The year 2017 shone with bigger expectations and trends, especially for the tech geeks, web designers, and UX experts. A number of them tuned to the future predictions and trends that would drive them ahead, while others were inactive and lazy like a sloth.

Every year, new tools, frameworks, new technologies and new trends are seen in the web industry. Together we have seen the downfall of many design trends including sliders, flash-based web animations, and stock images. Talking about the user experience of a website, improving metrics, bounce rate and conversion are the key drivers for a business to stay ahead.

The overall design trends whether it be mobile or web, statistics reveal which design trends went popular, what were the consumers’ expectations and how they responded to the innovation. Before moving ahead, let us have a glimpse of indicators revealing surprising and astonishing facts about design trends.

Here are few of the statistics that make the case for a smarter website and better user experience design.

1. Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain (Adobe)
2. 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive (Adobe)
3. 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience (eConsultancy)
4. 84% of companies expect to increase their focus on customer experience measurements and metrics
5. By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator (Customers 2020 Report)
6. 44% of consumers would be willing to pay a premium price of 5% or more for a superior customer experience (Gartner)

From the statistics, it is easy to look for the possibilities in the future of design. Let us have a look deep into the dramatic hike of revolution taking place in 2017 and future years.

Web Based UX Trends 2017

Enhanced Readers Time

What happens when you come across a content that is very long and missing catchy images, failing to gain your attention? You either scroll through it until the end without reading or just opt out of it. It is better to save the time of readers by informing them about the estimated time required to read the article or blog post. It will probably put the readers to ease, helping them decide whether to spend time on it or not.

According to New Yorkers, “The more we know about something, including precisely how much time it will consume, the greater the chance we will commit to it”.

Medium is using the feature for more than a year allowing readers to know what time they have to spend. Some articles may seem longer than they really are, mainly due to the formatting. The same goes for the readers nowadays who are short on time and do not want to waste their energy and time on useless or time-consuming stuff.

Better Conversational Experience with Chatbots

Walking through aisles of a super store, what do you do when you face trouble while searching for the desired product? You often ask the store clerk to help. However, when it comes to online shopping, you either search for the product in a relevant category or enter search keywords to find the product. Companies usually integrate chatbots on their websites to address customers’ problems through quick response, rather than making them wait.

Merchant integration of technologies such as bots and natural language interfaces will lead to remote goods purchases by mobile totaling $2.1 trillion by 2021 (Juniper Research)

With the recent developments in machine learning, chatbots are widely used by Google and ShopBot by eBay. ShopBot enhances the shopping experience of customers looking for answers, which is better than a search engine.

Gesture and Voice based Experience

The things have quite changed after graphical users interface because now the focus is on voice and gesture-based interfaces as well. You probably have experienced with your own iPhone Siri Microsoft Cortana and Google Assistant on Android phone that can understand voice inputs. Search your query on Google through voice recognition feature, without moving your hands.

For instance, you can ask SIRI about the nearest burger shop on your iOS device. All of these features have helped improve user experience on a web or app.

Meaningful Micro Interaction

Many websites have incorporated unique animations, where you scroll down the page, the visual element starts to form. It is known as scroll triggered animations. Meaningful Micro Interaction is great for giving a demo to the customers or telling a unique story. The visual elements integrated on the website does not need any text, which engages the viewer through visual elements.

Scrolled trigger animation is also functional on a one-page website with multiple sections. When the user scrolls down the page, the animation portrays which section of the website they are looking at. One of the best examples of such website is Apple Mac Pro. The scroll-based animations exhibit their product inside out. Without any long and boring text, viewers will understand the product in a more effective manner.

Less is more

Messy websites with loads of text and images will cause users to immediately close it. This would result in higher bounce rate and zero conversion rate. The best solution is to offer negative space to the users, which helps in focusing more on content and less distraction with stock images and sliders.

For instance, if we look at medium.com, they have negative space both on left and on right, making content the focus. However, it doesn’t really mean you have to miss all the elements on your website just like navigation on the footer.

UX Mobile Trends 2017

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things has added a tremendous value to the businesses globally. With the cheaper availability of sensor technology, IoT will continue to evolve. The UX of an IoT app plays an important role in its success. Presently, the designers of UX face challenges in offering the precise information to the users, without distracting or annoying them with extra stuff.

The flow of information in IoT app between service providers, things, people and apps has to confirm that the information is concise, engaging and clear for the user.

The major concern of the UX designers and business owners is to confirm the security of information. The experience of IoT apps differs greatly from that of personal users and business users. App functionality in each case has to be understood clearly while doing the app UX.

Haptic Feedback

Haptic technology has gained popularity over the years and one of the common things in smartphones. The additional sensations make the usability of app features mesmerizing. Haptic clues are used to interact with the users while they are using touch function of the device to take an action such as typing on a virtual keyboard or pressing a button.

With the use of this technology, UX designers can use simple sensations to push the user to take the desired action on the application. Developers, in order to enhance the technology and offer smoother UI, are doing much of the work. The trend is now being used frequently in new apps and it will progress in the future.

VR Based UX

Virtual reality brings real-life experience in the virtual world. With virtual reality, you can experience the unimaginable, for example, traveling in space. In the future, the trend is being more towards design mobile UX for a virtual fantasy, as known as the experience provided by Virtual Reality Apps. Virtual reality experience is also dependent on the type of VR experiences, a user can enjoy.

The UX designer has to focus on 3D architect of the VR app to incorporate the experience, intended for the specific user. While designing experience, the location of the user and limitations with moving around is considered.

UX designer also needs to understand the level of involvement required by the app, to ensure that the design is detailed and well. The VR technology is getting the hype and UX trend will surely be influenced in 2017 and coming years.

Navigation Experience

Another aspect in providing better experience to customers while using the app is to reduce the time lost by users and increase the efficiency while being engaged in activities. It is not necessary that a user spending longer time on your app is the sign of better engagement.

This phase is in reality connected to a well-designed user interface. In the early step when you design the layout of your app, it should be well devised for the way users will experience while browsing different pages.

Whether you go for content based navigation, slider, drawers or popups, the main focus should be on offering spontaneous directions in order to make users concentrate on actual tasks.

In-app Gestures

People love to interact with their devices. Enhancing your app with personal behavior would be a deciding factor to attract users. One of the trends that has gained attention broadly is in-app gestures that will streamline the way customers access your app.

As most of the apps, manage the same gestures in a diverse manner, it is good way to offer your users some clues to make the flow more intuitive. Presently, Tamagotchi Gesture is widely popular; enhancing the human touch for the experience inside an app. Twitter is the most popular app, which uses this technique.

Enterprise Applications with Consumer

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the Enterprise Application Integration market to grow from $7.85 billion in 2014 to $13.35 billion in 2019

Enterprise employees have to interact with intranet applications that are usually complex and support several workflows. A wide gap has been observed over the years for employees’ expectations and what enterprise applications have brought over the years. Enterprise applications used by employees are normally perceived as consumer application as that of smartphones. For this reason, enterprise applications are in high demand that works the way consumer applications work.

A number of startups that strive with technology providers of enterprise applications discern based on user experience because they cannot compete on features, scale and functions solely. From this, it can be concluded that Enterprise Applications Providers are going to invest more in improved user experiences and better design beyond 2017.

Conclusion

The dominance of mobile and web designs have changed the perception of people. In 2017, we hope to see innovations and design aesthetics that would break the norm of flat designs, and lack of user experience. Companies have to adopt designs according to their own specific niche and target audience to identify what their audience need and how they can improve interaction.

Mobile apps, without any doubt holds great potential and have been popular for a couple of years to make them realize how they work and what its long-term benefits are. The apps are not only designed for age specific tech savvy people (teenagers and youngsters), as it is used by anyone of any age.

Moreover, everyone has gone through enough experience to know what good apps look like, which make it more demanding. The ever-changing technological expansion and the experience for users is the core of design experience, while users have become more demanding and harder to retain.