A lot of changes had taken place in the web design industry in the last decade and this is an ongoing process. We are confronted with a question as to while lies ahead in the web design industry in coming decades. What type of changes we can expect in the web design industry with new techniques and technologies as we are constantly moving ahead in them. What the landscape of web design might look like in the next 20 years or so.
For this, we searched the web for a larger picture instead of what the self-styled ‘futurists’ and ‘thought-leaders’ who just give TED lectures. Here in this article, we present the views of some of the professionals who are doing real-world work and more grounded in their thinking. Here’s what they think will be the future of web design in the next two decades:
- Developer tools will be the game-changer: As we move forward to the mid 21st century, the web design will become increasingly important and there should be no doubt about this in our minds. The time is coming that more and more of the people live their lives online, and the digital user experiences will be on the charts with almost every big organization. There is going to be a great demand for good software but broadly speaking, there are not enough good developers to build those things. But here is one good news, that to plug that gap, we have currently seen an explosion in the web design developers tools. With these tools, it will be easy to build real-time features into applications and the applications get the update automatically without users having to give refresh command.
The trend of how web systems are created will be redefined, as somewhat that we have seen in the rise of React and CSS in JavaScript in web applications. “CSS in JavaScript is a big shit in how we design apps” as per the engineer from Pusher. We will be focusing on building reusable components to solve a lot of problems. This will pay off with web experiences becoming quicker and cheaper to create.
In past building websites used to be a slow process, very hard to maintain, a lot of skills need to know about the people for whom these are designed. Now the power is back in the product builders hand with developers tools. Developers tools help us to discover what users need? Which means that less time will be needed in maintaining the applications and more will be devoted to knowing on customers needs. That is what will change in future too…
- The merger of Design and Data:The future is going to be all about bringing design and data together as per the expert view of global design and innovation company’s Fjord. Not only it will be in web design but in business also. Designing and experience will be helpful to the user in leveraging data and analytics to make that personalized and contextualized. This thing is already happening with ads. Google is crawling the Gmail to understand what the users is interested and try to provide the user with an ad specific information in which he is interested. Outside ads we don’t use this and it is just a matter of time that we will just be going to apply this to every consumer experience. In future, the designers and data scientists will be peers in one team that design web and add contents instead of two different teams.
- Conversational Interfaces: Understanding how your users think and what they need is going to be the key to implementing new technologies in web designing in the coming decades. There is going to be another major cultural shift on the web; towards conversational interfaces. As the biggest problem will not be a technical one, but they all will be human ones As per Sigma a UX and design agency there are a lot of the challenges around conversational interfaces align very closely with the challenges around inclusive design: mental models, language, confidence trust, and so on. The conversational interfaces are going to fundamentally change the game in web design. It is going to be a big step moving away from a traditional screen-based interface, where people can take their time to navigate around and look at supporting information, policies, terms and conditions. AI and machine learning have more ground to cover in ethics, privacy and transparency. The General Data Protection Regulations(an EU directive enforced from May 2018) will encourage privacy for design in the digital community and make them start thinking, by asking from people what they want.
- Rise in Web Animation: After the chat bots take off, copywriting skills may become as important to the industry as visual design skills right now. And the new creative skill that is going to be increasingly in demand will be Animation in web design. In past, we dismissed UI animations as tacky, annoying and obtrusive. But recently they have made a come back as a useful way to provide instant feedback when users take action and to guide them through a process. The credit goes to Google’s Material Design and other animation frameworks for raising standards. Because of this new popularity of UI animation, it is creating a new demand for skilled practitioners.
- AR and VR use to increase in Web Design: Another skill set that is in great demand by wen design studios is 3D.AR and VR are going to be a very big deal in web design in future. VR and AR will not be considered as a niche in future and that is what we will be expecting while going forward in future also. The arrival of Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore things are moving fast in this direction in web design for the future. AR and VR are going to be part of web design as we won’t have a screen any more and the web will just be part of what you see through your smart glasses or smart contact lenses.
- Open or proprietary?: The new technologies hold heaps of promise. But it is also important to look at the broader picture. Will the open web actually survive over the coming decades? This is the big question because currently, we see the emergence of a walled garden movement from some of the main players, like Facebook and Google. This is proving a dilemma for some clients as mostly customers journeys still happen on their own websites. But they want to integrate with things like accelerating mobile pages (AMP), which give Google the ability to cache everybody’s contents on their own system. On Facebook, we see a similar problem as clients want to create a bot in Facebook Messenger. These are the real big issues that are going to impact web design in future. But many experts are in favour of the open web.
- Project Common Voice:Mozilla has come up with Mozilla’s Common Voice project which aims to provide an open-source alternative to proprietary voice interfaces as they want to allow an open web-based system whereby one can build voice assistant. With this project, they are using to train an open and publicly available speech recognition model. This kind of open-source developers tools is providing new hope for the future of web design in the next two decades.
These are some of the changes that experts expect with future in web design and development in the next two decades. Let’s hope that things will go according to their wishes.
