The Future of Web Design and How to Plan For The New Trends

With close to two billion active websites and more being launched daily, the web world can be described as dynamic and an industry defined by stiff competition. To stand out from such an enormous pack, you need to implement innovative web design ideas and follow futuristic trends.

Here, we share the top five trends that are expected to shape the future of web design and development in the next several years. Prepare for this future by familiarizing and implementing these latest changes in your next web redesign work.

Chatbots and machine learning

Efficient customer support is a key part of successful businesses and the reason you should always be striving to improve on this area to compete better in your industry. A good place to start is to employ chatbots which are AI integrations that support automated customer interactions on your website.

It is expected that by the end of 2020, more than 80 percent of customer exchanges will be facilitated by tools with chatbots taking the biggest share of these numbers. The good thing is that consumers don’t seem to mind using these tools especially since they offer quick responses and solutions to their queries. Indeed, with nearly half of customers preferring to contact a business via a live chat feature – where chatbots are best suited for – it is easy to see why this tech is here to stay.

Voice search optimization

If there’s one aspect of your web design you cannot afford to ignore today, it’s the need to optimize your site for voice search. Studies show that by 2020, nearly half of all search queries on the web will be made using voice in place of text.

The preparations for this imminent change are underway with technologies like Cortana on Android and Windows PC, Google Assistant by Google, Siri on iPhone, and Echo from Amazon quickly gaining popularity.

So, what does this mean for web designers and developers?

For starters, it pays to make your site mobile responsive as voice searches comprise about a fifth of all mobile searches today. What’s more, you will need to add a voice search function to your website – probably by integrating a voice search recognition API into your site.

Responsive design and fast loading sites

Mobile responsiveness may not be a new trend but it’s won’t be going anywhere soon. While there aren’t many new things to talk about here, we’ll emphasize on a few key aspects of responsive design you need to implement going forward.

For starters, be sure that all the basics are well taken care of – uncluttered homepage design, neat contact forms, simple navigation, etc. Optimizing these areas for the mobile user will significantly reduce your overall bounce back rates and improve user experience.

With more web designers finding success with card layouts, you might want to consider implementing cards on your next design or redesign work. This is especially recommended if your site uses a lot of aggregated content, videos, and images. Cards contain information like the title of the page or section, brief text, an image, or an icon.

Finally, getting a reliable host will boost how fast your site loads – a key part of attracting and retaining visitors on your website. Check out Hosting Foundry for detailed web hosting reviews if you’re looking for fast and affordable providers.

Micro-interactions

So, you’ve completed the tough work of attracting potential customers to your website, how do you ensure they take the action you want them to? There are a number of ways you can use to improve conversions but only a few are more effective than micro-interactions.

Take a look at the following two examples:

Alerts are a form of micro-interaction where a user chooses to receive or block notifications on their device or browser. If a user decides to activate them, they get alerted whenever you add new content to your site – usually blog posts, videos, etc.

Reactive event response, just as the name suggests, are automated reactions that are triggered by user activities. Some of the most relatable examples here include squeeze pages that popup when a reader scrolls past a certain point in a page, hover and scrolling animations, feedback sounds, etc.

Alerts/notifications and reactive event responses are expected to play a significant role in boosting conversions and enhancing user experience going forward.

Illustrations

With all the tech innovations coming up daily, there’s really no excuse to create dull web resources today. The web is littered with thousands of design and graphic elements you can use to infuse more personality into your website and make it more appealing to the eyes of users.

For example, you can choose to use animations like GIFs and organic shapes as a way of making your web content feel a lot more responsive to your visitors.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. The five major trends expected to remain relevant in the web design space for the next few years. Embrace them to create nice websites that help you attract more leads, improve brand awareness, and drive more sales.