With four months left until next year, it’s time to find out which UX design trends are dominating this year, 2021. We will talk about them below.
Living Objects
Anyone who has watched the Harry Potter film series at least once must have paid attention to paintings and photographs that come to life in the world of magic. Now, designers are also practicing something similar, animating individual interface objects and forcing them to respond to certain user actions. Sometimes they move on their own – this is necessary to attract attention.
It looks non-trivial and has not yet become boring – which means it’s time to implement this UX design trend until others do it for you.
Interacting with Feedback
User experience is always contact between the interface and the user. While traditional interfaces react in a standard way when performing any manipulations by the user – they emit sounds, issue warnings or messages, perform transitions, today you can offer for UX design something more. In particular, instead of these micro-interactions, you can implement, for example, the “crawling” of a new window, some unusual sounds instead of clicks, as well as animation – whatever, if only it fits organically into the response to the user’s action.
As for minimalism, here it is superfluous: after all, you integrate all these reactions for a reason, that is, in response to some kind of transition, confirmation, click, etc. from the user’s side.
Personalization
This UX design trend has been around for more than five years, and as technology improves, it is only gaining momentum. If earlier rather primitive algorithms were responsible for personalization, today it is led by artificial intelligence in many products. This trend especially affected platforms for online learning, which, with the transition to the digital plane, has become both more convenient and at the same time more demanding to retain the user’s attention.
Therefore, the adaptation of the interface to the preferences of specific students helps to enhance the effectiveness of their interaction with the “disembodied” teacher.
Gamification
Another “not new” UX design trend is gamification. In essence, gamification is when serious services and applications use developments from the gaming industry (game mechanics) to engage, retain users, and much more.
Why does gamification work? Because Gen Y and later generations didn’t just grow up playing games – games have taken key positions in all walks of life. The motivation of these people from early childhood was based on passion and reward (and not on a sense of duty, as before). Now all these people have an excellent idea of what levels, quests, awards, achievements are. At the same time, they may not understand at all what their boss expects from them or how to get the most out of your service. In turn, with the help of gamification, you can “force” them to pump their level, develop skills, complete tasks, and set new records.
Minimalism
Minimalism means avoiding unnecessary details. This UX design trend implies the use of only necessary elements that fully convey the essence. The minimum amount of text and images, a clear interface are what the user needs to navigate within the software. This approach quickly attracts and focuses attention – users only look at the main elements, their attention is not scattered. At the same time, a balanced combination of design, selling text, call to action, and high-quality illustrations will quickly increase the number of conversions.
Laconic typography, black and white color scheme is an example of minimalist web design. Also, iOS designers are constantly inspired by this UX design trend.
Virtual and Augmented Reality
In fact, the concept of 3D UX design dates back to the early 1960s, during the development of the Zooming User Interface. Its creators have implemented the appearance of new controls when the user approaches the main components of the menu.
As for modern times, in view of the infrequent use of VR accessories, 3D elements are gradually being integrated into standard interfaces (here we are talking about 3D maps and 360 content). By the way, the advent of the WebVR Javascript library also contributed to the emergence of such advanced interfaces.
In turn, augmented reality is much more widely used these days, and its traces can be found in many advertising campaigns aimed at demonstrating the features and appearance of products.
Live Сollaboration
Due to the fact that more and more companies are moving to a remote work format, many of the software products that they used before the pandemic are not relevant today. Therefore, in solutions that meet current business requirements, it is important to provide for the possibility of collaboration (editing, commenting, viewing, and other options with limited capabilities for a specific group of users) in a real-time format. We are talking, first of all, about products that imply the creation and work on projects.
Branded Design System
A design system is a set of rules and tools for visual and technical execution that reflects the philosophy of the product and is constantly evolving. The fact that today design systems and the phenomenon of unification are at the peak of their popularity is quite natural. When the web was born, interface creators did not have anything to focus on, but today they are already consciously starting from how “should not do” and how vice versa – “make it cool”.
Now any software product is a solution to a specific problem. The faster a user can figure out where to click, the higher the likelihood that he or she will choose this particular product and not the product of competitors. At the same time, unification makes the products of the same brand similar to each other, which means that it will be easier to use them from time to time.
First of all, this UX design trend can be applied to large-scale software solutions, which are periodically updated and replenished with new services. Indeed, branding increases awareness – this is facilitated by the uniform visual style of all projects.
By the way, one of the most famous ideas of this UX design trend usage can be considered Material Design from Google.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, current UX design trends are the embodiment of dominant technological concepts and we believe this pattern will be maintained in the future. This means that not only designers but also developers who specialize in these concepts should take part in creating the user experience. Even though this approach will take more time and money, it is guaranteed to pay off already in the first days of the product release.
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