What can we say about 2020? The year was no less than a roller coaster ride. Every business had to think of new approaches and new ways to market themselves; the world of the web changed too. New design trends blossomed, and we think many of these design trends are here to stay. In this last article of 2020, we have collated a list of design trends that we think are promising for 2021.

Advanced Personalization

In terms of design, personalization is an approach where a company, or brand, creates tailored content and recommendations for every user. The content and recommendations are based on information gathered – like date of birth, viewing, marital status, and order history, etc. The key objective of personalized design is to make the user feel that the content is crafted especially for them. This leads to an increase in the conversion rate, which is after all that the commercial website owners want.

Personalization is very much a user experience trend apart from being a best practice. Apple and Google continue to develop personalized assistants for their ecosystems. These assistants recognize who is interacting with them by face, voice, or fingerprint. Interfaces will become more personalized in the near future. Their appearance, tone, the position of elements, and behavior will change in a blink of an eye.

Touchless Interactions

Touchless interactions are another UI and UX trend that has emerged during the pandemic. By touchless interactions, we mean the various methods of interacting with devices without actually touching them. These can be voice user interfaces (VUI) or air gesture control.

Even before the pandemic, touchless interactions gained a lot of popularity and was poised to become a major UI/UX trend. Affixing a voice-user interface to your design can substantially expand its reach. It will be no surprise if a lot of companies create complete voice user interfaces.

3D and Immersive Experiences

3D designs are very attractive and grab eyeballs in a jiffy. Since 3D designs have been around for quite some time now, we can hardly call it a novel design trend, for the web and mobile. However, this year, the designers’ interest in 3D components and entire 3D scenes in interfaces will reach new heights. 3D design got all pumped up with Apple incorporating it in their latest macOS update. The macOS BigSur has a set of revamped icons, some of which look rather 3D-ish.

Also, previously the 3D elements were not diverse in practical use since they often put a very heavy load on user machines and therefore were not in much demand. But now, the modern front-end frameworks and libraries can significantly reduce page load time. This allows the 3D objects to become even more detailed and larger.

Looking at the rising popularity of VR and AR technologies, we can bet the 3D will only become more popular in 2021. Unusual angles, cool abstractions, and a lot more – you can do all this in 3D without using real objects. 3d saves money too; think about that expensive car or an unusual house that you want to showcase. 3D offers a WOW experience to users. They stay on the page longer, hence increasing the average session time.

Unorthodox Layouts and Scrolls

When we talk about a UI/UX design, symmetry primarily stands for classic and conventional designs. Although it is a great approach to streamline the structure of a website, all sites built on grids look alike. It is important for a site to stand out against the crowd. By not being unique, the website’s promotion in search engines is also affected. Unorthodox and creative layouts are bound to be more prominent in 2021. This offers more character and personality to your website and emphasizes its particularity.

Creative navigation techniques include scroll color fade, horizontal navigation slideshows, mix and match of horizontal and vertical scrolls, scroll-triggered animation, drag to explore, and more. These are particularly great for promotional sites about creative collaborations and events.

High-tech Landing Pages

One of the trends that are creating hype involves complex work with layouts and animation. For technology and production-oriented websites, an abstract representation of products and processes is a perfect solution. The tricks include hyper-realistic complex animations, volumetric illustrations, and renders that attract and captivate visitors.

However, the main challenge is that visitors get no more than 60% of the information you are trying to convey through your website at the best of times; with these websites, they get about 10%. Though this trend makes designers violate the basic idea of accessible and clear information delivery, you must find the golden ratio where you can astonish and bring value at the same time.

Unusual Illustrations and SVGs

3D is still popular in illustrations and 2Ds with surreal plots, unusual angles, experiments with proportions, vintage-muted colors, etc. There was a time when minimalism ruled illustrations, but now designs based on quirkiness and a combination of the real and the unreal is an emerging trend. Another highlight is vector illustrations in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format. It uses XML to define basic properties such as shapes, paths, fonts, colors, and more advanced features. We know that PNGs, GIFs, and JPEGs lose their quality when the display resolution is increased. That’s the reason you have to keep a separate file for each type of screen. However, with SVGs, there is no such problem. The vector format can be reduced and enlarged without compromising on quality.

UX Simplification

Today, the designer’s task is to cut down the elements and fields to the minimum. The same is the case with the number of steps a user has to take to reach the desired result. For instance, placing the whole checkout in a single step is trending these days. Registration and log-in processes are becoming more simple, or a side step in the user flow. 

In 2021, we expect websites will not force users to remember their passwords. For example, in an online store, the user’s personal identifier can be their biometric data or phone number. Apple introduced its super-button, which substitutes random data for registration. In a lot of applications, you can now register with only one button without the involvement of social networks.
Do you want to create a useful, attractive website based on the current design trends? Talk to our experts now!

Read More about techniques which could help you in designing effortless user interfaces.