Web design moves quickly, especially with Google pushing it along, and customers looking to ROI parameters from their designers. In the past year, we had emphasis on responsiveness, code security, and optimization, and flat design. In the coming year we may well see these trends take hold:
1) There will be much more attention to information design than ever before. Your User Interface, how it is coded, it’s accessibility and logical flow will become of paramount importance.
2) Losing hard earned eyeballs to unnecessary scroll or click is no fun. Optimizing scrolls and clicks will become as necessary as the images being used on?the site. The ROI for design is on top of everyone’s mind now a days, as a result we expect to see even more emphasis on coherent UX, optimized click throughs, and scrolls.
3) About a decade ago, many of us began the quest for creating a modular yet object oriented environment for design based on a grid system. With the success of Wix, commander and the like, it seems this may be the year that everyone will accept modular design in a grid system as the bedrock responsive design.
4) Flat design is all the rage now, and we don’t see that changing for a while.
5) We have forever recommended the use of better quality imagery and iconography and following the expansion of personalized photography in the past year, the trend toward quality should continue.
6) The influence of app design on web design will be even more pronounced, with form factors (e.g. full screen forms), and movement (horizontal scrolling – ONLY) that more closely resembles the app users’ experience.
7) The new applications such as JustinMind or Axure for Rapid prototyping, and Sketch for design and their online cousins such as inVision have become very popular, and we see even a bigger trend towards the use of these new tools for rapid prototyping and design of sites in 2016.
Overall everything will get faster, flatter, more streamlined, and more secure.