UI/UX Trends To Watch For Product Design In 2020
By: Dodo Design
Tags: Design, Design Research, Design Strategy, Trends, Ui Ux Design

This post is the detail of the infographic we shared bearing the same title for the month of February, 2020.

Download the INFOGRAPHIC HERE

Every year, businesses must make decisions that could make or mar their efforts. These product design decisions are usually determined by controlling trends that are too important to ignore. These trends shape the culture of the day and how users relate and connect with existing products. In designing products for customers, there are trends to look out for that if sidelined, could negatively impact the outcome of your offering. In this post, we want to share with you some of the most important UI/UX trends to be cognizant of when designing digital products for your users in 2020 and hopefully beyond.

VIRTUAL REALITY/AUGMENTED REALITY

The proliferation of products leveraging virtual reality and augmented reality to increase user experience has spiked. While there’s a line separating the two in areas of focus, their impact on the industries is quite enormous. From Facebook’s Oculus Rift to Google’s Cardboard, virtual reality aims to shut out the physical world and transport users into an imagined environment that looks like a live experience. This has found various applications in pilot training simulations, engineering, health and several niches. Virtual Reality is heavily used in game design creating a thrilling experience for users.

Augmented Reality (AR) seeks to add digital elements to a live view, a good example is Pokemon Go. AR has found great use in mobile games, mostly relying on the smartphone’s camera. The AR/VR trend is growing fast, with a total of $5 billion AR revenue generated in 2014 alone and predicted to generate revenue of $70 to $75 billion by 2023. While this trend is seeing increasing usage among company products and with several startups springing up from this, VR is expected to accelerate this year.

Photo Source: Pexels

GRADIENTS AND BACKGROUNDS

With this trend showing up on websites and apps, gradients are truly returning, and their effects are driving modern ui design in a wonderful way. With a special blend of colors uniquely used, the gradient effect adds life and vibrancy to flat design. This trend spiked in 2018, got popular in 2019 and seems not to slow down this year. Gradients are commonly seen in new app UIs and can be strikingly attractive. Designers now use bold gradients to make aspects of their projects standout instantly and companies are tilting towards this.

Photo Source: Digitaltrends.com

GAMIFICATION FOR USER ENGAGEMENT

This trend has been around for quite a while now, it started being popular only among digital products in the past decade, but has seen a constant increase in usage across many industries. A great example is Duolingo, the language learning platform that has proved that user engagement and completion rate increases when gamification is added as an arsenal in product design. Most online technology and code learning platforms make extensive use of gamification. From Codecademy, Dataquest to Sololearn and Datacamp, these are digital learning platforms that are transforming their user engagement using gamification.

Photo Credit: Dribble

RESPONSIVE COLOURS IN LOGOS, ICONS AND VISUAL BRAND ELEMENTS

Now, brands are not only just symbolic, they are being responsive to their context. Mastercard recently dropped the logotype from their logo retaining only the intersecting circles. This makes their logo responsive, working efficiently across several digital platforms. You see big brands like Dropbox, Facebook following these trends. A look at Instagram’s colourful logo and it’s responsiveness across different blends and backgrounds also points to the increasing popularity of responsive colour in design.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATIONS

The 3D trend has come to stay and will only get better. User interfaces are now coming bundled with breathtaking animations that increase engagement. The emotional connection that 3D graphics and animations create in digital products could impact product performance. The interactivity animations contribute to users’ experience drives user engagement. From mobile games, utility apps to social media UIs, animations have become a go-to feature if a product must become a buzz.

Also check out: Design Strategy: The Unique Value It Brings To Businesses from our blog

Photo Credit: Dribble

MICRO-INTERACTIONS

Micro-interactions are those moments customers experience as they use digital products.

This includes interactions like article progress bars, beautiful push notifications, as well as sounds that add an extra layer of delight to the design. While some are used to direct users’ attention, give tips, others give feedback about completed actions.Any social or interactive product that lacks engaging micro-interactions could end up having a less than optimal user experience on the whole.

Photo Credit: Howtogeek

VOICE UX

Virtual office and home assistants that perform tasks using voice prompts were made popular by Google, Amazon and similar companies. Now, it’s becoming a norm for apps to carry voice commands as the trend has steadily risen. People now interact with their apps, performing tasks at times when it would otherwise seem inconvenient, like when cooking, driving, painting and more. When considering the fast paced nature of today’s world, voice UX seems to be the answer. This trend will most likely keep rising in 2020 and beyond.

Photo Source: Dribble

MINIMALIST DESIGN AND SIMPLICITY

In this age of digitization, where everything is screaming at you, minimal speaks loudest. From landing pages to UIs, modern fonts to clean layouts, minimalistic designs have gradually become the norm.

There are several other new trends emerging that are very important to building digital products with great user experiences. However, including these 8 will set your product on a path of positive customer reviews.

Also read How Duolingo Nailed Their Product Using Design

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