In 2017, there was a lot of hype about the user experience that a website provided, and this trend is going to continue to remain a top priority in 2018.

Today’s consumers have a dwindling attention span, so it’s critical that your website design is intuitive and compelling enough to make your visitors want to stick around. If your website is difficult to navigate, slow to load, or not mobile-friendly, you’re not offering a positive user experience to your visitors.

Google now places emphasis on the user experience that a website provides when ranking content. Considering that more than half of the searches performed online are now made using mobile devices, Google is moving towards a mobile-first indexing. This means that the Google index will primarily crawl the mobile version of websites instead of the desktop version. A responsive website design will help ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and offers an optimal user experience by Google’s standards.

We’ll see a number of new website design trends roll out in 2018 that will enhance the user experience even more. Here are a few of these anticipated trends to be aware of:

1. Premium Content Experience
Creating a beautiful and intuitive website design is just one part of the equation for providing visitors with a positive user experience. You need to make sure that you’re taking into consideration the content experience as well.

Providing a good content experience on your website means offering a clear order of how visuals are presented to increase the comprehension of your content, eliminating clutter, and embracing white space. As you design the interface of your website and add features and capabilities, don’t lose sight of the content experience.

2. Smart, Personalized User Experiences
Thanks to advancements in technology, marketers are armed with critical consumer details that impact the buyer’s journey, such as previous interactions that a consumer has had with a website and where the consumer is physically located. This knowledge allows businesses to deliver a more personalized experience.

Some ways that we can expect businesses to deliver smarter and more personalized user experiences with their websites in 2018 include in-app chat features to enhance customer service, age-responsive capabilities (such as automatically adjusting the size of the font for better readability), and log-in memory features to save time for users.

3. Time-Saving Website Design
Today’s consumers are on-the-go. If you can save them time to find what they’re looking for on your website, you’ll win them over. The catch is that you don’t want to take away from the user experience by helping users save time. Taking an intentional design approach and anticipating user needs is a practical solution for a time-saving website design.

4. Voice-Friendly Interface
According to Google, 20 percent of all search queries are voice searches. With the growing number of smartphone users and the popularity of virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Now, we can expect the percentage of voice search queries to increase this year. Voice activated interfaces in website design will soon become the norm, not the exception.

5. Augmented Reality
You can’t bring up the topic of website design trends for 2018 without augmented reality being part of the conversation. Pokemon Go played a role in getting the everyday consumer exposed to augmented reality, and we can expect to see more businesses in 2018 use augmented reality to allow consumers to see what different products will look like in their homes before making a purchase. The more that display and camera technology advances, the more appealing augmented reality will become to marketers and consumers.

6. More Biometric Authentications
Apple is an industry leader for biometric authentications by allowing users to access content on their mobile devices via a fingerprint or facial recognition. With security being a high priority for businesses, we can expect more websites to incorporate biometric authentications into their designs, such as fingerprints, facial recognition, voice recognition, and an iris scan.

7. Elimination of Common Annoyances
Some of the most common annoyances that will turn visitors away from your website include a slow loading website, a website that is not mobile-friendly, and a design that is difficult to navigate. There is nothing new about these common annoyances, and we can expect that more businesses in 2018 will strive to eliminate these website design mistakes.

Being aware of the latest web design trends for 2018 will allow your business to offer a cutting edge website that aligns with your company’s goals.

When our team at New York Ave designs a website, we take into account the human psyche, which enables us to create more intuitive interfaces. We will work closely with your business to ensure that we bring your big idea to life by offering a user-friendly website experience that accomplishes your objectives.

Contact us at New York Ave to learn more about our human-centered approach to website design and how we can help you deliver a premium user experience for your website visitors.