As an app developer, when was the last time you stopped to look at current trends for app design ideas in the development world?
You know, mobile apps are constantly evolving to improve the user experience, and it’s your job to keep up.
Oftentimes app designers keep their heads buried in their projects and forget about what consumers want today.
Try to break that mindset if you can, and put what the user wants first. If you excel at these app ui ideas, users will choose your app over one of your competitors, every time.
Table of Contents
Swiping Features
There is some deep rooted psychological proof that swiping is in human nature. People love to swipe, even from a young age.
You need to have swiping features in your mobile app. If you’re still not convinced, just take a look at common dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hily, and so many more.
All of these apps are seeing huge success right now, and all of them use swiping as a primary feature proving to be some of the best mobile UI (user interface) design.
At this point, it’s almost impossible to deny a feature that is so apparent in so many successful apps.
It’s likely your mobile app doesn’t involve consistently swiping through potential matches, so how can you use a swiping app UI design to your benefit?
There’s so many places you can implement swiping. If you sell a variety of items and have them on display, that’s one place swiping can be extremely effective.
Customers love more options, and making it easier to go through each option with a swiping feature is a great app design feature.
Adding swiping features in any direction is going to be good, and you don’t have to be a dating app to implement good app design styles.
Here’s an example of one of our favorite trading apps Robinhood, where swiping on different stocks in your portfolio makes trading much easier.
Voice Interface and Voice Search
Voice search is an app ui idea that has become increasingly more popular as voice search technology advances.
It’s getting easier and easier for smart speakers to pick up your voice and provide you the exact results you need.
When it comes to mobile apps, a voice search navigation feature can make the overall user experience of your app much better.
Depending on the app UI design of your mobile app, voice search could be an amazing app design idea.
Voice integration is not limited to the search feature though. Users can navigate through your app via voice commands.
Hiring a mobile app developer that can implement voice interfaces is going to be your best bet since they can provide you with a variety of app design styles.
One of the best apps that utilize voice search is YouTube. Their mobile app has voice search integration for on-the-go searching, making it extremely easy to find the video you need.
Vibrant Colors and Gradients
Choosing the right set of colors and gradients is crucial to a beautiful app design. Below, we break down two common approaches for the best mobile UI design.
Flat Design
The best app UI ideas combine a flat design with captivating gradients and shadows. Flat design has been around since the beginning of mobile app development, and is often still very effective.
Flat design is the most simple design style and makes the user experience pleasurable and positive.
Essentially, flat design avoids 3-D elements at all costs, and focuses on simple, bold colors and other style elements.
Flat design is amazing for the user experience, but can be boring to some users. This is why a concept called Flat 2.0 was implemented, in which skeuomorphic design elements are used as well.
Skeuomorphism
Skeuomorphism is the opposite of a flat design concept, in which 3-D elements are preferred and are used more often.
The goal is to mimic real-world elements and to make a mobile app feel alive. Skeuomorphism does this by employing elements like gradients and shadows, making parts of the app feel 3-dimensional.
While this style does work to improve the user experience by catering to natural human interpretations of objects/items, many designers feel the style of these app design ideas creates too much clutter, and makes using the app much more difficult.
Combining the Two
This is why combining both flat design trends along with a few skeuomorphic elements seems to be the best combination for great app design.
For example, the use of a gradient on an app background is a skeuomorphic element, but when done correctly, a flat design can still be implemented.
Gradients add a lot of depth to any scene, making a seemingly boring page come to life with emotion.
On top of using gradients, choosing vibrant colors seems to be a big trend in app design ideas.
Picking truly vibrant colors that match with one another for best mobile ui design can be difficult, so head on over to the Adobe Color Wheel to get colors that match.
Personalization
Arguably one of the most important app design ideas trends, personalization helps differentiate you from other apps just like yours.
The app market is becoming consistently more saturated, and you have to do something to stand out.
Personalizing your app is one way to show consumers that they should stay on your app because of the amazing user experience and great app design it provides.
There’s a few different ways you can personalize your mobile app, one of them being through eCommerce.
Most eCommerce style apps will tailor specific products to you based on what you’ve already scrolled through or taken interest in. Amazon is a great example of an app design that does just this.
Any app build that provides content should be able to personalize in some way. Over time, content should appear that align with their interests.
Content personalization is only one way to improve the user experience.
Creating user profiles for each user experience and delivering different app functions based on a specific user category is another way of personalizing a mobile app.
If you can make your app feel like it’s designed specifically for a user, you’re on the path to the best mobile UI design.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality is definitely still a work in progress, but is becoming more and more prevalent as the years go by.
Now, let’s get the distinction right between AR and VR, because they are very different. VR (Virtual Reality) is a completely immersive experience that blocks out all real world input, and focuses the user entirely on computer generated content.
AR (Augmented Reality) on the other hand superimposes digital content onto a user’s real world view.
This makes it seem like there are digital elements actually within the real world. It is considered a composite view between computer generated content and the real world, making it much more applicable to mobile apps.
While the current applications of AR are somewhat limited to superimposing cute looking animals onto your camera, we are headed towards commercializing AR.
Being able to see and interact with products and services in augmented reality is the next step.
Augmented reality enhances the user experience by a massive amount, and if you can find a way to implement it into your app, you absolutely should.
Dark Mode
Dark mode is one of the best design features you can add to your mobile app. This is especially true for apps that use a lot of white space.
After a while, constantly looking at a white screen becomes a problem of eyestrain for users.
For users that use your app frequently, a dark mode could be an amazing option that will greatly enhance the user experience.
Some of the most popular apps have dark, or night mode built in. Reddit is one app that does this, and allows users to avoid eye strain, and remain on the app longer.
A lot of white space is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it’s amazing and makes designs pop out much better.
Although a consistent downside is the eyestrain users face when looking at a white screen for too long. If you find your app to be in this category, maybe it’s time to implement dark mode.
Video and Animation
Stagnant app pages are a thing of the past. Customers are getting bored more easily, and need content that moves to keep them interested.
On top of being able to keep users attention, animations allow users to understand your content better.
Most people are visual learners, and will have a much better time navigating an animated app rather than a stagnant one.
From loading animations, navigation animations, to visual feedback animations, there are so many ways to implement interesting animations into your mobile app.
This seems to be a design trend that’s here to stay. Users simply love animation.
Get Trendy Today!
As you can see, there’s a whole lot of trends to keep in mind as we cruise through app design ideas.
Some of them are not new app UI ideas, but are still the main trends that keep us busy. At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to improve the user experience in any way we can.
It just so happens that following great app design and implementing them into your app is one of the best ways to improve UI.
Hopefully we went through some design trends that you’ve already been doing, and maybe some that we surprised you with.
As your favorite mobile app development company, we strive to keep you up to date with all the latest trends. If you’ve found a trend that didn’t make it in our least, we’d love to hear about it!
