’s pain points, perspectives, and emotions throughout the design process.
- Anticipate your user’s emotional state when using your products and utilize design elements that proactively diminish potential issues.
- Provide helpful and supportive feedback that acknowledges their actions.
- Design with adaptability and inclusivity in mind.
- Ensure you’ve created your designs using ethical practices.
The Latest UI Design Trends
Having explored the dominating trends of UX design, it’s only fitting to address the latest UI design trends, too.
We have listed and explored the UI design trends of 2024 that will revolutionize the way you create user interfaces.
Dark Mode
Dark mode refers to low-light user interfaces that exhibit dark color schemes.
Aesthetically, dark mode is excellent for enhancing the elegance, sleekness, and sophistication of a digital product’s UI. However, dark mode has other benefits.
Dark mode reduces eye strain and is great for conserving battery life on OLED screens.
Animated Icons
Animated icons refer to icons that move in a manner that reflects their functionality. In other words, animated icons bridge the gap between functional elements and visual elements.
For instance, let’s say your user interface utilizes a bell icon to represent a notification feature in your product. When the user hovers over the bell icon, it shakes in mimicry of an actual bell ringing.
Relating back to microinteractions, animated icons typically make mundane tasks more dynamic and engaging.
3D Design
The usage of 3D design elements will also see a rise in popularity in 2024.
As a UI designer, utilizing 3D design elements will enhance the visual communication of your digital product. 3D rendering enables UI designers to create hyperrealistic user interfaces, which, in turn, enhances the polished aesthetics of the product.
By carefully choosing your shaders, illumination methods, and modeling, you can determine your product’s overall style and mood.
Bold Typography
Concerning typography, it appears that the bigger and bolder your font choices are, the better.
It’s no secret that you don’t have long to grab the user’s attention when they’ve begun interacting with your product. By using big, bold, and often capitalized fonts for your headers, you increase your chances of capturing your users’ attention.
VUI
VUI, or voice user interface, allows users to interact with a system via voice or speech commands.
After the emergence of voice-activated speakers like Alexa, users have become increasingly receptive to VUIs. In recent years, VUIs have offered a viable alternative to traditional human-computer interaction for users with accessibility issues.
2024 will see UI designers cater to their users’ comfort by expanding on the personalization of VUIs. In other words, hyperpersonalized VUIs will provide your target users with a more familiar, conversational experience.
The Top Web Design Trends
Like UI design, web design focuses on the aesthetic value of user interfaces. However, unlike UI design, web design focuses on more than the user’s interface. Instead, web designers focus on the entirety of their design project.
Given that web design serves as the foundation for both UI and UX design, you must know what’s currently trending.
Here are the top web design trends of 2024!
Dynamic Cursors
A common pattern amongst several of the previously mentioned trends is the UI/UX designer’s attention to more minor details. This pattern is especially prevalent for web designers and the dynamic cursor trend.
You can creatively alter the cursor’s shape or implement an animation that the user triggers while moving the cursor. No matter how you utilize and customize a dynamic cursor, you’ll increase the user’s engagement even when just scrolling!
Game-Like Reward Systems
There are approximately 3.09 billion active video game players around the world. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that web designers have incorporated game-like reward systems into their designs.
Points, rewards, puzzles, and challenges make up a game-like reward system. By utilizing game-like elements like these, you’ll entice the user to stay on the site longer.
Organic Shapes
Organic shapes refer to any design element that doesn’t exhibit straight lines. Thus, organic shapes enhance visual fluidity and also pay homage to designs that occur in the natural world.
The naturalistic asymmetry of organic shapes serves as a great sectioning technique for your website’s content.
Parallax Scrolling
Parallax scrolling refers to the motion of a digital product’s interface. With parallax scrolling, a website’s background moves at a much slower pace than the foreground. As a result, parallax scrolling creates an optical illusion that resembles 3D effects.
Although this is a visually appealing trend, you should take caution when using it in adherence to responsive design. Specifically, you should consider how parallax scrolling effects will appear on mobile devices.
Design Color Trends You Should Experiment With
UI design and color theory go hand in hand. To truly refine your UI design skills, you must adopt the thinking process of a graphic designer.
Static visual elements like color are just as crucial to a compelling user interface as interactive elements. For this reason, we will now address a couple of the top design color trends.
Earthy Color Palettes
Like organic shapes, earthy color palettes serve as a contrast to the hyperfocus on technology within modern culture.
To counteract the overwhelming dominance of technology, you should use soft browns, greens, blues, and beiges. In doing so, you’ll allow your users to combine the tranquillity of nature with the enticing nature of the technological landscape. As a result, your users will feel more relaxed when using your products.
The Bright and the Bold
On the other side of the coin, it’s an equally prevalent graphic design trend to use bold, bright colors.
When bright, bold colors take center stage on a webpage, you’ll grab the user’s attention and create visually appealing contrasts.
What’s more, with brighter and bolder colors, you can even evoke certain emotions from your users.
The Dominating Mobile App Design Trends
Given the importance of responsive design, we shall also explore a couple of the currently dominating mobile app design trends.
Passwordless Security
Perfect for a fluid user experience, passwordless security is on the rise in popularity in 2024.
By offering users an alternative means of passing security, like biometric authentication, you’ll reduce the chance of cyber attacks. Additionally, you’ll address and resolve a common pain point among users—trying to remember long-forgotten passwords.
Glassmorphism
Glassmorphism refers to a glass-like visual effect that combines transparency with background blur.
By employing glassmorphism, you can create a 3D effect that gives the screen a layered, visually engaging aesthetic.
Enhancing dimensionality and depth, glassmorphism makes user interactions more fluid. Consequently, glassmorphism inspires a sense of openness from the brand that the user can trust.
Design Trends: Designing for Maximum User Engagement
The most important thing you should take away from this guide concerns the nature of trends. Inherently, trends are fleeting by nature. What might appeal to your users now might change in as little as six months.
Adhering to trends may generate rapid bursts of popularity and relevancy for your brand. However, to maintain such popularity and relevancy, you must understand why certain things are trending.
Ask yourself, ‘Why do users want to see the trends we’ve implemented into our designs?’ From there, you can learn more about how your users wish to shape the digital landscape. Above all, trends serve as a gateway into user-focused UX design.
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