People always look for the most innovative UI/UX design trends, and consumers’ preferences change yearly. We all have experienced the fall and rise of iconic fashion trends and how quickly people can change how they look at a brand based on their experience.
In User Interface (UI) design, the same thing takes place. Interface styles range from those that look like real-world objects to those that are incredibly plain and simple. Each of them has advantages and drawbacks. Your ability to innovate, advance the design sector, and improve your design practice depends on your ability to generate and experiment with new UI/UX design trends.
The need to understand and master UI/UX design is getting more prominent in the digital space as more brands are moving towards building their apps and website portals for their consumer to interact with the business directly.
Unfortunately, most consumers have encountered slow and poorly designed portals that make visiting or navigating brand apps or websites a nightmare. Therefore, ensuring your customer has a fulfilled and convenient journey is the utmost priority for brands operating in the digital space. While there are 3rd party apps that you can operate on that handle and customize your portals to fit your needs and your consumer’s requirements, you need to understand a few basics first.
Firstly it is the difference between UI and UX design. UI stands for user interface, which involves designing how consumers look and interact with your app or website. This would focus on the consumer’s first contact with your brand through a portal. If you decide to build an app, your UI design would be aimed at the buttons consumers click on and the screens they navigate to and from. It will fall under the same category if your website has additional features like forms or surveys.
The next is UX, which stands for user experience. This design focuses on the consumer’s experience interacting with your app or website. Whether the brand portal is easy to navigate, whether the content is readily displayed and understood and how effective your app operates when interacting with a consumer. If consumers struggle to use your app or website, you should reevaluate your overall UX design and explore user experience design trends. This also means you need to change elements within the user interface. The change can also come after you review user interface design trends and figure out what works for your brand.
While UI and UX design might sound similar, they are not. They complement each other and must be designed effectively for a digital product to be successful. Every year, new trends are introduced, each of which facilitates making user interactions more streamlined and creative. This could be more updated visuals, quicker responsiveness or cleaner designs. Either way, staying up to date with these trends would give you the upper hand over your competitors and give your digital product the perfect boost. This blog will dive into the upcoming UI/UX trends for 2023.
The following trends are:
1. UI Motion and Animation
The average user’s attention span shortens over time due to constant exposure to content on social media or other digital portals. So it is important to remember that your UI design needs distinct features to grasp user attention and navigate them through your digital product. One trend that will improve your chances is UI motion and animation. Adding animation to your transitions and user interface elements will bring life to your overall product. This will also add to the user experience as consumers will feel more engaged when they click on different features of your app or website. Finally, it would help if you focused on adding dimensions to each animation and design movement. Finally, searching for UI design trends can give you the ideal creative direction to layer your animation.
You must remember to ensure these animations seem natural and are not distracting the user from the actual content or functionality of the portal. Overloading your app with animation would confuse the user and make the consumer journey more challenging. Well throughout motion design can effectively direct the user’s attention to critical elements of your digital product and even encourage consumer feedback. Both of these would be essential for a brand app or website.
The art of capturing user attention is by telling a story they can follow on your portal because who does not like a good story? Motion animation can assist you in telling a visually aesthetic story for your brand. For example, scroll-triggered animation is an excellent way to encourage users to scroll down a specific brand page. This involves an animation taking place every time you scroll up and down a page. This motion on the page gives the user a sense of control over the direction of the brand story. It also immerses the consumer into the user experience altogether.
2. Anti Light Mode and Design
The screen time of an average user is increasing with the rise of easily accessible content online. Therefore, features that ease eye strain are significant to the user experience. For example, there used to be a choice between light and dark modes on apps and web design applications, with the light mode being the default initially. Designers are now moving towards making darker contrast or colors the default for users. Some sites and apps will also change depending on the time to access them. The standard bright background is considered outdated and would seem more of a nuisance than an essential these days.
Similarly, there is a trend to move away from the conventional design processes for brands and look toward more expressive designs or what some designers would call Anti Design. This means that designs for brand sites and apps used to revolve around functionality being a top priority and having a business look and feel to the design. This thought process for design is changing, and you can now expect UI/UX designers to go against traditional expectations and experiment with more artistically aesthetic designs. You can get inspiration after going through the UX trends in 2023 and staying ahead of the game. As mentioned earlier, focusing on user attention is a priority now and trying to capture it with traditional designs will only ensure visitors glance at your content and not interact with it. The example below captures the true essence of what anti-design would look like on an app.
3. Rule-Breaking Typography
The art of designing your fonts and making them look more appealing to consumers is a form of typography. This is a vital factor in UI, as the font of the content on your app can make or break your application. If consumers don’t like the design direction you can select for your font, your content might not even get glanced over. The rule-breaking or ancient typography trend is gaining traction and has been used by more brands recently. This means going against the basic rules of typography which are not to have twists, abnormal sizing, positioning dived words on different lines and making the fonts easily readable.
So if you were jumping on the trend, you would not follow the commandments of typography and start experimenting with every aspect of font design. However, you need to remember only to do this kind of rule-breaking typography when necessary and not to duplicate it throughout your web pages. This would seem counterproductive and make all your content less desirable. So these kinds of font changes must be well thought out and planned. You have the option to customize every section of the fonts on a page and you can make use of this kind of creative freedom. Some standard fonts used in industries are Serif Font in fashion and Sans Serif for digital products.
So try moving away from the traditional and use bolder or ink-trap fonts. An ink trap font was created for miniature printing and the letters have no corners. The font ink spreads into the missing area as it is printed onto the page. The ink trap mitigates extra ink being spread out and ruining the sharp edges of a font. Even though this sounds like it’s meant for newspapers, the trend encourages designers to incorporate bold oversized versions of ink traps into their web pages.
An excellent example of experimenting with the font is how Discord revamped its logo and changed its brand font to look bolder and broader. The brand’s thicker appearance emphasizes visual elements against a colored background. The image below shows how they changed their logo design, the lower image being the current one and the higher one being the previous font.
4. User Behavior Across Devices
Let’s break it down if you need to be better versed in cross-device user behavior. Cross-device user behavior is how a user may engage with a given funnel through two or more different devices at various times throughout the customer journey. For example, consumers constantly swap one device for another while navigating from micro-moments such as your phone to extended focus like desktops over some time. We live in a world surrounded by all kinds of devices and more advanced cross-device experiences are becoming more common. Designers need to keep this in mind when they are designing experiences for the user.
Understanding how to design for multiple devices is now an essential skill for UX designers, as knowing how to map a user’s journey. It also entails how they may go from one device, such as mobile, to using it on another larger console or tv screen—and then designing and understanding edge cases that can be vital. It’s easy when brands have created similar experiences.
5. Experimenting With Dynamic Color
Color is vital to creating a stunning UI/UX design. It is one of the first elements you see when you visit a webpage or app. So keeping up with the latest color palettes is essential in gathering user attention and maintaining it. For example, Google recently launched Android 12, their new UI. What users saw was the use of extensive dynamic colors. An example of this is given below.
This also meant that users now had more options to customize their smartphones. For example, the UI suggests a color palette based on your wallpaper. This suggestion can be in the form of matching the color, shade and tone of the wallpaper and can make the whole UX more appealing.
Similarly, even other brands are adopting this practice, like Samsung, with their introduction of the Samsung One UI 4, which also has a dynamic color palette. Some brands like Apple stick to their palette because it works for their users. You can tell the difference in similar colors on an Android and the IOS interface. So as a designer, you can choose what kind of color palette you want, but as of now, the dynamic option is the way to go. Especially if you want a head start amongst your competitors.
6. Digital Wellbeing
Like mental well-being, digital well-being is a trending topic, as many consumers spend most of their time online. So users must be mindful of what content they consume daily and for how long. Brands are introducing tools available to help you achieve your sense of digital well-being and more default settings in our devices have, by principle, a focus on the well-being of the user in a way that helps you integrate with everyday life. The need for more control and awareness over our digital habits has become focused. Many consumers discuss how they lose hours of their day scrolling content without end or cannot leave their devices. This is the case even where they have formed unhealthy repetitive behaviors.
As any bad habit becomes harder to break, observing interactions with your tv, laptop, and any device can be challenging unless you make it a goal based on knowledge, stats and awareness. Awareness can come easily with the correct statistics. This is quickly changing through the introduction of smartwatches. These devices implement well-being monitoring features such as Habit Trackers & Daily Stats, as seen in the example above. In turn, it will increase public attention toward these digital wellness initiatives. For example, if you are designing a web page for your brand, try incorporating elements of digital well-being into your platform to show consumers that you care about their needs and health. For example, a timer telling you how long you have spent on a site or a digital report on how you have interacted with the site over the month could be a good idea.
7. The Future of AR/VR UI Design
Meta changed the whole landscape of the digital world when it introduced the Metaverse. This space introduced living life through a digital portal and communicating through it. The Metaverse consists of different technological elements that combine VR, AR and video technology. This potential is vast and could change how we view our world. Meta has also promised to reduce the prices of Oculus headsets like Quest to make this technology widely available.
With that in mind, UI/UX designs will sooner or later have to follow the same trend as the user is no longer contained on a screen but can be immersed into a completely different world through Meta’s technology. Designs will have to be more innovative and off the grid. As a designer with no restrictions of just one screen, you have to make your user interactions more realistic and mimic the actual environment around you.
Brands like Apple and Google have already released AR development resources. These are ARKit and ARCore, which merge the digital and physical worlds. If you, as a brand, are designing a new UI, you must keep the AR world in mind and build a platform that can integrate with that technology. It can start small, like real-world items with interactions attached to them through an AR headset and using the physical environment to interact with the real world through a camera.
These AR UI design kits will be readily available and more brands will start coming up with their own, so keep an eye out for them. Practicing with new UI tools is essential in developing your skill and continuously improving the user experience for your consumers in the real world and the VR/AR world.
8. A Vintage Outlook
Bringing back popular trends from decades ago will always remain in fashion, especially if they were successful for generations back then. The nostalgic angle has always been a plus point for brands, from Genz reviving the retro look to Millennials reminding people about the 90s. This kind of trend will always come up and is very relatable. The one plus point about introducing the past trends now is that you can incorporate them with new tech in the present digital space. In terms of UI, you can use clean outlines and nostalgic bold texts seen in fashion shows in New York during the SS23 runway era while also using animation to make the content look alive.
Combining the 70’s text with 2022 design trends is the perfect way to keep things new and pull on consumers’ heartstrings visiting your web or app pages. Past fashion and digital advancements always have a way of finding a common point from which trends can be reborn.
9. Edgy Design
Some brands need a flare to convince consumers that they are not the everyday average mundane brand. This calls for stepping outside the traditional play-it-safe designs and more into the so-called brutalist UI designs like the images displayed above. Some brands only follow this trend because some view it as too rough and intimidating. But those willing to take that risk will leave an impression.
In terms of design, you can incorporate stark effects against a lighter background. For example, it might seem blinding, but it can be eye-popping for consumers if done correctly. The typography would also not be small. Instead, it would help if you used accessible visuals like Sans Serif. You can also fit in lines and boundaries in place of sharp edges and frills or special effects to highlight the fonts and make colors jump at you while you’re visually being stimulated. Finally, check out all the variations you can use and don’t overload your UI with too many effects, or the actual meaning of the content might get lost in translation.
10. Micro Games
We all have come across the Chrome dino game wherever your internet is down or a web page can’t open. This might be a minor aspect, but consumers notice little effort to value their time more. More and more applications are introducing micro games consumers can play while waiting for different web page features to load up or process a specific command. This can be used when shopping for items and waiting for your order to get processed or for a product launch to start so you can buy the product. Even though this might not retain most of your customers, it improves the user experience on a webpage or app and goes a lot way to show customers you want them to be engaged even while they wait. It would certainly keep some consumers busy.
These trends forecast what might be popular in the next year. You never know what might get trendy next year, as the future is always unpredictable. This is a starting point for brands looking to improve their UI/UX designs and you can see what works for your business. Keep in mind that testing out trends for both UI and UX would make the overall customer journey worthwhile and make your brand more recognizable.
If you are still new to this space or need to elevate your business in the digital space, get in touch with experienced designers from SV Digital who specialize in UI/UX design. Give them a shout and see the wonders that can be achieved.