What Drives Web design in 2016?
Before we give our predictions, it's important to understand the powerful forces that can change in web design:
Technology: advancements in the available technology and tools, both to access and build websites, largely determines what designers and developers can do.
Users: the prevalent ways web visitors, designers and developers use the available technology, shape the web design landscape and push its boundaries in a forward-looking direction.
Other creative fields: what’s trending in other creative fields like graphic design and fashion, eventually finds its way into web design and vice versa. Creativity survives on mixing and matching ideas to convey emotions and propose solutions.
Most of us nowadays are multi-device users and expect a website to just work and look gorgeous, no matter the device we use.
Responsive Web Design (RWD), serving the same HTML code to all devices and using CSS to alter the appearance of the page on the device, is the prevalent technique and what Google recommends to build mobile-friendly websites. Therefore, some of the trends in my list illustrate approaches to web design that are most suited to RWD.
Taking the drivers above as guiding principles, here’s our list of 2016 web design trends.
Carousels are bad for SEO. The lack of content means that it’s difficult to get meta information into a page. This is especially true as Google no longer crawls meta keywords (although Bing does) and so will take keyword information from the page. Of course, you can have the word count below the carousel, in the body of the page. Most sliders though contain headers that are wrapped in H1, and these change when the slider does and as such, devalue keywords within them.
Adversely affect performance. Often carousels contain high-res images that are under-optimized and as such, slow down the load time of the front page – which as the most important page on the site should load as quickly as possible. Sliders also make use of JavaScript or jQuery, which can also add to performance headaches.
Pushes Content down below the fold. While above the fold content is perhaps not as important as it once was (we all know how to scroll these days), it’s still not recommended by Google that you push content lower down the page. While the search giant’s recommendations are based on ad content above the fold, a carousel really doesn’t offer much in the way of value to the user – it’s just pretty.
Tends to be inaccessible. Even the best frameworks out there can’t fully solve the issues of accessibility that surround carousels as there are so many to address.
Further to this, just a 2013 study showed that just 1% of people click on carousels. And many simply ignore them and don’t note the content, thanks to the phenomenon known as banner blindness.
All of this is not to say that you shouldn’t use carousels at all in your designs, but you should have a good reason for their inclusion aside from that the client likes it. Carousels can work, but they should be carefully crafted and optimized to ensure that they don’t compromise UX and accessibility.
The sliding animation powering carousels, for instance, is certainly a useful tool for other design elements. For instance, you can try a sliding navigation drawer for your mobile viewport. As shown in the below prototype created in UXPin with the no-code animations editor, the sliding animation allows the user to “shelve” and reveal content as needed.
Unlike a carousel, a sliding animation doesn’t require a user to scroll through multiple frames. The content simply pops in and out of view as required. To get best web sites we have to hire best Web designing Companies in Hyderabad
Bolder ad formats mean less clutter
Publishers will be offering more native advertising, both editorial and programmatic formats.
Better targeting of programmatic, using advertiser data and cross-device tracking, should allow for more impactful ads that allow publishers to reduce scale and improve UX.
This could mean less clutter on desktop and mobile.
Services not pages
This is perhaps a middle ground between webpages and AI delivered content - the website as service.
We're already there, as the aformentioned UX Pin report points out, with sites such as Facebook and Netflix. These sites are divided into pages but we don't think of them in that way. They're services.
Delivering the right content is of course the main objective of UX with these sites. As users begin to stop thinking in terms of pages, the importance of service design will grow.
Vikram Kishore
Website Designers in Hyderabad