Last week in my Web130 class our teacher asked us to do some
research and come up with a list of web design or development trends that we find
interesting. We then presented our list to the class and gave an overview of
each trend we found. It was fun and instructive to see the breadth of
topics and opinions shared by a 15ish person class. Here is the original compiled class list.
My 5 Top Web Design Trends
Microinteractions
This one is definitely my favorite of the five,
probably because I am kind of obsessed with UX (user eXperience) and UI (user
interface design) principals and ideas right now. Microinteractions are
subtle/subtlish visual feedback that help guide the user without being
unobtrusive or overly distracting. An example of a microinteraction would be
when a button changes color when you hover the mouse over it. This site has some helpful examples of microinteractions that are pretty fun to play
with. Now, as much as I like this for of user feedback, there are some things
to consider in the technical realm. What if you are using a tablet, how does
the hover function work then? Uh-oh, when I’m on a tablet using a touch screen
it’s impossible to hover! In this case it would be better to use an interaction
that gives feedback when clicked instead of relying on the hover.
Websites With Slides
This trend takes the home page of a website
and replaces it with PowerPoint like functionality. Instead of having one
landing page that links to the other pages there is a slide show of several
different topics which you can click on to read more about them. This site utilizes the slide show format to display Facebook's year in review. Each slide is a
picture of the topic and has a link to a blurb about the topic. My problem with
this design is one of navigation, since there is no main page to go back to it
can be confusing to navigate this site. I kept thinking “Is this it? I feel
like I’m missing something!” But no, the site is small and simple, the
navigation structure is just not what I’m used to.
Long Scroll
Oh long scroll, how I love and hate you. Long
scroll sites have several pages worth of information and/or navigation items organized
vertically in one long front page, so you have to scroll, and scroll, and
scroll, and scroll, well you get the
idea. From a purely visual point of view long scroll sites can be beautiful and fun, and I’m sure they are a delight to do the visual designs for, but from a practical
standpoint they are boorish and excessive. Having a sticky nav at the top of
the page that will follow you down as you scroll helps alleviate some of the
frustration involved with using a long scroll site but only a little. To be
perfectly honest I find most long scroll sites to be a bit masturbatory, they
are beautiful feats of design and coding, but are they really necessary?
Here is a super silly example of a long scroll site, how far can you scroll??
Interactive Scrolling
Interactive scrolling can be seen as the next
evolutionary step of the long scroll, or perhaps the younger brother of the
long scroll. Interactive scrolling utilizes the same continuous scrolling
elements of the long scroll to display information and visuals, but it adds a
movement element. The visuals in a basic long scroll site are static whereas
with interactive scrolling react and move based on your scrolling through the
site. I feel pretty much the same way about Interactive scrolling as I do about
the long scroll….meh. It is pretty cool, but I don’t really want to use it on a
regular basis. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to have to scroll for 3 minutes
to basically watch a cartoon advertisement for your business,
actually it’s a .org so is it a business? Who knows! I certainly don’t, and do
you want to know why I don’t? Because I got tired of scrolling and left the
site before they could sum up what they do for me.
Material Design
Material Design is a specific design
language that Google developed and released upon the world in 2014. It is based
on the idea of having a comprehensive visual language that everyone can
understand and use. Do you use Gmail? Google+? Google Hangouts? Google in
general? Then you have encountered Material Design. The manifesto babel on their site breaks it down as a synthesis “between classic principles of good design with
the innovation and possibility of technology and science.” That’s cool, what
does it mean? (This translation is thanks in part to my art degree and art
history minor, turns out art babble and google design babble are very similar languages).
Well, as far as I could tell the idea is to take a visual language we already
are comfortable with, i.e. paper materials in the real world, and utilize those
properties to create a web/app based language that is easier for users to
intrinsically understand. While the explanation of what Material Design is can
be hard to slog through and wrap your head around, the actual implementation of
it is quite lovely.
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