What’s so special about UI/UX design is that they are always in flux. 2022 ended and marked a new chapter in web design. The competition is so fierce that it becomes more and more challenging for companies to stand out from the crowd of similar websites with extraordinary designs. By 2022, it’s already been over 1.98 billion websites on the World Wide Web.
But how to create a really attractive website? First things first: make it easy and eye-pleasing, and fill it with the relevant information to describe your vision. That’s not all. Adhere to UI/UX design trends in 2024. In every sense, they are the shortcut to leveling up your web design.
How Do Design Trends Appear?
Trends are the products of society’s inclinations and moods. To be precise, they are new developments or prevailing tendencies existing in society. Just appearing in the right place, at the right time, at the right moment, and among the right people, a trend can acquire widespread adoption.
Let’s take such a design trend as Art Deco as an example. It appeared in the post-war period, when the atmosphere of luxury and affluence of the roaring twentieth was perfectly reflected in this visual arts style. So, the right time and the right people maintained mass appeal to it. UI/UX trends have the same nature. Observing modern society, we can distinguish tendencies ruling this year.
There are many specific UI/UX design trends in 2022 you should know. Let’s check them out!
Top UI and UX Trends in 2024
UI/UX design plays a key role in communicating the business’s vision and values. Living in the age of information overload, we easily get distracted by insignificant things, which only complicates the task of creating an effective interface for UI/UX designers.
While working, employees lose about 86 minutes per day by getting distracted by other things except for their work, and every time it happens, it takes about 15 minutes to focus again. You can imagine how easily our minds start rambling. So, the UI/UX designer’s task is to create such an interface to translate the message of the website clearly.
UI and UX designs are closely connected, but they are accountable for different websites’ functions.
UI or user interface is a compilation of different web elements such as touchscreens, sounds, buttons, screens, pages, visual elements and so on. All these components enable users to interact with the website.
UX or user experience is the full spectrum of impressions the user gets while interacting with a website. It often affects the user’s attitude towards the product or services the website offers. Thus, unable to find the “Contact Us” button, the client will leave the website providing no contact information.
Now, let’s look at UI/UX design trends!
Inclusive Design
Inclusive design is a design approach that considers the needs of all users, including those with disabilities, different ages, and cultural backgrounds. This UX trend emphasizes the importance of designing products that are accessible, usable and enjoyable for everyone.
Being more than just a UX design trend, accessibility helps individuals from different backgrounds navigate a website and attract more clients. You can’t even imagine the number of people who rely on this functionality — 20% of general internet traffic comes from people with special needs.
How to achieve better inclusive design and accessibility? Contrasting colors, large texts, clean-cut imagery, keyboard navigation, adding alt text to images, effective UX writing, and so on are the way to make website navigation more inclusive.
Minimalism or Maximalism Extremes
Obviously, in 2024, we won’t go for a happy medium in web design. Sticking to average is not our case. Way more trendy is either minimalism or maximalism. Minimalism hooks with its simplicity and elegance, eschewing excess elements. When applied properly, it boosts user experience. A minimalistic interface proves to be the best interface, as it makes navigation intuitive and helps the user reach their goal.
The maximalist UI design trend allows experimenting with font variation, overlapping visuals, floating elements, and all the excesses. In the spirit of brutalist websites, it looks loud and bold. But don’t make too many extras. Some web designers use bright colors, disorienting patterns, odd cursors, and unnecessary animation, which in the end, looks like a dwarfy design from the 1990s. But behind all of its ugliness, there is an artistic hint.
Extended Reality
Submerging website visitors into virtual reality is another UX design trend that is going to dominate the website creation landscape in 2024. We are the generation that is pursuing unique experiences and impressions. Especially in the age of COVID-19 when everything moves online, providing your audience with a chance to interact in the digital landscape is essential as never before.
GDC 2020, the game industry professional event, transfers all its talks to virtual reality with 360-degree tours, chat rooms, webinars, and lectures. Thus, anyone who is interested in game development could join the conference from any part of the world. Besides, virtual tours to museums, art galleries and theatres are something truly outstanding. Once you’re there, it’s hard to turn back.
For its part, IKEA has taken an even more creative approach to apply this UX design trend by incorporating AR technology into its web design. Fiddling around with the cat twerking in your bedroom is not as useful as visualizing how this or that piece of furniture will fit in your apartment.
Activism and Health
In the wake of environmental issues, more and more people want to be engaged solely in eco-friendly projects. So, it’s a new UI/UX design trend to spread awareness and educate people on how fragile the environmental situation is now and how we can help that.
Since more and more people become concerned about how addictive and manipulative technology can be, web designers create safe web platforms. Thus, data protection and tracking the digital carbon footprint are a must.
Besides, as if we hadn’t heard enough of COVID-19, the pandemic has been the instigator of new digital health opportunities, including wearables, telemedicine, and artificial intelligence. In 2024, we can expect these behaviors to continue to trend.
Dark Mode
At the heart of this UI design trend is the dark-colored interface with a black or dark gray background. It emerged as a response to rising concerns over increasing screen time. Dark is proven to reduce eyestrain and eliminate headaches, improve work experience, and save battery life. It has been trending for several years, as it is not only more healthy for both people and devices, but it also seems visually attractive for many users.
Therefore, such tech giants as WhatsApp, Instagram, Google, Apple, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have already implemented this growing UI trend into their software products. This allows companies to be competitive in the market, as users tend to opt for software that offers a dark mode option.
Emoji
Used to be purely a means to express an emotion in your text, emojis have raised into a wide-spreading UI trend. In 2024, you may see them successfully integrated into website interfaces.
A nice move is to create your own emoji that represents your business by adding some personal touch to your brand. These funny and playful elements look good on any site as they are highly effective in grabbing attention.
As statistics say, a text with an emoji can increase engagement on Twitter by up to 25.4% and 47.7% on Instagram. It builds trust between your company and your customers.
“I guess we’re used to expressing emotions with the help of emojis in online communication. To evoke a more emotional response, web designers hype the interface with emojis, thus attracting more attention.”
Evgeniia Liuts, Head of UI/UX Department at LITSLINK
Animation
Animated words, a full-screen video, a background image ― animated elements in web and app interfaces magically keep the user’s attention for a bit longer than just bare information does.
In 2024, a number of unique and good illustrations are bombarding users from everywhere. The task of web designers is to make websites visually appealing with the help of this UI trend. Not only animating illustrations and icons can make your website more interactive, but small microinteractions that create a unique user experience.
Microinteractions are small moments of user and design interaction. For instance, when you tap twice on someone’s photo on Instagram, an animated heart icon appears on your screen. These elements in your IU, where they are appropriate, would breathe refreshing vibes into it. Building up an interface’s unique temper and aura, they have the only task — to delight and engage users.
Typography
Since web design refuses to remain stagnant, adding some unparalleled typography tricks can help your website stand out from the crowd. Playing with different fonts can make your website look truly eye-pleasing.
Adding some creativity to your design might enable you to experiment and play with forms and structures. In order to implement this UI trend, you can customize fonts according to your needs, making them bold and loud, minimal sans serif, hand-drawn, animated, 3D or colorful.
Bold typography may provide a set of advantages to your brand:
- The website looks dynamic and eye-catching;
- Typography enables UI/UX designers to experiment and show their creativity.
Also, do not be afraid of lacking balance because asymmetric does not mean chaos. To gain harmony in design, conceptualize each item’s weight, color, size, and movement of the elements on your page, and how it would look.
Pastel Colors
Pastel is the king in 2024; this color palette is likely to dominate the web design landscape this year and become a new UI trend. These are not only elegant, but highly practical colors. Besides, pastel colors are easy on the eyes; they are gentle and soothing and create a nurturing atmosphere.
In the midst of minimalism’s flurry, pastel colors get in sync with it perfectly. They imbue a website with lightness and simplicity. Creating pastel colors is also effortless: just make the background and watermark bright but faded in accordance with the general concept and graphics of a website.
However, be mindful that this UI design trend is not good for every industry. It works perfectly in the cosmetics, fashion and personal care industries, but may seem off in finance or utilities. You need to pay attention to what emotions you want to evoke in people when they visit your website. Businesses like finance aim to create a trusting but also stimulating atmosphere, so brighter colors are more appropriate.
Gradient
This UI design trend is not a newbie in the world of web design. But in 2024, the gradient effect should be more airy and light and add volume to fit the trend. Using just a linear gradient is out of date, but layering, mixing different colors, and color blur effects on the background are what really define this trend.
With the combination of 3D icons and pastel gradients, an interface acquires depth and volume, and a website morphs into a truly agreeable eyeful. This eye-catching UI trend can enhance any design and help a website or app stand out from the competition.
Skeuomorphism
Among UI trends of 2024, skeuomorphism is one of the most impressive ones. This is a design style that mimics the physical world by using real-world objects and textures in digital interfaces. This UI design trend has been declining in popularity in recent years, as more designers opt for more minimalist and flat designs. However, some designers are starting to incorporate skeuomorphic elements into their designs in a more subtle and refined way, giving them a more modern and updated look.
Skeuomorphism is the play with hyperrealism, shadows and volumes to achieve such authentic results. Aiming to show the volume of objects, web designers experiment with light, shadows, textures, and flares. As a result, it looks enticing and eye-pleasing.
It is easy and fun to interact with skeuomorphic elements as they are familiar to users because UI designers use concepts that they recognize. For instance, the recycle bin icon on Windows is what successfully fulfills mimicking real life in both appearance and function.
3D Icons & Illustrations
As you’ve noticed with the previous UI/UX trends, 2024 is definitely the year of design. 3D icons and illustrations keep climbing the trends chart. And why not? Deep, innovative, and imaginative, 3D objects may glue you to the screen and grab your attention in several seconds.
Web designers may strive to add more and more 3D icons and illustrations on their websites and look for free illustrations on the web, which is obviously the wrong way. To stand out from the crowd, come up with your own graphic ideas, and you will see users will love them. This UI trend wins users’ hearts because people are fond of visually appealing images that remind them of real objects. In this way, websites with 3D illustrations have more opportunities to create a captivating environment where users stay longer.
Voice UI (VUI)
No wonder, VUI is one of the hottest UI trends in 2024. If you have used any of the Amazon, Google, or Apple products, and we are pretty sure you have, you are already acquainted with Voice UI. Have a look at Google; no need to type a search request ― just voice your query and a smart AI algorithm will provide you with the best answer. It’s easy, quick, and entertaining to give voice commands like ‘Ok Google, find the best Asian cuisine restaurants in New York’ or ‘Alexa, turn on some jazz.’
“Voice is a new way of interacting with technology, and now, many try to save a lot of user steps and eliminate the requirement for a graphical user interface,” says Evgeniia, “You can order a taxi through speaker saying, “Hey Google, I need a ride,” and you’ll get a car. Those things make our lives easier.”
That’s why this UI trend has the potential to be implemented by more and more organizations and stay trendy for quite a lot of time. 2024 promises to bring more tools and techniques for designing this technology.
Implement The Best UI/UX Trends To Boost Brand!
These are just a few of the many UI and UX design trends that are shaping the design world. It’s important to keep in mind that trends are constantly evolving, and designers should be flexible and open to new approaches and technologies.
With the help of the latest design trends, making interfaces even more user-friendly and appealing is easy. If you are aiming for perfection, stick to general guidelines for now. Concentrate on an excellent user experience, develop a more elegant and seamless UI and increase overall usability.
If you want your brand to stand out from the crowd, our team of skillful designers will provide stunning app design services tailored to your needs and goals, based on the latest UI and UX design trends. Contact us!
