Mobile UI/UX Design Trends in 2020

The rule ‘First impression matters’ is applicable almost to anything but especially important for any modern mobile app as most businesses are going mobile. The first thing a user sees when he opens an app is the design, of course, but to see what the app is capable of, he should interact with its user interface (UI). You can draw users’ attention with an attractive design but to keep them loyal, you should provide positive user experience (UX) which means easy navigation, usability, and high performance, among others.

The right blend of UX and UI helps to tell the company’s story, defines how users interact with the app, and keeps users connected to the brand. Since the app development market is constantly growing, it is becoming more and more difficult to keep ahead of the competition. To maintain a competitive edge, mobile app designers need to keep up with what is trending in UX and UI design.

Recent App Design Trends for 2020

#1 Visual Design

To get your message across, you must pay attention to all the elements of visual design. Though such elements as colours and fonts may seem minor compared to graphics and other components, they may provide an attractive appearance and preserve the aesthetic value of your content.

• Colours. In 2020 designers step back from muted colour palettes towards artificial and vibrant colours such as neon blue, pink, purple, turquoise, and others. These colours are rare in natural environments and therefore are commonly used to give mobile apps futuristic and techy looks.
• Multiple layers, shadows and floating elements. Floating visual parts and softly shadowed pieces add volume and depth to the app’s layout, creating a “3D Lite” look. This trend goes beyond graphics and spreads over images and even texts. The blend of multiple layers, shadowing, and floating creates a drown effect and gives a feeling of lightness.
• Fonts are a great instrument to visualize a hierarchical structure of a text, meaning that with fonts you can specify titles, subtitles, distinguish key and background information, highlight parts of the menu, and much more.

In the early years of UI designs, fonts had little variety. In many ways, they were hindered by low display resolutions and were difficult to read. Sans serif fonts were the only ones that looked more or less attractive on screens. As a result, they were widely used in almost any software program.

Nowadays, designers have a large range to choose from due to increased resolutions and technical advances. Serif fonts have largely grown in their popularity and now they are successfully used in the mix with sans ones. By utilizing two font types designers can build a visual structure of a text, highlighting significant, constant elements with serif fonts and temporary information with sans serif fonts.

• Buttons are slowly disappearing from screens replaced by in-app swiping and scrolling gestures, therefore, designers and app developers get more white space. White space makes the app interface look neat and tidy, making the room breathe and balancing its elements.

The only place where buttons still look good is the bottom bar that has evolved into a bottom sheet. Bottom sheets contain swipeable navigation elements that can be conveniently selected by only one tumb without using two hands.

#2 Graphics and Animation

With the Internet getting faster and the amount of info raising exponentially, users’ attention span has dropped from 12 to 8 sec., meaning that it’s much harder to incentivize your potential users and retain their focus. Nobody is ready to spend time reading massive amounts of greeting texts on apps’ landing pages. Therefore, designers have to search for ways out and one of them is to use more visual elements such as 2D, 3D graphics, and animation. These techniques help guide users through your app and instantly communicate brand ideas and values.

Designers experiment with illustrations, making them more eye-catching and emotionally charged, utilizing all kinds of art styles. For example, Mailchimp has a charming mascot monkey that represents fast mailing services provided by the company and a popular task manager Asana uses majestic narwhals and unicorns to animate successful task completion. Besides illustrations and animation, app developers extensively implement 3D graphics to introduce an element of gamification, give apps a more futuristic look, and enhance user’s interaction with the app.

#3 Dark Themes

Dark themes started appearing in mobile and web apps in 2019 and seem to continue the trend in 2020. Apple actively promotes dark themes by including them in its iOS and Mojave operating systems, Google added a dark theme to Gmail, and even Facebook and Instagram have ones. And the reasons why dark mode is so popular among users are simple. It helps users reduce eye strain, it’s stylish and saves battery charge.

# 4 Passwordless Access

When creating a mobile app, developers should follow the idea of simplicity for a user –  convenient to use, intuitive to learn, and easy to access. That’s why biometrical recognition functionality is being implemented in almost every mobile phone.

Biometric authentication includes the detection of patterns, fingerprint scanning, and facial recognition. Leaders of the mobile market such as Apple, Google, Samsung, Xiaomi, and others largely adopt this feature in their products, shaping the mobile development industry.

# 5 Voice Navigation and Interaction

About 15 years ago only computer geeks would know about voice interaction with computers. Nowadays, lots of mobile apps are equipped with voice assistants that are ready to answer any question or fulfil user commands. Voice interactions are becoming more nuanced and precise, resulting in a growing number of followers. UI designers should closely look at a voice user interface to integrate it into their mobile apps.

#6 Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms is another rapidly developing technology that can be already accessed on our mobile phones. It’s been successfully used in offline shopping, eHealth, education, eCommerce, gaming, and other industries. AR can be implemented in UI design to improve mobile app user experience, blending digital reality with the real world.

Google ARCore and Apple AEKit AR developer platforms encourage UI designers to create mobile apps complemented by AR for practical use. For example, Google enhances orienteering with Google Maps by placing virtual signs and pointers over the live view on a mobile phone.

Summing Up

The mobile app development industry is thriving more than ever today. Every year there appear killer-feature trends UI/UX designers should be aware of and know how to effectively implement for the benefits of their apps.

On the other hand, if UI/UX designers try to fill their apps with every new functionality introduced to the development market, it’ll be a mess. To avoid it they should realize the purposes of the created apps and select the needed features respectively, ensuring that their user interfaces are designed with mobile app users in mind.