Mobile App Design Trends for 2016

With enormous popularity of different mobile devices designers are faced with a challenge – make an app look amazing on every device, from iPad and iPhone to the newest little thing – iWatch. And that’s on what top mobile app design trends in 2016 are oriented.

New trends in mobile apps always appear from existing ones, because most of them are here for a long time, just shaped differently due to new devices or systems releases. After the fascinating conversation with our UI/UX expert Ujean Poloz we will now show you some interesting and latest mobile app design trends for iOS and Android.

1. Flat & Material

We see that a flat design keeps being the top trend in UI/UX mobile design, but it changes a lot now and creates mix with a skeuomorphism, so called almost flat design. The difference from flat is shown in shadows, layers and volumes. Flat is also merges with material design by Google, for iOS and Android both. Looks like our apps will be not so minimalistic anymore?

2. Animation

One of the most powerful trends from 2015 gets more and more common and used. It’s almost impossible to find an app with good UI/UX and without animations. Scrolling, swiping, interactive animations capture clients from the first touch. As it was with the very first iPhone – everything you do, you do with your fingers, getting wonderful and live response.

Programs like Pixate, Origami, Principle, Flinto allow to create interactive animations, make different elements within one page move and interact in different ways, so they are more and more popular, but After Effects remains one of the main tools to create animations and prototypes for iOS.

New apps are providing unique and smooth experience from the start page all the way to the exit page. They are responsive and you are just mesmerized by the way they guide you through the story. Isn’t it amazing? And due to that, there are more and more new tools to create such animations and make customer experience with your app the smoothest adventure ever. This is definitely one of the biggest 2016 mobile app design trends.

Read also: Increase mobile app sales with a/b testing

3. Font changes

As usual, fonts are very important in UI/UX design – even if the app is absolutely beautiful, who’s gonna spend time to try and understand what’s written in that small box? And with the new bigger iPhone 6s/6s plus – and iWatch, in the same time, we need all fonts to be scalable to fit every screen and be perfectly readable. Apple presented the new fonts family – San Francisco, or SF. There is a SF compact for iWatch and a SF for all other devices. These fonts are now replacing Helvetica Neue on all devices. Of course, designers should use those ones in their apps for iOS devices already.

4. Different device sizes design

Of course, due to big variety of device sizes we need to carefully place elements of navigation and menu. In his book ‘Designing for Touch’ Josh Clark analyses heat maps for different devices and shows how exactly users hold and tap on their phones, phablets and laptops. This info is amazingly useful for all interested in UI/UX mobile design.

5. Force touch

And of course, after presentation of the new iPhone 6s and 6s plus we have an absolutely new way to design – using Force touch. Apps can have any button, control, or region on the screen respond to a press of stronger pressure. A Force click can provide a shortcut to additional functionality within the app. For example, in the standard Mail app lightly pressing and holding on a message will trigger a new, temporary window on top of your inbox that shows the content of the message — removing your finger will close it. If you press harder, you’ll open it. This technology was previously presented in iWatch, and now iPhones has it too and even better. You can add previews, easy and fast actions and lots of other amazing things. That’s a definitely amazing trend we would love to see in action in apps.

Conclusion

So, we hope to see many exciting apps created in the current and future trends we mentioned in this article. Are you interested in knowing which trends we find suitable for your idea or concept? Write us in comments below or contact us here

Comments