What are the on-trend website design features for 2019 - and will they still be popular in 2020?
Elegant Digital work with design partners for clients around the world, so we’re ideally placed to gather together some of the latest design trends and rip them apart comment on them.
The Death of Mobile First
Photo by Quang Thai Nguyen from Unsplash
2019 saw a quiet dismissal of the mobile first rubbish that was sold to many clients over the last few years. Was it helpful in pushing mobile web design forward? Maybe. Did it result in sites devoid of useful content? Definitely.
Without a doubt, more and more of us are using our mobile devices to visit websites, search and shop. And Google has been pushing mobile friendliness in order to improve your search engine ranking. But the desktop is still the key tool for research and actually getting things done - and mobiles keep getting bigger and higher resolution. It’s never been more important to focus on users rather than platforms.
Farewell mobile first design, nobody liked you anyway.
Minimalism
The trend that won’t die. Less is more. A classic and timeless web design trend and often the go-to for a web design, and definitely what every fresh graduate thinks every website should look like. More whitespace, concise and clear typography.
But will it survive first contact with a client who wants to make the logo bigger?
Custom and Classic Fonts
What designer doesn’t love talking about fonts. And iphones. Bigger and bold typefaces, still clean and formal, and moving away from humanist fonts as brands want to stand out from the crowd.
Still no comic sans revival.
Video and Video Elements
Agencies have been pushing video content for about eighteen months now as the best way to generate traffic. No comment. We’ve seen a plethora of video elements introduced into designs though, and it’s definitely not in doubt that it makes sites more engaging. We’re even using some on our site, so it must be good.
But all these extra MB leads us to...
Fast Loading Pages
Not new - but it’s something that we can’t get enough of - SPEED, SPEED, SPEED! Videos useage in general, are on the rise, so the speed of your pages is super important. Research indicates that 53% of users will leave a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. I don’t know who did the research but it sounds about right.
We’ve also seen new challenges in serving content to India, China and Russia. One challenge is speeding things up - another challenge is accurately measuring it. China is big, y’all.
Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots
Of course the recommendations on what we should watch on Netflix or things to buy from Amazon are made from AI algorithms. Which means that we shouldn’t worry about Skynet anytime soon because I am not watching Styling Hollywood or buying a sheep toilet roll holder.
But, chatbots are evolving. With levels of customisation, they are used to help supplement a standard FAQ, and to a degree learn and improve each time a customer interacts with them.
We’re seeing more and more requests for live chat with integrated chatbot support - the main challenge we’ve found is educating clients and securing the investment to create scripts with a solid direction, and the content needed.
We’re actually really interested in working with a client to do a study on conversion effectiveness and a process for that surrounding work - so if you are too please get in touch.
Incidentally, we bought the sheep. All hail our robot lords I suppose.
