by Tashfeen Mustafa Choudhury

Trends are one of the most common and important part of any industry till date. In many ways, trends are what drives a business, pushes it to innovate and change accordingly, helping a business grow.

Similarly, the Web Design and development industry is seeing trends in 2016 develop towards technologies and design patterns across the web, starting from robust development tools to designs that keep user retention. Since these trends are changing, most people find it easier to use someone like these web designers cardiff to help make sure that their website is up to date. With the customers of almost every business industry online, it is important for developers and corporate professionals alike to keep themselves updated with new technologies coming in, especially when said technologies could be built by developers with less than their best intentions and used to attack a business through technology, which is why it’s important for businesses to have a web application scanner to ensure the safety on the web and therefore any sensitive data, etc.

With that, the following are the top trends in web design and the development industry in 2016.

1.Hero Images

Captivating HD images with strong call to actions can increase conversions. According to Jerry Cao at Awwwards, “Since vision is the strongest human sense, HD hero images are one of the fastest ways to grab a user’s attention. Thanks to advances in bandwidth and data compression, users won’t suffer from slow load times either.”

2. Animations
As flat design prevails, more and more websites are using animations to maintain originality and tell their own story.

However, animations must serve a purpose. It just cannot be put anywhere. You can use animations in many ways:

Loading animations: Loading a web page is a tedious process, and users will leave if it takes too long. Rich and unique animations can keep the user pleased or even engaged while waiting. Slack, for example, uses their own logo as animation and ditches the age old circle loading animation.

• Scrolling: Smooth scrolling depends on animation and provides the user with more control of their experience.

• Motion Animations: Motion animation is the perfect tool to draw user attention as the human eye naturally follows motion. This can be used to attract user’s interest and intrigue towards specific places on your website such as forms, CTAs and menu items

3. Micro-interactions

Micro-interactions are everywhere. Starting from silencing your alarm clock in the morning to checking your Gmail notifications, micro-interactions are performed daily without second thought.

Micro-interactions help you do several different things, such as communicating feedback, see results of an action, or help a user manipulate something.

These interactions are vital to any app. They should happen subtly and be kept as simple as possible. Each of these interaction paths lead users to a more human-centered design and is a key to adoption and usability.

4. Users are starting to care more about the performance than the look

Having a good looking website is great and definitely holds if not increases user retention, but a site that does not function properly will definitely face trouble. Users are increasingly becoming more aware towards the performance of the website. For this reason, it seems to be the case that more and more companies are reaching out to website design experts for help with getting their sites online. Big Gorilla Design is based in Austin and has an excellent reputation for web design, marketing or branding, so take a look at their website if your business is in the process of designing a website.

Poor performance will cause users to leave. Designers should not only make their site look good, but they should also focus on making the experience on the website seamless.

5. Bots become a part of UX

If you sign up for Slack, you will see the slackbot welcome you to the app.

Bots are not only coming up on web apps but have proliferated on Facebook and are used also by Telegram and WeChat. CNN, for example, was one of the first publishers to launch a bot on Facebook. Using a bot is helping them deliver more personalized content to their followers and widen their reach internationally.

In the next few years, bots will become an integral part for many business on the web.

6. Computer vision in the browser

Tracking.js is an open source computer vision JavaScript library, with different computer vision algorithms. These algorithms can be used for features like facial detection or color tracking while having a lightweight core.

Now computer vision is not limited to native apps and C/C++. You can now use it directly in your browser and detect faces or track positions in real time.

With so many other frameworks and libraries, JavaScript has become an effective language of the web.

7. Containers will become huge

Containers have been around for quite some time. But the web development world saw a lot of actions and changes after the introduction of Docker.

Docker is a container service that enables faster development of software even in an isolated environment. Basically, a container has all the dependencies it requires to run an application on its own.

This means developers can build, test, run and deploy an app anywhere faster. The service runs regardless of the environment it is in. This year, Docker will continue to develop, add features and gain security.

8. Motion UI

Motion UI is a Sass library which is one of the three parts of Foundation for Apps by Zurb. It is widely used for rapidly creating animations and CSS transitions. With Motion UI, it is less complicated to make an app’s transitions look smooth and rich. This tool is sure to stay popular among developers for the next few years.

9. Advanced platforms require new responsive designs

Responsive design is already a vital part of any website or web app. But it will not be targeted towards ‘mobile-first’ anymore, as new technologies such as Oculus Rift an Apple Watch usher in new ways of viewing online content.

In addition to these, Semantic UI and Foundation For Apps are new responsive frameworks in demand to create fully responsive web apps.

10. Real Time everywhere

2016 will see a rise in new apps that work in real-time. Real time broadcasting and analytics is being implemented on desktop and mobile. Similarly, live streaming will also become increasingly important in the social media world with apps like Periscope and Meerkat gaining prominence. Real-time is just breaking out.

Real time services, like pusher.js will see a gain in popularity among developers to achieve seamless real-time integration.