If anything in the mobile development world is constantly changing, it is none other than the UI/UX design. While every app wants to keep pace with the fast-paced evolution taking place with UI/UX design, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the trending UI/UX design experiments and popular elements.
The mobile app designing process is exposed to all kinds of experiments these days, and new design trends continue to come up. In 2021, the following UI/UX design trends are going to dominate the app world.
Minimalist Design
Minimalist design is one of the few dominant trends making rounds across all types of app user interfaces worldwide. The basic principle that guides minimalist design is to reduce the information overload causing distractions. Since today’s people remain already overwhelmed with ads, digital content, app messages, and notifications, minimalism by sticking to the most relevant gives a fresh breath of relief for the users.
Doing away with information overload through simple UI design is the key to this design trend. Using a lot of white space while reducing design elements to a minimum and using lighter shades and less distracting design layout remains a key attribute of this design principle.
Dark Themed Design
In recent years, both Google and Apple provided additional support for dark-themed UI design. No wonder most of the flagship devices are also providing dark-themed screen interfaces. Changing the app screen to dark mode at night and light mode during the day has become now more popular among app users since this ensures lower consumption of battery power while causing less harm to the eyes. In 2021, more apps will embrace dark-themed UI design than ever before.
Microinteractions and Micro UI Animations
Microinteractions such as small animations denoting the loading process have been very popular for web apps, and they are still relevant in the context of the web. But these days, the use of small micro-animations has also started to become popular in mobile app UI design.
Apart from providing feedback about the undergoing activities within an app, micro-interactions and micro animations can replace visual information and graphic elements to facilitate a smooth and streamlined user experience. The use of hamburger menus is a simple example of little and intuitive design elements that can replace a lot of cognitive overloads.
Simple Voice-Enabled User Interface
Voice-enabled user interfaces make a strong and growing UI trend to dominate 2021 and years beyond. It is reported that more than one-third of users in the US already interact with apps and make web searches by using voice commands.
The voice-enabled smart assistants such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and several others now can respond to user commands for carrying out all kinds of actions. When for your next voice-enabled app project, you hire an app developer India offers many great options. In many countries, including India, voice interfaces have become a sensational trend in the recent past. The voice-enabled interfaces will continue to grow in popularity in 2021 and years ahead.
Gradients
While minimalist design elements such as flat UI are continuing to dominate the app design for years, the trend in the case of many apps has resulted in additional white spaces than what is necessary. The UI designers were long searching for a way out from this exaggerated emphasis on white space, and so we landed upon gradients and shades as new design trends.
Without completely renouncing the white space and minimalism as the ground principle, designers began experimenting with various visual styles. Gradients represent one such visual style that has replaced flat Colors in many apps. As flat design now needs a twist to deliver a unique design flair, gradients and shades will continue to remain recurring UI design elements in the coming years.
Glassmorphism
If you look back at the evolving design trends in the web and mobile apps, you can easily see the emergence of neomorphic as a dominant trend for quite some time. The trend brought a new twist to many apps representing a fusion of two opposing design trends, such as skeuomorphism and flat design.
In the current year, designers are likely to embrace a more experimental version of neomorphic called glassmorphism. Apart from keeping intact many design elements of neomorphic, the trend offers a blur effect or blurred background creating a feel of looking through the glass.
Authentication without Password
One of the key trends in in-app UX design now is passwordless authentication. The passwordless authentication measure works best for users who tend to forget passwords. As the number of apps is continuously increasing, many users tend to forget passwords, resulting in compromised security or a bad user experience.
In different ways, passwordless authentication can be incorporated into apps. By introducing verification factors such as device ownership or a hardware token or using biometric data such as fingerprints, voice recognized or face recognition data, and the user can be authenticated. Passwordless security helps improve app security besides optimizing the user experience.
Bottom Navigation Bar
When it comes to the navigation design of the apps, the bottom navigation bar has emerged as the most popular trend in recent years. The navigation bar at the bottom ensures easier access to all navigation options. For single-handed users also the bottom navigation bar offers great accessibility benefits.
In the bottom navigation bar design also, there is a growing trend of using minimal graphics. Since dark themes and gradients are becoming popular, they are also influencing the bottom navigation design.
Conclusion
These UI UX design trends for 2021 are not exhaustive, and several ones equally deserve to be listed. At the same time, it must be pointed out that design experiments are continuously happening with the user interfaces and user experience of apps. This is why these trends should only be conceived to provide a gross direction for the app UI/UX design in the years to come.
