Popular Design Trends for Startups
Awesome specializes in crafting beautiful and engaging UI & UX designs for tech startups. As a company, they help their clients evolve their brands through research, planning and collaboration. We had the opportunity to hear from Awesome founder, Firat Parlak, about current design trends and how his company is adapting and keeping up with what is popular in the design world:
What are some of the trends in design for startups that are popular right now?
“For startups, design trends are headed in a direction of controlling human behavior to create an environment of less thinking for the user so that they can spend more time on using products; generating more data and tangible results that startups can extract and grow their business model.
These trends are around crafting better user flows by minimizing the amount of steps that user needs to take. For example Slack has a feature called magic link that lets you send an email to your phone that will automatically sign you in so you don’t have to type out a long password on a mobile keyboard.”
Any other trends you can think of?
"I think there are many attempts to streamline design principles for making products that is consistent, easy to understand and use.
Besides those, I believe there are 2 simple trends out there create experiences that makes us feel and use our senses. They are UI sounds and UI animations.
UI sounds: Sounds used to be mainly incorporated in games. However, startups are also adapting to gesture based UI sounds to enhance their user experience. When the sound gives the right impression, you can achieve a lot with a minimal amount of effort to create a truly rewarding experience for your app.
UI animations: Animations can also enhance the user experience and because the simplification of UI design that enabled users to focus in animation, this trends actually could be the most impactful one. For example, Animated UI gestures during an user on boarding process can cognitively educate users on how to use the product. This becomes very important for user adaptation and even branding."
How are design trends changing and where do you see them in the future?
"I see that design trends are prominently controlled by major players like Google, Apple and Facebook. They want their users to adapt to these trends without thinking from user's psychology of adaptation to these new changes.
Design trends definitely have purpose but should be consistent with these changes we're making on users. Every time there is a red notification on my App Store icon or software update notification, I don't want to feel an anxiety that I need to download, open and find out that there is a completely new user experience. Trends should be innovative but it should be incremental so you can adapt these changes without losing your users."
How does Awesome work to stay on top of the popular trends in design and stay ahead of the curve?
"Awesome has a dedicated team that is watching UI/UX trends closely. We're constantly exploring and testing out new design experiences as users so we can bring them to our internal team meetings for discussions on how we can apply these trends to our design process that we provide for our clients."