How many of your users have requested a dark mode in your product? I’m guessing it’s a dozen at least, if not much more. Heck, I once received a dark mode request from a government employee using our customs clearance product!
Just like me and many others, you might be in a dilemma; should I follow this seemingly silly request or ignore it? You know that dark mode is a popular design trend, but is it really going to make your product better or solve more of your user’s pains?
Well, yes! While some things never go out of style (like rigorous UX research planning), it’s also essential for you to follow the latest design trends and use them in your product. And yes, current design trends can also significantly improve the usability and effectiveness of your product.
So, let’s go over the most prominent trends in the design space and understand how you can benefit from each one.
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What Are UX Design Trends?
UX trends are the latest design principles, workflows, types of interfaces, UX design tools, and technologies that are proliferating in the world of UI/UX and have a high chance of becoming mainstream and appearing in most digital products.
While some of them will eventually fade away (like skeuomorphic design) or become static (like voice user interface), most of them will survive and be a must-have in any modern user interface.
Examples of trends that have passed the test of time include minimalist design, data-driven design, and others.
But, if there’s a chance of these trends fading away, should you really care about following them?
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Reasons To Be Aware of UX Design Trends
It’s important to care about the latest design trends and try to incorporate them into your existing projects.
The reason why is simple. These design trends have become popular because they are able to solve real-world problems and improve the usability of digital products.
For instance, dark mode has made it possible for people to work during late hours in dark rooms without disturbing their family members who might be asleep. Responsive design, on the other hand, has made it possible to build interfaces that work well on any device.
I know, there’s a chance that some trends might fade away. But, it will take at least a couple of years (or even decades) for them to fade into obscurity. This means you can take advantage of these trends for quite a while before needing to review your design.
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The Top 10 UX Design Trends in 2024
The design space is moving forward rapidly and there are new trends appearing every single week. There are, however, usually small and insignificant ones that tend to disappear rather quickly.
Conversely, these 10 design trends are quite prominent in the world of UX and are very likely to stay with us in the long run. So, let’s discuss each one in detail.
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1. Micro-Interactions
This is the case when your interface is giving feedback to the user and interacting with them in subtle ways. While small interactions might not seem important at first glance, the combination of many of them along your core journeys accumulates and creates an overall positive user experience.
Examples of micro-interactions include the animation of the like icon on Instagram and other social platforms when the user clicks on it.
Another example comes from Apple—the company I admire for its design-first philosophy. When you press the trackpad on Macbooks a bit harder than usual, the pad responds with haptic feedback to tell you that you have just performed force touch.
Image Credit: theproductmanager.
2. Clean User Interfaces
I understand that there are many awesome pages or features in our product that we want to showcase to our users. But this does not mean that we should bloat the interface they are seeing with a multitude of images, buttons, lists, and other elements.
I mean, look at MSN’s homepage.
You have 2 navigation bars, 6 lists, and 2 cards, all showcasing different types of content on a single screen. I challenge you not to get eye fatigue while browsing a website like this.
Image Credit: MSN.
Clean User Interfaces Example
Clean user interfaces dictate the opposite by having few UI elements relevant to what you are doing at that moment. Google Maps is my favorite example.
The navigation bar on the top allows you to view restaurants, museums, and other places of interest. The icons only appear when you zoom into the map, close enough for cities to become visible.
Image Credit: Google.
3. Dark Mode
While many users still consider dark mode something fancy that only software developers use, it is an inevitable trend. Dark mode will most certainly continue to increase in popularity in the coming years.
Why? Because there are certain real-life benefits to switching your interface design elements to the darker gradients.
Firstly, it relieves eye stress when working in a dark room. In the ever-popular world of side hustles, flexible work schedules, and remote work from different time zones, people often work during the evenings. Dark mode helps them to feel comfortable in front of their device when sitting in dark lighting.
Secondly, it is about preserving battery life. Dark interfaces consume less energy because the LED screens need much less brightness to display black backdrops.
Image Credit: Dmitry Kostrov/Istockphoto.
4. Metaverse
Our world is slowly drifting towards a fundamentally new type of user interaction—augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Admittedly, the popularity of these two is currently relatively low due to the costs of AR/VR devices (it’s a new technology, after all), but the shift towards this interface is, again, inevitable.
One of the most prominent players in this market is Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) with its Metaverse.
The Metaverse will let you interact with friends, buy products, and attend concerts and other types of entertainment in the virtual world.
Image Credit: Meta.
5. Advanced Cursor Interactions
We all know the basics of cursor UX. If the user hovers over a button or a link, show the pointer cursor. If they hover over a text field where they can type, show the text cursor.
Apart from this, however, there are more advanced ways that you can help your user interact with your interface. For instance, Apple has changed the cursor into a circle in the iPadOS with its own unique interactions.
The reason behind this change was the fact that the iPad’s interface is optimized for touch interactions. Simply adding the ordinary cursor would not feel natural to use. So, Apple, following its tradition of excellence in user experience, came up with this circle cursor that is easy to use with a trackpad or a mouse, while preserving the overall touch-first experience of the OS.
Image Credit: Sixcolors.
6. Data Visualization
Another considerable trend in the digital world is the ever-growing availability of big data and analytics. What this means is that showing useful analytics to your users related to their activity in the product has become essential.
I could argue that data visualization is a form of art by itself. With great user experience design and inclusivity, you will be able to make any type of complex user data easy to grasp for your target audience. Just look at this example.
Although there are three different types of data present in the above image, you can easily distinguish between them and even understand their relationships with each other.
Image Credit: UXPlanet.
7. Personalized Experiences
Personalization is not just a design trend; it applies to anything in the digital world. Now that we have access to real-world user engagement data, we can better understand individual user needs.
By taking advantage of this, we can create user interfaces and content that are relevant to every single person using our product without the need for extensive UX research. This allows us to create highly immersive experiences and follow the notion of inclusive design in a whole new way.
Image Credit: Jelena Stanojkovic/Istockphoto.
8. AI Generated Content
Artificial Intelligence is one of the core technologies that has made it possible to create the personalization I just mentioned. With the advent of advanced algorithms and generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools), we are able to use the information from our user research, as well as the preferences of specific users, as context for the models to generate content that is highly relevant for our users.
For instance, Spotify’s AI models will consider your location, time of day, and previous streaming patterns to understand that you are going for a run and suggest a playlist with energetic songs.
Luckily, generative AI has become prominent in design software, making it easy for you to use this technology in your design decisions.
Image Credit: chatgpt.com.
9. 3D Designs
Modern devices have become quite powerful when it comes to processing heavy visuals. This has opened new opportunities for product design in terms of adding 3D elements, typography, and animation into user interface designs.
With 3D, you can now add advanced interactions to your mobile and web design and make the overall experience more pleasurable for your target audience.
The e-commerce wing of IKEA, for example, has recently launched its 3D AR app called IKEA Place.
This app allows users to place IKEA furniture in their homes, judge how it looks with the rest of the room, and determine whether it fits.
Image Credit: IKEA.
10. Responsive Design
The world is mobile first. Around 75% of all active devices worldwide are mobile, so there is no excuse for not making your products mobile first as well.
The main component involves enabling something called responsive design. This is a development and design methodology that allows your product to adapt its interface to the size of the device, be it mobile or desktop.
Luckily, modern design tools, such as Figma, come with a wide variety of functionality (including prototyping), granting you this UI design trend to create responsive layouts with relative ease.
Image Credit: milindri/istockphoto.
The 5 Characteristics of Late-Stage UX
Now that we have covered the most prominent design trends, I would like us to discuss another related topic—how late-stage UX is different from the rest and which aspects you need to pay attention to.
Why is it important? You will most likely be able to follow these design trends at the later stages of your product’s design maturity when you have already covered the bare basics and have the time and resources to improve your design with the latest trends.
So, let’s go over these five important late-stage design characteristics.
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1. Financialization
Creating pleasant experiences with your design and helping your users get the most out of your product are only a percentage of the tasks that user-friendly design is supposed to handle.
When your product becomes mature, and you have successfully optimized the core product flows, your focus will start shifting toward the financial side of UX.
Specifically, you will start optimizing the conversion journeys of your product in order to encourage and help your users become paid customers. Financialization is usually prevalent in the e-commerce space when great UX assists users in quickly finding the product they want and buying it with ease.
This aspect of UX has become increasingly important for SaaS products, too. Mixpanel is a great example.
If you are a free user of Mixpanel, you can only save 5 reports. Every time you save a report, the product shows you this limit and prompts you to upgrade to a paid plan to get unlimited reports.
Image Credit: theproductmanager.
2. Saturation
When you have a product in a mature market, one of your big challenges is to differentiate yourself from the rest. Saturation is the process of user experiences of different products becoming too similar in the market. This is usually the result of companies copying the successful designs of others to stay competitive.
This situation poses a challenge for design teams, as they need to innovate and create experiences that are different and better than what already exists in the market.
A famous example of such differentiation is LinkedIn, which has added user journeys specific to its niche, such as endorsements. This has permitted the website to successfully differentiate itself from other bug social networks by entering the niche of professional networking.
Image Credit: LinkedIn.
3. Disintegration
Disintegration refers to the process of similar user journeys with different elements and experiences across your product. For instance, the create button looks and behaves one way on your main page and another way on other pages.
This is a common problem for mature products as different teams and designers are working on different parts of the product. They often do not communicate their design decisions with each other and end up creating different experiences for the same thing.
Google is famous for this. Each of its products is different from the rest in terms of the looks and behaviors of basic elements.
Image Credit: .
4. Commoditization
Another common problem with mature products and markets is the over-standardization of design elements and experiences. For example, a Login process works the exact same way everywhere.
Generally, this is great for user experience. You don’t have to explain how a certain feature works, as it is common knowledge. On the other hand, because of this phenomenon, the room for creativity and innovation has become much smaller for product designers.
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5. Automation
As your product matures and revenue grows, you are able to pay for tools that were not available for your design team during your startup phase.
One of the best investments that you can make in your design process is automation. Modern tools come with machine learning add-ons that can help you automate the creation of adaptive interfaces, usability testing, user attention tracking, and more.
Image Credit: PeopleImages/istockphoto.
Trends Matter In UX Design
A lot of trends will enter the design space quickly, gain a bit of traction, and die—not unike the many peculiar trends in clothing and fashion. The ones we discussed, however, are quite prominent and have the ability to solve real user problems.
So, make sure to follow these trends to keep your product’s design modern and relevant. I also suggest checking out a web design community or community for UX designers to learn from others and even become a trendsetter in the industry!
About the author
Suren Karapetyan, MBA, is a senior product manager focused on AI-driven SaaS products. He thrives in the fast-paced world of early stage startups and finds the product-market fit for them. His portfolio is quite diverse, ranging from background noise cancellation tools for work-from-home folks to customs clearance software for government agencies.
This article originally appeared on Theproductmanager.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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