5 Mobile App Design Trends of 2016 You Need To Know

Mobile devices are invading our life and their enormous popularity has challenged apps designers to come up with attractive and exquisite ideas for the consumers. They have to keep up with the ever-changing design trends so that their final products be enjoyable and not obsolete.

Here are 5 mobile app design trends of 2016 that you should consider when laying another app for mobile devices on the consumption table.

Gestures

Gestures are those tapping, flicking, dragging, pressing, zooming, rotating and other magical tricks that activate the app. They are comfortable for app users and are easy to use on devices of various sizes and shapes. One thing that mobile app designers should keep in mind is that most people tend to hold their smartphones in one hand and deliver these gestures with their thumb. Therefore, they must take into account the space they need to work with to make the app and gesture sync.

Pastel colors

Pastel hues are making their way into the mobile app trends. What makes this trend a good one is that the pastel-colored background allows for the application’s important features stand out and not take the user’s attention away from them.

Typography

Typography is the backbone of mobile app design. It is known that our main means of communication is through text. Therefore, the proper use of typography is essential in improving UX. Text must stand out on the app’s interface and black text on a white background is the best choice in matter of readability for app users.

Animation

Previous mobile applications were more static than they are today. With continuous development of smartphones and their more powerful capacity to support heavy-animated applications, designers are using this opportunity to make the application design more dynamic. Animation is also the element that improves the user’s visual experience.

Playful

The above trends relate to the more technical part of the mobile app design. One thing that makes users come back to your application after their first encounter is the degree they have enjoyed the application. Playfulness of an application is the key for your app design to engage users in the interactive aspect of the application experience. This trend gives mobile designers green light to their imagination and creativity.

Related: Popular Web Design Trends for 2016

Conclusion

If you want your apps design to be distinguishable and catchy don’t neglect these design trends. Whenever you are designing a mobile application you should always think about the user experience and user interaction with the product that you will make available for their consumption. Therefore, in order to be able to gain as many users as you can, your mobile app design must be unique, but at the same time in line with the users’ expectations.

Button Design Techniques to Improve User Experience (UX)

Principels of successful button design

It’s not a secret that currently one can create a button via multitude of ways. The majority of these methods are quite similar, nevertheless in rare cases you see a button that is very different from the rest of them.

These unique buttons were simply created with a little more time, attention and effort.
Was it worth it to spend time on button design? Definitely, otherwise, no one would have paid any attention to them.

The most widespread methods of buttons creation are CSS3 and special tools. But before you get down to creating a magnificent button that everyone will like – you need to take a minute and think about the purpose you’re designing this button for and how it will fit the overall look of your website.

If you’re creating a button just for the sake of it – why would you take a trouble of creating something unique? You can just download a free button set that somebody uploaded and be done with it. However, if your goal is to deliver an award-worthy design, it’s worth to consider several button design aspects that are outlined below:

Consistency with the brand

Your button design must be consistent with the context you’re creating them for. What does this mean? It means that your should pick corresponding color scheme and graphic style, maybe even use the brand logo or borrow its form if possible.

You are not limited by anything: play with fonts, colors, pattern and shapes. Let your creativity run wild. If you see that website design is flat – create buttons in the same style.
It won’t be wise to use shiny gibbose buttons – just make sure that your button will blend seamlessly into the overall design of the website.

Ask yourself: Is my button contrast enough?

Considering that at the moment people want simple, yet visually pleasing website designs, web designers are forced to include lots of eye-candies. This means that the page will have a lot of vivid and attention-grabbing elements.

Use different colors, size and shapes for button design

However, you need to make sure that the button design is clearly visible and can be easily found. The higher the contrast, the better. You can outline it with different colors, shades and fonts, just remember to make it stand out without sacrificing overall UX.

Is your button design compatible with the content?

You need to keep in mind that buttons must match not only the logo of the company, but also the overall UI. For example, buttons can be buttons on the mobile version of the website, but on the desktop website they can be replaced with something unusual and interesting.

Use shades with caution

Remember that any shades look much better, when they are darker than the element itself. Which is why, when your element is darker than surrounding, you need to be very cautious.

Conceal secondary elements

You should always keep in mind that secondary elements, such as menu elements, controllers and bars can be similar (same corners, shape), but with different shades, borders and gradients.

Shape of the buttons

Round vs square button

In case the interface of your website includes too many buttons of the same shape – it’s definitely time to change that.

You need to make at least the most essential buttons stand out. You can change their shape from square to round. It will definitely attract the attention of users.

Outline of the buttons

Always remember: under no circumstances can the button’s outline be lighter than the button itself. Moreover, the outline of the button must be darker than the background – it’s a golden rule that needs to be followed.

Make use of icons

When working on action button design, icons can be your best friends. For instance, in case you’re designing a “Next Page” button and don’t know how to go about the buttons inscription – just use an arrow, pointing to the right and users will understand that this button is for going to the next page. Such button will look better than overused “Next” or “Next page” buttons.

Indicate the importance of the buttons with color saturation

In case your website has lots of functions and options it’s recommended to focus the attention of the user on the most important ones from the very start. For this exact purpose, you can make the most important buttons the most color saturated.

Apart from that, you can use association. For example, if a set of buttons is related – make the most important one – deep blue and the less important ones blue and then light blue.

You can also make use of the buttons’ size and make the most important buttons big and clearly visible.

The last, but not the least button design technique

Indicate button’s state

Design professionals can easily distinguish the state of the button, however, that is not the case for the rest of us. User will try to click the button whether it’s active or not and will get frustrated if it’s inactive.

To avoid the unpleasant situations like that – you can simply use CSS instruments, such as shades, gradients and borders to show that the button isn’t active yet.

Conclusion

As a web designer, you have you own approach to button design. It's nothing bad in re-using predesigned elements or UI styles, as they are a great way to save time and money. But if you want to add a dose of uniqueness to your website, crafting you own web buttons is the path to go.