I talked to Courtney Boyd Meyers yesterday for an article for The Next Web. She was interested in design trends for the new year and I told her some of what I’m thinking will catch on.
Predicting Trends is Impossible
Forecasting in all things is guessing. It’s part looking at what’s happened recently and maybe throwing in a bit of what you want to have happen. No one predicts traffic will go down after it’s gone up a bit. With that said, I think there is at least one major design force coming up this year: increasing focus on mobile web design.
Why the Time is Finally Right For Everyone to Wakeup to Mobile
Designers are opening their eyes and realizing that consuming content on mobile devices is important. The number of mobile devices sold and used to access the web is staggering. Luke Wroblewski mentioned that it was predicted smart phone sales would outpace all PCs by 2012, only to have that milestone passed a full two years early. People are using their mobile devices more and more for their general internet usage and it isn’t slowing down.
The problem with designing for smartphones instead of PCs is that mobile users are a fickle bunch. Their motivations are different and less forgiving when they are using the web on a desktop. Attention is more fleeting with mobile users interested in very quick bursts of information to fill times when they are bored or in immediate need of info.
With such short attention spans, the focus of quality mobile experiences is on the content: giving users what they want as quickly as they can access it. Anything outside of the main content is very much secondary.
The Convergence
Lots of people have talked about Mac OS X and iOS converging in the near future as desktop and mobile computing become more and more similar. This is starting to happen with web experiences as well. Look at Twitter. Its new redesign is amazingly simple and focused almost like a good mobile web experience.
It makes sense that desktop web experiences get more simple and focus on the content. That’s what the user is there for. If the content on your site is too hard to digest with excessive ads or multiple calls to action and paths through your site, that just adds mental weight to your user and makes their life more difficult.
Get to the Point
Luke Wroblewski’s book Mobile First argues that designers should think about the mobile version of a site before diving into the desktop version. Doing so forces focus on essential functions and content. That ultimately benefits the user on both the small and large screen. This idea of getting in and getting out as quickly as possible is spilling over from mobile to desktop. Mobile usage is shaping users to expect quick hits of information. That will be one of the major design topics in 2012 and give you reason to be clear with your message and drop any extraneous information or distractions.
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