The Known Guide to Web Design Trends 2022 – Part 2
March 18, 2022
Well, lookie here! More website design trends for 2022, but this time about functionality. (Didn’t see our article on this year’s hot visual trends? It’s not too late – it is waiting for you here.)
Here’s what’s got us all fired up:
- Motion Sickness . . . and how to avoid it.
- The Need for Speed . . . go faster or perish.
Wait! Does it sound like we’re trying to go in 2 directions at once? Move. Don’t move. Read on.
Sick Design
When last did you rollick along on a hoverboard? A rollercoaster? A DeLorean?
Thing is, not everyone finds it fun. In fact, lots of people get motion sickness from parallax effects and scrolljacking.
Besides, scrolljacking is a usability nightmare! Humans don’t like confusion. When, instead of taking us up or down as we expect it to, scroll suddenly morphs into animated effects, it gives us pause.
Look, pause is great when the user has stopped to read your content with relish. Pause is not good when there’s a sharp intake of breath just before they bounce off the site in horror.
Motion-heavy websites are fantastic for some, but for others not so much. Here’s the important bit: as citizens of the world wide web, we should design responsibly. This means considering the impact of our work.
Short story: making people sick isn’t what they mean by sick design.
Sidewinding
But, it’s not all bad news for scrolling. There’s a trend towards horizontal scrolling as an alternative to vertical scrolling. A side scrolling experience through a static website creates a sense of progression. It’s great for discovery sites like city guides and online galleries.
Morphing
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use movement in your design. Hell no! Here’s a trend that’s as exciting as ever: glassmorphism. A combo of reflection, diffusion and shadow combined with subtle movement creates an exciting 3D optical illusion.
Site speed performance
Back to bouncing: did you know that more than half of users will abandon a page if they have to wait and wait and wait longer than 3 seconds for it to load? Actually, it’s worse than that – most people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds.
So what’s a designer to do?
There are a bunch of things you can do to speed up your site loading speed, from page caching to removing query strings from static resources, but let’s focus on images for now.
- Reduce the file size of all media assets. Image optimisation is reducing the file size of your images as much as possible, without sacrificing quality. BTW this is also important for SEO and getting your product images to rank on Google.
- Lazy loading aka deferring offscreen images. Delay the loading of images until they are needed. In other words, only once the viewer is in a position to view them let them view them. Simple, right?
A glimpse of greatness
2022 is all about moving . . . or not moving. Or doing both at once. Is it possible?
Onward & upward!