UX and Web Design Trends for 2015 and Beyond

You have completed designing your website with a highly impactful and large image on the homepage in compliance with the latest web design trends. But to be sure it is not enough. You need to make the website, functional, user-friendly, understandable, handy and spontaneous in the context of today’s rapidly changing world.

4 months from 2015 have passed and it is beyond any doubt that it is the best time to ponder over the latest trends that will stir the world of web designers in this year. But following the latest trends only for the sake of being cool and trendy is not accepted. Trends should be the proprietor for those who are concerned to improve the usage and engagement for the users and this will lead to the inevitable accomplishment of end goals.

Now let’s take sneak peek at the latest trends of UX web design for 2015

Why Web Design Is Important?

Web design is becoming critical as more and more designers are putting their efforts into this. Here are some of the benefits of a good web design.

• Future Proof

  A good web design work well across all the existing devices in the market. It is a safe way to survive longer in the future.

• Cost Effective

  A good web design may take longer, but it allows the website to survive for longer. It helps in proper management and support. The best part of this is that the upgrades only need to be applied to a single place, thus saves time and money.

• SEO Optimization

  SEO is an important part of every website, but it is difficult to manage it for both the desktop and the mobile site separately. Google always recommends a responsive approach in order to fix these problems.

• Smart User Experience

  Optimizing the site makes the life easier for the user. It saves a lot of time of the users as the pages load quickly.

What Impact The Users The Most?

It is clear that a good design is very important for every website but there are few things that are important for the user. Let’s have a look at them.

• Load Time

  Load time plays an important role when it comes to building traffic on the web page. 40% of the users leave the pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. The mean wait time for a website to load is around 2 seconds. The bounce rates also increase with faster page loading time.

• Layout

  Layout acts as the base for the success of any website. Most of the users view the pages in F-shaped pattern. The pages that are horizontally designed encourage Z-shaped reading among the users. The first two paragraphs of the page are the most important and the users are interested in that only. Even some of the users just scan the first few words of phrases of the content and get an overview about the whole content. Around 70% of the users prefer to read only the bullet points on the page.

• Trust

  The websites can improve the trust by including links to media coverage and showcasing the social media followers. Stock photography can be avoided along with pre-made templates that make the user feel that the website is artificial.

Many web design trends disappear and re-appear in the last few years. A new set of design trends is gaining recognition from most of the web designers. New developers and designers can learn a lot by creating websites around these modern trends. It does not matter what the skill level is, there’s always something to learn about the qualities of the website design patterns.

The UX and Web Design Trends

Here is the list of modern web design trends that every designer should master for his or her new web project.

Predominance Of Responsive Web Design

Keeping in accordance with the projection, in 2015 the use of mobile is now epidemic and has outreached the use of desktop in every sphere of life. With the increase of mobile usage, responsive web design, as a requisite and irreplaceable technique will continue to prevail over website designing throughout 2015.

In the recent algorithm change, Google recommends the criteria under which every website has to possess the mobile friendly feature in order to improve their rankings in the search result. In fact, it won’t be too wrong to say that by the end of 2015, the mobile would be the only benchmark for website design.

Importance Of Micro-interaction In UX

We are surrounded by Microinteraction – they are the contained moments within a product that moves around a single use case.
The most popular instance of Micro-interaction is “You’ve Got Mail” introduction of AOL or Twitter’s pull-to-refresh. Inspite of its smaller size, a subtle touch of Micro-interaction can vividly increase a site’s user experience. As the web has become more multifaceted, users will be expecting that your UI will be put up using simple Micro-interaction that is also effective and sensitive.

Rise Of Flat Design

With the introduction of iOS 8 and Android 5.0 Lollipop, the flat design received the attention it deserved and implementation.

Flat design is about telescoping a design to its simplest elements and allowing only the important aspects and contents speak without the plumped up visual extras overshadowing the main point. We humans love the little visual effects that bring an extra appeal to our mundane life. This is largely the reason that this year will witness a rise of Flat design in our desire to add a special touch to our two-dimensional digital world.

Gone are the days when the businesses used to use their icons or logos to pop up or down the website to grab user’s attention. Now the designers are more interested in constructing design elements that appear smoothly on the flat screen. Flat designs are becoming the most sought-after design elements nowadays. In the near future, the users will begin to expect more from the flat designs on their flat screen. Layered designing will get more prevalent in the future.

A Greater Importance On Typography

As the web continues to change rapidly, the designers now possess more tools to bring web typography much advanced. Type manufacturers offer web font kits of high quality in more than reasonable prices and allow web’s access to beautiful typography in a more expanded way.

Effective Use Of UI Cards

The “card” style layout has emerged as a great way to organize vast amounts of content without any hassle. These cards allow visitors to get an immediate look at the products, services, news and philosophy of the company, and more. In addition, small and nimble card size allows easy integration for sensitive requirements. UI Pinterest is the best example of this technique in use.

Design Will Be Content-Focused

2015 is the year of the content-focused web design. The way users consume your content, regardless of the device used, is an important factor to be taken into consideration when designing websites this year. This year designers will be using design elements that reduce the loading time while increasing responsiveness – all without negative impact on the overall esthetic element of the site.

Icons Will Be Used Over Text

Icons are an ideal replacement for heavy traditional images and text labels. A glance on the icon gives visitors the idea of what a feature is about. It’s quite easy to understand icons play a vital role in capturing the attention of the user.

Over the past year, designers benefit from icons to create lighter and attractive websites. However, the icons are also used in many other forms such as Computer Graphics, sprite sheets, and applications.

Use Cinemagraph Instead Of Photo Or Video

If you are undecided on whether to use a photo or video to your site, consider using a Cinemagraph site. A Cinemagraph image or moving expresses more words than pictures ever but consumes less bandwidth than video. It can also animate the background of your site, break excessively long blog posts to keep amused a snooping visitor for up to 15% of more than usual time.

Background Video

An ambient background video is a new trend that allows the user to watch a video without installing any flash plugin in the browser. The rise of HTML5 in the browsers has forced the videos to be used as any other page element. The trend of adding a large image on the home page is soon going to vanish with these auto-play videos.

Rising Demand For Native App

With the explosive growth in the sale and use of mobile devices and tablets, 2015 will see a huge demand for native applications. From a user experience perspective, native apps are much better than the optimized mobile sites.

It is enough to say that a mobile optimized site is just the variant of its desktop counterpart which tends to contain more or less the same content. Conversely, a native application provides a smoother experience for users with specific app controls.

The responsive design has swept away all the other technologies for web designing. Fixed widths are arbitrary while designing a screen. A website is more like a web page and the addition of features like email newsletters, 3rd party CRM software, marketing automation becomes less accurate.
The web design is no longer used as a print design for a large display. The coming years will see more and more websites go interact with the full – width screen. HTML5 will be more popular and embrace the website as apps.

More Customized User Experience

Due to the growing need for more detailed data, monitoring user activity is at record levels. To achieve this goal, cookies are used on a much larger scale than ever. Using cookies, we can obtain large-scale quantitative data for their users, like their browsing habits and where they are located.

Dynamic And Advanced Storytelling

Parallax design is in trend and the designers have been using this to add more creativity to the websites. Free parallax plugins have also been released by most of the developers.
The parallax design leads to another trend called the art of dynamic storytelling. Every website has some story to tell, but the content is not necessarily presented effectively. Parallax layout makes the content look natural as it mostly relies on a single page only. The layout scrolls both vertically & horizontally using motion for storytelling.

Grid-based Layouts

The grid-design is a popular design style and is also a popular choice among most of the designers. The websites that need large content lists looks great with a grid-based design. This is similar to the concept of wire frame boxes that are injected into the full website design.
The grid design is flexible and this makes it easier for the designers to create naturally responsive websites. There are a number of tools and resources available on the web for the designers.

Navigation Widgets

Navigation has been one of the favorite elements of designers as well as the developers. The navigation design was at its peak when flash was in trend. The decline of Flash brought simple and unattractive menus.
Here are some of the cool ideas for an amazing navigation.

• Sticky menus
• Sticky navigation attached to the 4 corners of the screen
• Street view navigation

Summary

2015 brings new hope and new technologies in the world of web designing. More than the design, the emphasis is on the user experience and the possibilities are endless.

The UX design technologies are ever changing and the possibilities in the field of web design are also limitless. Whether these changes will lead a revolution in the era of web design, but it can be said that the experience of users will see a dynamic change in the year 2015 and the year ahead alike. Finally, Regardless of what’s hot and what’s not, however, the trend you choose to follow should serve your customers – and your brand – before anything else.