Top UI/UX Design Trends in 2020

1. Split Screen Alignment

It’s always great to split the content area when dealing with Website designs. Especially with today’s wide desktop screens.

2. Low Key Gradients

Too bright and flashy gradients are no longer in trend. It’s getting lighter and lighter nowadays. Because ultimately minimalism is the key!

3. Colour Palette

Choosing a matching colour palette is the most needed ingredient for an eye-catching User Interface. This initial step will decide the future of the design. The combination of light and warm colours are trending now.

4. Full Width Design

Fixed-size wrappers? No! Web designers can utilize the entire space for arranging the contents. Wasting too much space on the left and right of the content section became old!.

5. Serif-Sans Serif Combo

Mixing Serif and Sans Serif fonts became a trend in 2020 instead of using the same style fonts.

6. Empty Space

Depending on the message the UI is delivering, it’s important to give it some space. There is no need to create congestion.

7. Password-less Login

Are you still using native username-password login? There will be no such option in mobile interfaces very soon. The latest UX design is quickly moving forward with password fewer authentications like Fingerprint scanning and facial identification.

8. Interaction Sounds

Sounds are the fastest way to communicate an idea. But we didn’t try to add this in our applications. Just remember the transaction successful sound in google pay. No need to explain more!

9. Gestures & Buttonless Design

The number of buttons has decreased. So, it gives more space and content areas. Avoid maximum buttons and provide gesture navigation.

10. Say No to Navigation Drawers

Are you still stick on with navigation drawer? You know what? Google introduced this design style in 2013! Upgrade your design knowledge if you still using this.

11. Voice Interaction

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and much more! Voice-powered apps deliver precise and fast query results.

Some DO’s and DON’Ts

1. Inconsistency

Avoid using too many different styles. This will guide to a smooth and concise app. The key is repeating patterns and elements at any time you can.

2. Drop-Shadow

Try to use lightweight drop shadow rather than overusing them. Don’t use very harsh colours.

3. Prioritise Buttons

It is important to give visual importance to the primary action. Secondary action should be less prominent but still visible if the user is looking for them.

4. Text Hierarchy

Use the required space between text. Find text priority and arrange its weight. Always start with a big title which should be the most prominent element of the page.

5. Iconography

All icons should either be outlined or filled. In addition, ensure a consistent line thickness and corner radius. Don’t use different icon styles in the same design.

6. Alignment

Don’t align related items to different sides. Always try to aligning related elements to the same side because it connects them visually.

7. Contrast

Try to find a better contrast ratio for different items. Low contrast is equal to low usability.

8. Forms

Forms are used to log in, to sign up, check out, etc. So, it’s important to provide clear guidance before and after submitting the form.

9. Touch Targets

Poor touch targets in mobile/tablet devices may lead to frustration. So, try to create finger-friendly targets by keeping the required space between them.

10. Quality of Images

Images are the life of a design. Choose creative and realistic photos. Avoid fake or staged stock photos. Also, try to use high-quality images only.

This article is written by Juny George and Sanunath G.

October 25, 2022November 29, 2022

Why a Heuristic Evaluation Is Critical for Your App UX

If you want to be a winner, you must have a good user experience for your apps. Major game changers in the field like Facebook, Apple and Google invest a lot of time and energy on user experience and they are very keen on building a UX team. It is their secret mantra for success and brand value.

But, except these powerful companies, many take the least interest in building a good user experience team. It’s because of this reason that the market is flooded with poorly user experienced products and services which are costing trillions of dollars in US e-commerce domain alone.

“88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.”
– Justin Mifsud, Usability Geek

It’s at this point that a well-known usability method called “Heuristic Evaluation” is coming into the picture.

Heuristic Evaluation

Heuristic Evaluation is a stage in the product development process where few usability experts evaluate the usability of the product interface against a checklist of 10 accepted principles called Heuristics. This can be done throughout the product development life cycles to make sure that the designed solution satisfies all the expectations from the real user’s point of view.

After the evaluation is done, the usability experts submit a list of their usability findings to the product development team. The Product manager can then instruct his team to incorporate those suggested recommendations on their product. If properly incorporated, this will resolve around 80% of the usability issues of the product.

Heuristic Evaluation vs usability testing

Please do not confuse Heuristic Evaluation with usability testing. While Heuristic Evaluation is done by product development usability experts with accepted guidelines, usability testing is something that we give a task to the potential user and then observing how he or she is moving around the product with the tasks in hand.

When to do a Heuristic Evaluation?

It’s better to do Heuristic Evaluation at the early stage of the design process of your interface. If you do it early, you will get good usability opinion before the actual users are exposed to it. The more complex the user interface becomes at the later stage, the more difficult it will be to incorporate the feedback. It will also be at the cost of time and money.

If your product team is delivering stuff through SCRUM methodology, Heuristic Evaluation will be very handy for the product owners to design their sprints and prioritize the user stories accordingly. Normally the evaluators present the list of their findings on priority order. This will help the sprint team to get the works done on priority and thereby can reduce the chances of skipping the deadlines.

Why do a Heuristic Evaluation?

Heuristic Evaluation is the most practical and cost-effective usability technique compared to other methodologies which are time-consuming and costly. While developers are busy with developing the product, the experts can evaluate the product at each sprint and give their opinion to the team. Then the team can incorporate the suggested opinions and present back a much better product for review to the usability experts. It goes on until a well-refined product is delivered to the public for their use.

Heuristic Evaluation does not mean that you do usability testing at all! In fact, both can be used in parallel to find out the hidden usability issues which otherwise would not have been possible in the routine development process. You can use various usage reports to evaluate the effectiveness of the Heuristic Evaluation you have implemented on the product. If you can spot some trends on the usage reports, you can concentrate on that part for a Heuristic Evaluation.

Conducting a Heuristic Evaluation

You can select any user interface for a Heuristic Evaluation. Even if it’s a rough sketch, wireframe or a final high-fidelity layout, all these can be used for the evaluation. That is the best part of it. The only condition is that it must somehow showcase the same features and functionalities which you are going to be released to the market. It’s not a one-time evaluation but it’s a continuous iterative process.

It’s always better to use three to five evaluators to do it. This will give you a comprehensive picture of different viewpoints. Instead of using the product team members, it’s always better to use people from outside the team belonging to different professional backgrounds and age groups. This will give you different feedback from the real customer point of view of using the features which might have been downplayed by its own product teams.

After the selection of evaluators, we can proceed for inspecting the interface. Let each evaluator come up with their own exclusive feedback. In this way, we will be able to a get unique viewpoint of each of them. Observers can be deployed to assist the evaluators in case if they need any clarification about the design. Their evaluation is based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design which are regarded as the basics for creating a better product from the usability perspective.

They compare the design against each of these rules and record their findings for future analysis and implementation.

After the evaluation, the evaluators can sit together and discuss their findings. They can reach on some common grounds and the differences can be settled amicably. This will also help them if they had overlooked any functionality or not. They can collect all their findings together and prioritize them. Then the product manager or owner can come to the picture and can discuss those findings along with the evaluators. This will give valuable information to the product managers on how they can enrich their designs and if they have any questions; they can get it answered from the evaluators on the spot.

“Care for happy customers, and the money will follow.”
– Stefan Freimark, Interactive Tools

If your company is not doing Heuristic Evaluation, it’s high time to do it now as it is very cost-effective and one of the best ways to fix most of the usability issues of your product. It is better late than never! Most of the products we use are built with business goals in mind, forgetting the user’s goals and needs. A minor investment in UX design and evaluation will lead to a massive return for businesses

Are you looking for a heuristic evaluation consultant? Contact us now!

This article is written by Manoj Pillai, Head of Delivery at AlignMinds Technologies

October 25, 2022November 29, 2022

5 Trending React Native UI Components in 2020

Every software companies always tend to have an increasing interest in cross-platform applications since they have dramatically reduced the amount of resources required to build mobile apps.

React Native applications stands at the top when comes to cross-platform apps.

React Native has tremendous possibilities in designing the user interface of an application.

The main time-consuming process for building an app is its user interface. Many third-party libraries and UI toolkits are now available to help you build next level React Native application.

Let’s see some possibilities of React Native UI designs.

1. NativeBase

NativeBase is the most popular and widely used library. It provides a wide range of cross-platform UI components for React Native.

Nativebase is 100% open source.

One of our main goal with NativeBase 2.0 is to make it easy to theme the components with very little changes to the components themselves.

Nativebase is built with blocks called components. The Components are constructed in pure React Native platform along with some JavaScript functionality with a rich set of customizable properties. They are constructed in pure React Native platform along with some JavaScript functionality with a rich set of customizable properties. These components allow you to quickly build the perfect user interface.

Building a button using normal React Native code on left and with NativeBase on right

NativeBase includes components such as anatomy of your app screens, header, input, buttons, badges, icon, form, checkbox, radio-button, list, card, actionsheet, picker, segment, swipe-able list, tabs, toast, drawer, thumbnail, spinner, layout, search bar etc.

Each of these components in NativeBase is made with a better version of the same component in its native part.

After finding out about NativeBase we found ourselves using it in every app we develop.

For example, we used it in various screens in Referr app, a mobile application that helps users to win points and gift cards by recommending local businesses to their friends and family. Titles of every screen were made with NativeBase { Header, Title }. This helped us in saving a lot of time and effort.

We use NativeBase Header component in Referr to make a better feel in UI and to reduce time and effort.

2. React Native Elements

React Native Elements is another cross-platform React Native UI toolkit. It is completely built-in JavaScript and is very much easy to use. React Native Elements also supports Expo. Every component in React Native elements is customizable. You can change the basic colour, size, fonts etc. for each component.

With React Native Elements, coding becomes much simpler. If you want to create a button component, it is as easy as the below code.

import { Button } from’react-native-elements’;

React Native Elements also gives a wide collection of icons. It has all the social icons that a developer needs in the current scenario.

3. React Native Material UI

React Native Material UI provides highly customizable material design components for React Native. To make more customized components, React Native Material UI is using a single JS object the uiTheme. By default, it is a light theme that can be changed easily.

Installing React-native-vector-icons helps to unveil the full potential of React Native Material UI. React-native-vector-icons has wide support for icons. It helps to easily change the primary colour of the application.

4. UI Kitten

React Native UI Kitten is a mobile framework with a set of easily customizable elements. Despite there are a lot of standalone react-native components nowadays, there are not so many frameworks that offer you a wide set of commonly used components as a single dependency with similar UI design.

For instance, in Web Development there are CSS frameworks like Bootstrap that allows you to add dozens of nice-looking elements. You can also style them according to your corporate guidelines by just changing variables.

UI Kitten framework attempts to fill this gap.

All components are flexible and can be customized. It aims at boosting your mobile application development and allows you to focus on business logic instead of view composition. It helps you to bring your MVP to life in a shorter period of time.

Using React Native UI Kitten you will be able to create style configurations of components that you use the most (buttons, inputs etc.). These styles can be reused then in the process of development. Configure them once and use anywhere!

For example, below code showcases how to build a button using UI kitten.

import{RkButton }from’react-native-ui-kitten’; render( ) { return( Click me! ) }

5. Nachos UI

Nachos UI is a React Native component library. It has almost 30 customizable UI components. Nachos UI Kit is coded with Avocode which is a fully-featured tool to share, hand-off and inspect Photoshop and Sketch designs.

Nachos UI also works on the web with the help of React Native Web. It also has Prettier which is an opinionated JavaScript formatter. It also uses Jest Snapshot Testing. Nachos UI is so easy to use. For example, let’s look into an example of building a simple slider.

import { Slider } from ‘nachos-ui’ const Example = ({ value, handleOnChange }) => { return ( ) }

Conclusion

For every developer, his main aim is to build his application with impressive UI in a limited time frame. When I stepped into React Native, a most difficult milestone for me to pass was to build the user interface for an application. Because this took me a lot of time and effort to offer my client an effective solution with a mind-blowing interface. But now, with these predefined and customizable UI components, the styling of the user interface is made a lot easier. I suggest you should try at least one of these UI components in your next project.

– Sharoon Shaji

Are you looking for a reputed application development company to implement your next project? AlignMinds is an award-winning company with more than 10 years of success in developing disruptive applications for multiple verticals. Contact us now!.

October 25, 2022November 29, 2022

Top 7 UI Trends in 2020 That Will Make Users Fall in Love with Your App

In today’s digital world, it is essential to create websites and mobile apps that enhance your brand identity, boost customer engagement and drives more traffic for your business. The customers expect a lot many things from brands and one of them is great user experience. We need to understand the customer’s preferences before we start designing our product.

The product should be user-friendly, easy-to-use and efficient. It should be neat and interactive. Your page design, logo design, navigation, and colour selection should be well researched and user engaging.

It’s important to leverage the UI designing trends that keep changing at frequent intervals. The competition bar has raised and mere updating your apps and websites bi-annually will not take you to a favourable position.

So, here are some latest trends for designing the UI that you can follow to remain ahead in the race.

Top 7 UI Trends in 2020

1. Gradients

We can see them everywhere; in illustrations, UI elements, and text. We love gradients because they add realism and depth to the platform, the way we see everything in real life. That probably explains why elements with gradients feel more natural.

The gradient designs also provide scope for performing creative colour experiments on the layout of the mobile apps, in an attempt to make them vibrant and eye-catching. Next year will probably bring us many more apps and websites with bold colours and gradients mixed with transparency.

2. Typography

Typography is one important factor that helps us to make the best UI. There is a trend of using big “headings” with gigantic fonts in combination with a little bit of smooth animation. Even if there is only a little content, it will catch the attention of eyes.

Today, UI designs for mobile apps seem to be incomplete without adding some bold typography as it is a key factor that contributes to holding the users’ attention. The typography trend works great with creative experiments that require a mix of elegant fonts with catchy taglines. Here are some examples of the same:

Text content that is visually integrated into creative images.
Addition of animated typographic elements.
Using interfaces based on typography as the core visual elements of a UI design.

3. Illustration and animated graphics

Illustrations are one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolbox. Well-crafted illustrations allow designers to convey pretty complex ideas without using too many words. So, when users see illustration, they can understand the concept in a glance.

An enjoyable illustration can give websites or mobile apps their own personality, thus making them more memorable.

Micro-animations help customers distinguish elements on the screens they are going to interact with. After an event takes place, feedback performs an important task in assuring the user that the intended action has actually happened.

This, in turn, brings users a better experience. Additionally, to make these pages stand out, these illustrations often come to life with complex motions.

4. Augmented Reality (AR)

In 2020, web design trends will all involve thinking outside the box, or rather, the grid. We need to forget UI fixed to screens. Instead, we should emphasise interactions which feel like they take place within the real-world environment. Google and Apple have already introduced their own AR development platforms, ARCore and AEKit, that blend the physical and digital worlds.

Designers will need to go beyond screen-only interfaces to include physical interactions. Augmented Reality has ushered a new era in user interface design, a new way of thinking.

Augmented Reality (AR) has become one of the top UI trends in the year 2020.

5. Voice User Interface

The popularity of Alexa and Google Home can’t be undermined. They are the new norm, as they become users’ go-to medium to seek nifty information, get entertained and even control their routine tasks. The navigation-less, button-less and menu-less experience seems so intuitive to a user that 40% of adults now use voice search once per day!

This makes it clear — voice search is not the future. It’s already here and will only become more prevalent in 2020. Voice interactions are slowly but fundamentally changing the way we interact with interfaces. Instead of relying on touchscreens, mice and keyboards, users are steadily accepting the hands-free way of doing their everyday tasks.

Smart home speakers have already found their place in the hospitality industry, automobiles and large enterprises. The convenience of having an always-on machine that helps you do your digital tasks will not only aid the visually impaired but also introduce a unique way for illiterate users to access the web, in years ahead.

6. Parallax Scrolling & Fixed Navigation Bar

Parallax scrolling is a website trend where the background content is moved at a different speed than the foreground content while scrolling. Parallax Design is a newer element which is being used by several designers in their designs. It involves creating a visual setting in which the object appears moving, or it appears different when viewed from different angles. This type of design is even possible with video and multi-layered parallax.

Fixed Navigation is helpful for users. When they scroll down a website, the navigation bar will be still visible to users and, it will help them to move to another webpage if they like to.

7. 3D graphics

The mass-market currently has little demand for this technology and 3D graphics seems a bit unusual for websites. Nonetheless, 3D elements rendered specifically for a platform get a place in this year’s UI trend list.

It is added at the end of the list because, the production cost of 3D elements is not only higher, they take a longer time to load on a screen.

Nobody loves waiting. Users expect platforms to load in an instant. Any element that adds more time to the user journey meets with frustration.

The good news is, we don’t have to give up entirely on 3D elements. Faux-3D lets objects look three-dimensional. The downside is, they are not completely convincing regarding light and shadow.

The change in the design-first approach

The design-first approach for digital products became a primary attribute this year.

Why?

These designs should improve people’s lives and help businesses to meet their goals.

Most phones have lost their borders and have rounded edges, bezel-less displays or notch displays. That changes their interface quite a bit. It will pose challenges for designers to use sharp-edged elements in their mobile UI and app design.

In 2020, the trends prioritise speed, simple page designs with asymmetrical layouts, and most importantly, a mobile-first approach.

It is more likely that these trends will also change in the coming years as the main platform(mobiles) will be having major changes in layout and sizes.

– Vishnu Anilkumar