The first impression is the best impression. Ever came across this cliché? Needless to say, first impressions these days are primarily influenced by design. 

Even the most useful website or product is rendered powerless if it is integrated into a poor or obsolete design. User experience design fundamentally changes the way a customer perceives your brand: excellent UX design directly translates to increased traffic and conversions for your products.

UX design enhances the experience for the user, making it intuitive, smooth, and vibrant. Lately, there has been an increase in attention towards experiences like storytelling, personalization, and emotive interaction design, that add profoundness, dynamism, and a touch of reality to user experience.

These are just some of the trending UX design principles in 2022. In this blog, we’ll cover 6 popular UX design principles that you need to keep an eye out for!

1. Storytelling

Stories have been with us since our inception, as evidenced by cave paintings, fairy tales, all the words, and images that time travel seamlessly and get exchanged in common narratives. 

It is one of the most basic forms of human expression that helps people relate better to what’s being narrated. Stories evoke the innate curiosity that human beings possess and spark their imagination, delivering a rich immersive experience. In 2022, storytelling is fast becoming a popular UX design principle.

Storytelling helps forge meaningful relationships between businesses and customers. The more a user gets exposed to the full story of a brand or the experiences of other customers, the more likely they are to trust and relate to the business. 

All such nitty-gritty details that depict the brand story can be interwoven throughout the UX, delivering a powerful personalized experience to customers. 

As new details about why this brand came to be, what they are trying to do and how the user fits into the vision surface with each new scroll, the user begins to transform into an advocate for the brand.

2. Flow

According to the eminent psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, “flow is a state in which people are so involved in an activity, that nothing else seems to matter”.

During his research, he found that people reached peak levels of creativity, happiness, and productivity when they entered a state of flow. This principle can be extended to UX design by creating user experiences that flow smoothly from one step to another.

To achieve a seamless experience, UX designers need to focus on creating continuity, whether in a specific process like making a payment or in a larger scheme like the complete customer journey from landing on the site, browsing the online shop, to making a purchase, and receiving the item.

It’s important that the user experience is consistent and that each element within the given experience is a natural progression of the previous element. 

3. Micro-interactions

From the once revolutionary “like button” to a scroll bar that shows you where you are on a page, micro-interactions are small visual movements that have a large impact on UX design. 

Whether it’s a swipe, hover color, animation, or data input, micro-interactions serve the purpose of making the user experience more hands-on, interesting, and entertaining. During the inception of micro-interaction, the focus was on giving users feedback and transforming design from static to a more dynamic process. 

Google started this trend by making buttons enlarge when users click on them, and in 2022 we’ll see it become a standard trend in both mobile and desktop UX design. 

4. Dark Mode

Simply put, dark mode refers to user interfaces with a predominantly dark color palette. For example, black and other dim hues can be used for the background while text and secondary details stick can be displayed in light colors. 

Users appreciate the new, fresh appearance of dark mode, and designers have a bias towards the minimalistic, visual tone it has to offer. Anything that sits on black looks more beautiful.

Dark mode is also part of an overall attempt to de-stress the user at a time when we stay glued to our screens all day long. It naturally delivers a visually soothing and eye-friendly experience to users.

5. Augmented and Virtual Reality

The revolutionary shift toward virtual and augmented reality is a phenomenon that intensified with Covid quarantines and the timely establishment of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. 

Ultimately, this will manifest in 2022 UX design trends with the creation of more immersive, customized, and unique alternative playgrounds. AR and VR-oriented designs redefine ways in which users interact with products and scale engagement to unprecedented levels. They will aim to respond more directly to a user’s needs and environment in real-time.

For example, AR has been used in eCommerce apps to let users virtually try on clothes from the comfort of their homes. This will surely fire their enthusiasm and provide a spectacular user experience.

    Also Read: How VR is changing Marketing, CX & Safety in automotive industry

6. Anthropomorphic Animations

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human emotions, characteristics, and intentions to non-human objects. It is all set to become one of the top UX design trends of 2022. 

UX designers can incorporate this characteristic into animations to turn abstract shapes into affable animated characters that mimic human-like moments.

Human beings are naturally attracted to objects that mimic them visually and behaviorally. It stands to reason then, that anthropomorphic animations can scale engagement and create a more immersive user experience.

        Also Read: Ways to Improve Mobile UX – 3 Do’s & Don’ts of UX Design

In a nutshell

According to Steve Jobs, design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. UX design trends are ever-evolving and humanizing products and services like never before.

In this article, we’ve covered 6 unique trends that you can incorporate into your designer’s toolkit. At Hakuna Matata, we have a track record of delivering elegantly designed and high-performing solutions to leading clients across the globe such as TVS, Saint Gobain, L&T, Caterpillar, and Vanguard.

Our highly creative solutions represent the pinnacle of aesthetic perfection: they solve the most pressing problems of our clients while delivering a smooth, intuitive, and fun-filled user experience.

If you’re looking to partner with a leading-edge UX design company for your Digital Transformation initiatives, look no further! Schedule a free consultation today and talk to us.