Whether you're launching a website, platform, or application, ensuring an engaging and smooth user experience is crucial for reducing bounce rates. If you're looking to create a new user interface design, get inspired by the following UI design trends of 2024.
What is UI design?
UI design encompasses the design of all visual elements and interactive components that users interact with when using a website, software application, or any digital product. This includes aspects such as layout, typography, color scheme, navigation menus, buttons, forms, and other elements that influence the overall user experience.
How does your branding relate to your UI design?
Your branding is the starting point. All the brand elements such as colors, typography, and also the overall look and feel of your visual identity influence the UI design. While brand creation, considering the touchpoints the brand will be applied to in the future is crucial to ensure beforehand that your brand can easily grow according to your startup milestones.
Damian Bello, UI designer at The Branx, points out:
“Consistency between the UI design and the overall branding is key. Otherwise, it's difficult for users to relate your product or platform to your company.”
What are the characteristics of top UI design?
In addition to being visually appealing, high-quality user interface design stands out for its usability and practicality for both your team and your users.
From a user's perspective, the design must be intuitive, simple to use, and responsive. Users should be able to navigate your website, platform, or application effortlessly, without hesitation about the outcome of their actions. This requires a seamless integration of UI and UX design. Both must work in harmony to ensure a smooth and satisfying user experience.
From a design and development perspective, your UI needs to be clear to understand and easy to grow. Modular building is the keyword here.
Damian emphasizes:
“If you want your user interface to grow without hassle, it needs to be structured and designed with clear components and styles that you can recycle. For websites, platforms, and applications, there is no scalability without recycling layouts. This not only saves time but also makes sure that your UI is created consistently, independent of the design team.”
What are the current trends in UI design?
1. Clear layouts
With simplicity and ease of navigation in mind, tidy and clear layouts are a cornerstone of efficient, user-friendly UI design. Tidiness does not necessarily imply using whitespace, which over the last years has been dominating; it can also be reached via other layouts like bento grids.
Bento grids are a type of grid layout that is the perfect design option when you need to communicate dense content within a limited space across websites, applications, or dashboards. They are neat little boxes that fit together in a grid. Adaptive, responsive across devices, and structured, this arrangement organizes information in an aesthetically pleasing way. Within these boxes, you can add illustrations and even subtle animations.
Curious detail: The name and the structure go back to Japanese. In Japanese culture, a bento box is a traditional meal container with compartments for different food items.
2. Focus on typography
Typography is another way to add structure to your user interface. Big, bold, and capitalized is the latest trend here. For UI designers, oversized fonts are an easy way to grab attention. Whether you want to emphasize the H1 or add boldness to your CTA, with a simple and powerful sans-serif font, the words will stick to users' minds.
Like in the example above, oversized fonts convert text into more than pure words, they make it a design element where every letter matters. For the website of the AI startup Permio, we used Inter Tight, a special version of Inter with tighter spacing for optimized display usage. Due to its tall x-height and contrast-enhancing details like ink traps and bridges, Inter Tight is the perfect fit for larger display texts. Its clean lines and smooth curves create impactful text elements.
Important to note: Generally speaking, sans-serif fonts are the better choice for every user interface due to their enhanced readability on screens.
3. Interactivity
Over the last months, 3D elements have made a significant impact on web design. In addition to 3D animations, the latest trend is incorporating interactive 3D elements that respond to mouse movements. These eye-catching features enhance the storytelling of the website, making it more appealing and engaging for users.
Leveraging this trend, we created an interactive 3D animation for the homepage of a cybersecurity startup. It showcases in an abstract way part of the functionality of the browser extension. The translucent casing protects the ball in the middle, the company, from every type of threat. The ball moves according to the mouse movement, following the user's eye.
4. Immersive scrolling
Talking about websites, if you want to keep users on your page, you need to keep them engaged. Immersive scrolling, often referred to as “scrollytelling”, is one way to reach this. Designers and marketers have the power to control what content they want to display to viewers, and how that content is shown, making it a crucial part of the website storytelling.
Scrolling effects can be applied throughout, meaning that the design changes according to the scrolling movement of the user. Such scrolling effects can be placed prominently on the ATF for instance, where they catch the attention of the user immediately. In the example above, users see the working product while scrolling further down. For users, this provides valuable information and insights about the interface, for marketers, it's an effective way to demonstrate ease of use.
5. Dark vs light: Adaptable system theme color
Across laptops, smartphones, and tablets, nearly everyone has their preferred theme they will stick to no matter what. Aligning the UI of your application with the user's system theme ensures a seamless experience across different devices. Buttons, navigation menus, and text elements change their color, while always staying on-brand. Apple has been doing this for years, but it is gaining importance to enhance user experience: It provides visual comfort and adds a personalized touch.
The latest UI trends prioritize bold, and interactive designs for engaging user experiences. Clear layouts, oversized typography, interactive 3D elements, immersive scrolling, and adaptable system themes are the trending design features of 2024 that will make your user interface unique.
Looking for inspiration? Have a look at our Web and UX/UI Design projects.
Sources
UX Studio Team
UXPin
Webfx
Island.io
Givingli.com