User interface (UI) design refers to the process of creating interfaces within the software or computerized devices, focusing on appearance and style. Here, designers mainly intend to create designs that users would find easy, intuitive, and pleasurable to use.
Typically, UI design refers to the graphical user interface (GUI), but there are others, including the voice-controlled interfaces.
UI is an important part of the design process as it plays an important role in the customer acquisition process, customer retention, lowering support costs, increasing productivity and reducing development time.
(UI is often confused with user experience — but both are two different aspects that are closely related and aim at driving user satisfaction.)
You risk losing your customers if they don’t find your app or site’s UI appealing at first glance because this is going to be the first thing that they notice when they reach your site.
According to certain researches, around 26% of apps are not used more than once owing to the poor UI. To ensure that people engage with your UI, it is important to implement the latest trends.
With the latest UI trends, you are promising an improved experience and enhanced usability, which contributes to building trust.
After extensive research, we have come up with some of the UI trends that would pave the way to great user experience (UX) in the year 2019:
1. Typography and Storytelling
Font style has an important role in driving user attention to content.Storytelling that revolves around a digital experience would be a gamechanger in 2019.
Typography has a role in influencing the visual hierarchy of the website. This is one of the reasons why it becomes a vital aspect of UI — which, in turn, enhances user experience.
Though text style will help in capturing user attention, without a powerful content, we are far from offering a rich user experience.
Typography and copywriting work hand in hand — style attracts user attention, while great content engages users with the brand — making them a part of the tale that the brand narrates.
The main intent is to prevent users from skimming through the content and leaving the website, without taking home a value-added solution to their concerns.
While the style captures the user’s attention, the narrative engages users with the brand because it makes them a part of the story. This, in turn, keeps users from simply scanning through the content, but deriving a value from the narrative.
2. Micro-animations and custom illustrations
Micro-animations have been around for a while — and will continue in the year 2019. One of the main advantages of micro-animations is that these help visitors to distinguish elements on the screen, thereby enhancing the interaction with users.
In the previous year, custom illustrations, regardless of whether these were hand-drawn or digital, had gained popularity and will continue to be used widely in 2019. The vast asymmetries, free forms, and unaligned designs, which are part of the micro-animations ensure that the websites appear unique and stand out in the crowd, while also creating a user-friendly environment — promising a great user experience.
The illustrations when combined with complex motions — breathe life into the pages. And this blend of motion with illustrations captures user attention — providing the visitor with an understanding of what the brand represents.
3. Colors, Gradients and Overlapping Effect
The overlapping effect is expected to become popular over the upcoming days. This effect comprises color, text or image. With overlapping effects, you can ensure that there is sufficient space amid the different elements to attract user attention.
Gradients disappeared at some point in time a few years back — but made a comeback in 2018 and is expected to be a trend in 2019. Gradients are everywhere — within illustrations, text and UI elements. With gradients, realism and depth get added to the platform, which offers a real-life experience as the users move through the site or app.
4. Immersive, full-screen videos
Unlike any other elements, such as infographics and images, visuals have a deeper impact on driving user attention. But the latest UI trend is to enlarge videos so that these fit into the entire screen space. This UI trend has been around for a while now — UI designers use it a means of storytelling and engagement — and it would be a smart idea to include these to enhance your UI, going forward. These are actually images in motion and bigger in size, and also capable of engaging the audience.
When these videos are blended with bold and perfect typography, they are bound to leave an impact on the users — conveying the brand’s message. Amid the traditional photography that is static, people love to see more videos that are a feast to the eyes. Along with conventional imagery, rich, interactive and full-screen videos would be used as a means of storytelling and user engagement in 2019 — in fact, video clips are more appealing than watching static images.
5. Long scrolling
Scrolling is always a part of the features that enhance UX and it will be there forever. But we are witnessing a lot of experimentations using scrolling to enhance UI design. This time scrolling would be more focused on providing users with the provision to read a long-form content without having to switch across pages.
Recommended Reading: Top 10 Web Design Trends in 2019
Now, designers are using the long-scroll form to make room for long content. This helps the users to read through the information without having to navigate to other pages, but with a single scroll through the page that they are reading. This is the best approach to storytelling. Apart from storytelling, it helps in viewing a structured content in a linear way.
6. Cards
Cards can be described as little rectangles that hold inclusive images and text. These elements serve as entry points to more detailed information. These are referred to as cards because these resemble real-world tangible cards in UIs.
Cards were always there — in the form of sticky notes, business cards and what not — but now, we are using these more often in web and mobile apps. When implemented correctly, digital cards help in enhancing the UX aspect of apps.
Some of the reasons for using cards are listed below:
- Organizing content — cards help to organize information well — which aids for scannability when the users read through. With cards, content can be divided into meaningful sections — which again makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for quickly.
- The ideal choice for varying screen sizes — since cards are infinitely manipulative, the varying screen size feature helps to create a single design that can be used across multiple devices, in order to ensure a consistent experience, no matter what device is being used.
7. Full-screen backgrounds
One of the trends that were observed in the year 2018 was full-screen backgrounds and this is expected to be on the trend list in 2019. The main advantage of full-screen backgrounds is to gift the screens with a visual appeal to attract user attention.
For websites with minimal content and less complex structure, full-screen images are ideally the best choice. These large backgrounds are not just images, but also animations, videos or illustrations can also be used as full-screen backgrounds.
8. Buttonless UI
Buttons have always been a vital part of UI design — it will continue to be in the year 2019. It is expected that there would be more creative experiments on mobile user experience from UI interaction perspective, without using buttons.
(Voice search, scrolling, and drag and drop are some of the examples of buttonless UI)
The advantage of a buttonless UI is that it helps in saving a lot of space on the screen, which can be utilized for placing other elements, such as content.
9. High-quality photo content
One more UI aspect that would make it to the trend list in 2019 is high-quality photo content. Excellent and high-quality images attract user attention. Realistic and clear visuals are magic when it comes to driving user attention. Stock photos were being used to attract user attention all this time.
But rather than using images that are repetitive and that do not relate well with the content on the website, realistic photos can do the work. Of course, you can find great photos with Shutter Stock and other websites — but, when it comes to creating a human touch, only real images are ideal choices.
This is specifically important when you are working on specific domains, such as fashion, real estate, travel and tourism, and restaurants.
Let us create magic with real-life images — spend a little on photography and witness awesome results for yourself.
Designing UIs
UIs are the access point where the user interaction with designs happens. Designers main intention is to create interfaces that users will find highly efficient and usable. It is important to ensure that a smooth and seamless interaction is offered to the users through the UIs you design.
We see newer trends being introduced in UI every year to enhance the UX. UI should not be just about the appeal, but usability, ease of use and functionality. It is important to implement UI trends because it would give your design a touch of the much-needed freshness and newness.
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