Be Careful About These 6 Web Design Trends in 2016

Designing a website requires a deep understanding of the platform, the business needs and the latest trends. While some trends may walk out as soon as they enter, some stay for a long while, and conquer the design world with its aesthetics and concreteness. A classic example of a trend that stayed would be flat design. Initiated by iOS7, this trend found its way into web design, and stayed forever since. Trends keep changing, and they evolve with the needs posed by the end user. Intuitive designs evolved with the need for simple designs that can benefit in search and navigation.

Each trend evolves from a business need, and the trends that you choose to incorporate in your web design should also depend on the needs posed by your business. It is important to include those design trends that will help you achieve the design goals, and get you maximum users to the website.

Some trends fade with time, and it is better if you don’t incorporate them to your website. But, there will always be a trend like flat design that will stay for good with you. In 2016, there are some trends that will see a rise in action, while there will be trends that are going to fade away with time. Here are six design trends that you need to be careful of in 2016. Let’s go through each trend one by one.

Using the Hamburger Menu

Most of the content is being seen on a mobile device. Developers need to design keeping the mobile view in mind, which is why the Hamburger menu is trending. It not only simplifies your whole design, but also manages the entire content under a single umbrella. This trend has moved from the mobile to the web design world too. A lot of websites use the Hamburger menu to keep the design clean and simple.

While it definitely makes the design clean, it is not suited for the eCommerce and news websites. The reason being a lot of important content gets hidden in this menu format, and it hinders visibility. Some of the major news websites like Time have added a ticker along the side to take care of the visibility concerns. If you are implementing this trend, you may need to take care of the visibility issue properly. This trend can cause increase in bounce rates.

Carousels on Home Page

Carousels, specially on the home page, are definitely trending. You will find a lot of websites incorporating this trend. It makes your website look appealing and clutter free. While it works well from aesthetics perspective, it is not really a good idea to adopt this trend from the performance perspective. Carousels work negative for your site’s SEO, as there is no Meta information that Google can crawl into. Again, your carousels use a high resolution image, which means they can increase the loading time, and eventually lower the performance of your site. If possible, avoid carousels for your website, as they can reduce the performance of your site.

Parallax Scrolling

The look on your face is unbeatable when you open a site with parallax scrolling. It works effectively when it comes to user engagement and offering user experience. But, this too is bad from SEO and performance perspective. Parallax scrolling means you have a single page content, which is by far too less from crawling point of view. The heavy graphics and JavaScript combined can prove to be heavy for your website, which eventually lowers the performance.

Load Screens

Today’s users won’t wait for more than 3 seconds to get the websites loaded. Remember the time when websites used Flash screens, which took a long time to load? Such heavy load screens are not good from performance perspective. They tend to keep you waiting. You should ideally follow trends that can make your films less loaded, and keep up your performance levels.

Increased Use of JavaScripts

JavaScript is there in everything that you create for your website. From the social plugins to the add-ons that you offer, JavaScript proves to be the basis. The load speed is reduced massively with JavaScripts, which proves to be a hindrance in mobile browsing. This also affects your website’s performance. In case malicious code enters the website, it can prove to be a threat to security. So use as little JavaScript in the design as possible.

Cluttered Typography

Many websites are designed with multiple typographies which can hinder the aesthetics and complicate the user experience. It is advised that you use maximum two typographies so that you can reduce the clutter and enhance the experience.