2014 Predictions for Web Design | Hacker News Reader

2014 Predictions for Web Design

inside.envato.com

38 pointscollistaeed21 comments

Motions: we already have too much of them.

For me Wikipedia had the best content and very high ranking, and its "un-designed" interface is telling strongly that making things "designed" was often unnecessary. Sometime ago an "[edit]" link appeared where hovering a section's title. It was annoying and has been apparently removed.

The first thing I do on a new smartphone install is to remove launcher animations, which are laggy and useless. The same with any PC install, either Linux or Windows: go to the settings and uncheck all animations.

Most animations other than simple sliding on mobile apps are also useless. Any the only moving thing that is useful, the "loading..." spinning weel, is often even absent.

So I think it will be like with rounded-shades-UI vs flat-UI: once doing animations is easy and mainstream, it will not be a marker of craftmanship, and will be dropped except when really useful.

I think Wikipedia is not "undesigned", it's just a very well designed site. And the net is plenty of bad designers.

Sometimes things have to be simplified and redefined. In some ways "undesigning" is a very important part of the design process, in order to maintain the functionality of the product. This is the real purpose of design, not making things look cute and over animated.

Have to agree here. The last thing we need is more motion. There are very few instances where it benefits the design.

1. Functionality 2. Form 3. Get away from your screen. Life is short.

I just hope that designers stop ruining user controlled standard behavior like scrolling on web pages. Example: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

Yes! It seems like these are always only tested on one browser and OS too so it's broken for like 90% of the people. Super slow and awkward scrolling or just choppy and confusing.

Got to agree. It's possibly the worst website I've ever seen. Besides maybe the iPhone 5C bright green scrolling background madness. Apple these days seems to be leading the charge on terrible design when it used to be pretty good at it. Pity.

Luckily their hardware design is still good (laptops and phones anyway), but I guess that's only because they haven't 'redesigned' them yet. Pretty sure it will be a train wreck if they try to do that too.

> Things culminated with iOS7’s release which took the concept of flat design mainstream.

Yeah, Windows 8 and Android are pretty niche.

iOS 7 was one of the last major hold outs so Apple adopting a flat design approach after Windows 8 and Android could be considered the culmination.

Less than 25% of the mobile market is hardly a "major hold out."

It depends how you look at it. Worldwide you are right but Android dominates largely due to the availability of cheap handsets (most of which aren't running the latest Android with the modern flat design style).

In the US iPhone is 40% of the market and considering that 80=90% of users have upgraded to iOS 7 the number of iOS users that are using the flat design compared to the number of Android users with flat design is probably a lot closer than market share would indicate.

Also, although they have less than 25% of the market they are still the second largest manufacturer which in my opinion makes them a 'major hold out'.

iOS7's transition to flat design was behind both Android and Windows 8, and clearly followed them. I think the point the author is trying to make is that Apple, the biggest proponent of stylized, squeomorphic design moving to flat UI behind Google and Microsoft was really the final defeat of brushed metal and rich leather in UIs.

> squeomorphic

This is a beautiful typo of skeuomorphic. It makes it feel more squicky.

If you want to see the future, look to the past...right? With all of the advances in JS/CSS features and performance I would expect that a lot of the garish 90's Flash "enhancements" will make a return beyond some of the simple scrolling and animation touches we see now.

Full 3D spinning cube navigation, automatic audio playback, loading screens, constant page/background animations, etc. It's all going to come back in some way, and that's not some sort of wishful thinking on my part.

Having watched and been a part of the evolution of the web during the rise of Macromedia, what we're seeing now with CSS and JS is very similar to the simple SWFs people were putting together back then. Once everyone gets comfortable with the way things work, it's going to evolve.

Sorry to be negative, but I didn't find any real predictions here, just statements about what is happening now, each followed by "...and I think that will continue in 2014."

be careful they will vote you down.

I hope for a return of text instead of icons. Text is less ambiguous, does not require guessing, is accessible and clean.

But doesn't translate. Quite literally.

Website colours will begin to standardise a little bit my imagination tells me white backgrounds with black text are in.

it's true that "Living and breathing the space gives you the background to draw on using intuition" but, at the same time, that's one of the reasons people tend to miss disrupting changes: they are simply so far out what they are used to they don't even consider them possible.

am I the only one who doesn't like envato?

from a web design point of view I believe their popularity is keeping designers from innovating. the whole portfolio is polished but extremely repetitive.

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