No wonder the web and mobile UI design have evolved drastically in recent years. The year 2016 has brought in some major changes in the field of designing expert user interfaces. Lightly designed sliders and carousels have been the major part the e-commerce website’s homepage. On the other hand, a mix of a flat and material design was widely implemented in designing website interfaces and to give a polished touch to the mobile apps.

App UI Design Practices Followed in 2016

While Apple has continued to carry some of the flat design principles, Android apps emphasized on going behind the Google’s Material Design trends. In this article, you should be able to walk through some of the major components that have been highly practiced by the design experts in the past year.

Design For Larger Screens

Most of the UI based projects had a focus on designing for larger screens. It does not necessarily mean to flood with crowded content but to focus on the most important element. The font size has increased and mobile devices with displays bigger than 5 or more inches were targeted.

The rise in the number of smartphone users and the trend of big displays are the clear indications that designers now have much room to be creative while designing mobile apps; the more number of mobile devices, the more focus on designing UI for those devices.

The Minimalist Design Approach

If there is something that has changed over past few years, it is the implementation of minimalist design approach instead of keeping long stretched out content. The new design practice is more about including only most important component in the mobile app interface design.

In recent years, use of images on the welcome screen has also gained a lot of popularity just like hero images are used on the website homepage.

Use of Overlays and Modal Windows

Modal Windows appear as a separate window in the app displaying some additional messages. Overlays are the tiny window like text boxes that are displayed in addition. A good example of overlays can be a “form confirmation” overlay window with some messages. Both overlays and modal windows are highly employed in designing UI for apps.

You can read more about modal windows here, Here’s What No One Tells You About Modal Windows

Swiping Replaced Gestures

As discussed above, carousels and sliders have been a major UI element in the modern design, the gesture options are now limited. Users feel more comfortable swiping through various images and products on e-commerce websites. The ease of swiping between various elements has also led other forms of mobile apps viz. Social apps to use this intuitive feature.

Bold Typography

User Interface design cannot ignore the importance of typography. The year 2016 has seen the heavy application of bold and large typography designs in mobile interfaces as well as on the websites. Further, Sans Serif still wins the game in the font application being the favorite choice of designers.

Storytelling Approach To Create Brand Awareness

The storytelling approach is something which is not too old. It is a fresh trend and is in vogue for a while. The objective is to create brand awareness by means of some creative approaches that assists the user understand a company or a brand. It can also be used to introduce your products and services in a much innovative way.

Read more about Storytelling, Factors That Affect The Longevity Of Storytelling

The Bottom Line

No design trend lasts long. It’s all about what users like the most. Based on the user opinion, new techniques are introduced. Among all the popular UI design trends discussed above, the one that I feel should last long is the minimalist design approach. The reason is users nowadays rely more on the User Experience and minimalist approach does the job quite well. So, that’s all from Oodles Studio. Let’s wait and watch what is going to influence in the design year 2017.