Latest UI Design Trends That You Can Incorporate Into Your Mobile App

Everything changes with time, so do UI design trends. What’s trending now may get outdated tomorrow. That is why it is imperative for app designers or a design consultancy to keep up with the latest mobile app design trends and be well-versed in them.

Modern designs keep users hooked to your application. If the app lags behind the current trends, your users’ interest might start declining and they may look for a better alternative where they get a better experience. For example, users had/have a great demand for the dark mode to avoid the default white screen during the night (and to prevent eye strain). As it got popular, many apps started rolling out this UI feature to meet users’ demands and make their browsing experience during the night even better. Now users expect this feature in every application they use, and if the app doesn’t have it, they might not be as much interested in it as they would be if it had the dark mode functionality.

Top UI Trends for 2022

With competition getting only fierce, compiling the latest trends at regular intervals becomes inevitable. What UI designs are trending currently in the mobile app industry? We have compiled a list of the most recent UI trends in 2022 that you can leverage in your next app project.

1. 3D Illustrations

Among the top UI design trends for 2022, 3D illustrations seem to have captured a great deal of attention from both designers and users. 3D graphics tend to provide a very realistic shape to your designs, and unlike conventional 2D images, appear more eye-catching and lively. Users may often feel as if the product (or the graphic) has popped out of their device’s screen.

Although integration of 3D graphics into your web and mobile app interfaces can be a bit of a challenge (and it can be a time-consuming process as well), the experience they offer makes it worth considering in your design strategy.

2. Glassmorphism

Another UI trend that is becoming quite popular among designers is Glassmorphism. Followed by Neumorphism which was further followed by Skeuomorphism, this new UI design concept makes the interface design even more refined and enhanced. The reason why it is termed “Glassmorphism” is it gives a glassy look. Some of its characteristics encompass a transparent frosted glass effect with a blurred background and using vivid colors to highlight it and a subtle light border on the translucent objects. Not only it brings depth and visual hierarchy to your UI, but it also allows designers to shift the user’s focus to the content they want to highlight. Layers are represented in glass shapes and in a way that makes it easy for the users to see and understand which layer is on top of which.

3. Bauhaus Style

Bauhaus style or a geometric structure UI involves using a range of geometric shapes such as circles, triangles, or rectangles for your UI design layout.

Our perceptions are greatly influenced by shapes and colors, and that’s what the objective of a Bauhaus style is. By using the correct combination of shapes and colors for your visual design, users’ perceptions of the brands (or their products) can significantly change. In other words, we can say that this UI design uses human psychology to draw the user’s focus.

4. Animated Illustrations

An animated illustration can be defined as a short story-teller design that designers leverage to explain the content or matter more precisely. The purpose here is to help users understand the matter efficiently. Unlike static images or illustrations, animated illustrations tend to grab more attention from the users and engage them on the page for a longer period.

5. Aesthetic Minimalism

The UI design trends 2022 keep a key focus on making the design aesthetically pleasing yet minimalistic. The concept refers to creating designs using simple shapes, forms, and the least amount of colors and elements possible. They might look simple at a glance but require a lot of brainstorming. A minimal design ensures that users aren’t distracted from their purpose and are presented with the most relevant information when needed. It is an amalgamation of the right usage of white space, color, photos or illustrations, and shapes or patterns.

6. Bold Typography

Of late, designers have embraced big and bold typography to communicate the messages more effectively, and they greatly complement minimalist designs. It is believed that bold typography seems to spark more visual interest inside the users, makes the text stand out, and gets users more involved with the content.

Make sure to make the right balance between the level of boldness and the rest of the design.

7. Immersive Design

Immersive Design or Immersive Effect creates an experience that fully absorbs the users in it. This UI design trend, which is a blend of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR), creates an illusion that the user is physically interacting with a product in a digital or virtual environment.

Immersive design will have more role to play in the coming years as designers try to minimize the gap between the physical and virtual worlds.

8. Micro UI Animations

Micro UI animations are tiny yet powerful functional animations that provide users with quick visual feedback and display changes more clearly. Basically, it informs the user as to what would happen or what would they be presented with if they tend to click on a particular button.

Micro UI animations have also made the hovering experience extremely pleasing. You would have often come across websites where, when you hover over to a particular menu option, there is a swift change in the text color and respective menu icon animates as well.

9. Rounded Corners

Rounded corners are the new UI trend that designers prefer over sharp corners (of a rectangle). In fact, they are more sort of an industry-standard now than a design trend. Not only rounded corners are aesthetically pleasing but they play a major role in drawing the user’s focus. If you pay a close look at a normal rectangle and a one with rounded corners, you will notice that the edges of the former point ‘outwards’ and thus there is less focus on the content inside it whereas with rounded corners pointing inwards, the focus shifts more towards the inside content.

Even smartphones today come with round edges, and rounded corners perfectly align with the device structure.

10. Bottom Navigation Bar

Screen sizes have enlarged. There are devices with a 6.5 inch or larger screen size. Although more screen space has enabled a better viewing experience, the difficulty in browsing has tagged along.

Users mostly hold their device using the pinky finger and maximum touch interactions happen through the thumb. With large screen-sized smartphones, it gets difficult to tap on the top navigation menu as users then have to adjust their holding position. This creates a troublesome experience.

Keeping this in mind, mobile app designers have started shifting the navigation bar from top to bottom so that users can access it straight away without having to adjust the hand position. A recent example is the eCommerce giant Amazon. They have placed their navigation bar right at the bottom which is within the reach of the user’s thumb.

11. Smooth Swipe

Swiping is fun. And with the latest UI design advancements, the swipe experience has enhanced as it has been made more engaging and interesting. There’s plenty of ways you can make your swipe experience stand out. For example, you can move from the traditional swipe to a more smooth page-like swipe that animates as if you are turning the page of a textbook.

Or you can also integrate the liquid swipe animation effect into your mobile app. This is one of the most trending UI designs. As the term suggests, Liquid swipe brings a water-like feel upon sliding pages or during screen movement. This makes content browsing smooth and encourages users to interact more with the content.

Final Thoughts

The UI trends in 2022 are likely to make the overall mobile app user experience more enhanced, simplistic, pleasurable, and engaging. Though these are currently in trend, we may get introduced to more captivating, fun, and user-friendly designs in the future.

If you haven’t yet implemented these UI designs in your mobile app, you are missing out on a great opportunity to make users fall in love with your app. Go ahead and try them out.