On this day 4 years ago, we explored some of the upcoming trends in Web Design in 2016. Today, we are again going to look at some of the most popular trends in Web Development and Design in 2020!
The world is now firmly digitally-driven, and so web development’s importance in society is ever-increasing. For all businesses looking to portray their services, web development is important. For all customers looking to make a purchase, web development is important. Websites are a catalyst for communication between a brand and its customers, or potential customers, so it’s imperative to keep up-to-date with what’s new, what’s popular and what works!
Here are some of the trends to watch out for in 2020:
Voice Search
Voice search, for those that may be unfamiliar, is a function pre-installed in pretty much every modern mobile phone which allows the user to surf the web, use apps or type messages to friends using voice command.
To use as a contextual example, 27% of the world’s population were using voice search on mobile in late 2018. By 2021, it’s anticipated that over 35% of the entire US population will use voice assistants in some form. By 2024, the worldwide voice smart speaker market may be worth $30 billion.
The popularity of voice search will only continue to rise, and its growth can be attributed to the ease of use - with voice search, everybody can communicate together and helps bridge the gap between the elderly, the young, and technology.
Judging by the movement voice search is making, marketers will soon (if not, already) have to consider and optimise their SEO strategy to cater for voice search.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We may not notice it as much as we should, but Artificial Intelligence is all around us, and for many of us our primary contact with AI is in the form of chatbots.
Developing year-on-year, customer service is transitioning from human-led, considered interaction to a seamless, fully-automated process. In fact, it’s suggested by Gartner that by 2021, 85% of interactions between business and consumer will be purely handled by AI - reducing the need for human support!
This is positive for all parties as it will allow customer service employees to specialise and put more focus into important issues, companies to save money and, perhaps the most important part, immediate responses for customers!
Simplicity
It seems that web design is reverting to a simple, clean look with ample empty space to keep the user engaged and focussed on the content. This simplicity can come in the form of white space, minimalised navigation and dark mode.
Each has their benefits, each reduces risk of an overcomplicated brand message and each contributes to a sleeker, clearer user journey.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Introduced by Google back in 2015, AMP HTML is a “subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics”.
Essentially, Accelerated Mobile Pages were created to allow companies to build websites that instantly load and present a polished process. In theory, AMPs should load within 2 seconds, compared to up to 20 seconds for regular mobile pages.
By integrating this into your web development, it’s another factor that can help improve your SEO as fast-loading pages are rewarded!
Do the latest trends in web development interest you? Fancy yourself as a future web developer? Find out how a course with The Training Room can get you there.