How to avoid mistakes when learning UX/UI trend
Today I’d like to highlight few important things about learning and adopting UI and UX trends, when most UI trends are likely corresponding to the new instruments and tools for prototyping and ideating, UX trends are going from new research-based and interface design evolution. And these two aspects of the design process have different learning and adoption processes.
How to learn a UI trend
Have you ever wonder why designs on Dribbble made at daily challenges are looking good but the apps UX/UI which you are using day to day looking and working in a really different way? Is it because there’s not much of skilled designers in the world or because clients and product owners are too stick to the conventional design practices and frameworks so they get stuck in “past”? That may or may not be the case at the end of the day. The truth is, Dribbble’s designs are bubbly.They don’t work for real products because it’s a solid image out of context, they don’t disclose the product experience. It’s about UI on steroids and nothing clear about it’s product design. The contrast can be good, the animations look clear but that’s less than enough for a good product.
It’s a very, very close to Stock photos where you have a happy office worker and this image was using to show on hiring marketing campaign how fun and cool it is to work in your office, and now because photographers are developed, their skills and the industry grew, we have a visuals of offices which are looking good but don’t say anything about the company which this office is belongs to. It’s belittling of HR, Office manager, all the people around office vibes to you say that the picture clearly explains everything that the office does, no, there’s much more behind one poor image.
Same with UI’s. Good UI designer, UXd should be able to create any design from Dribbble, but it’s only about skill in your design software.
Now about UI trends
So UI trends are dangerous, and blindly following them can impact the career, especially when a junior designer makes first steps, because it can make a form to overweight the function. Glassmorphism or neo-Brutalism have a certain spirit and it can be only on a surface meet your product, business needs (users’ needs), although they broke Human interface guidelines and/or Material/MaterialU guidelines which juniors might be not good at.
Research on appropriate UI trend for a project should always correspond to what you know about your user, business and tech specs as well.
Although I’m not calling to get rid of trends, just seems to be important to mention that most of the products don’t need them, rather than good UX, so let’s talk about it next.
How to learn a UX trend
Well.. What is actually a UX trend? Would be good to mention that any UI trend is a sub-layer for UX, but that’s just for graphomancy. In the essence UX trend is riding new way to interact with information, inclusiveness for everyone and in every handy way. Voice assistants, chat bot, ADA compliance, VR, AR e.t.c. it’s all good, but even traditional interfaces are developing too! Those are platforms that can help make the information accessible at the right time in the right way. That’s why a lot of apps dying so fast while tried to ride AR (People plays Pokemon GO from 2016, but Minecraft Earth died less than in half of a year), a lot of money can be spent in trying to ride a trend, without deep research and fine business model.
When the deal is on product UX it is responsibility of a designer to pitch the right idea and get rid of unproven. The cost of riding the new undeveloped design trend which even might not fit users need can be critical. The cost of UX trends is higher than UI, and every single UX trend is half less expensive in the next year to implement, so designers can book more time to learn and research it and the final costs will be cheaper.
For an existing product it would be good to measure like did the team optimised the current experience (assume it performs well)?
Now about UX trends
So the general guidance from a man who were doing poor work on pitching trend upfront good UX research of users, guided just by faith and courage, pick a certain trend and spend enough time to be an expert in a trend, it will have a way more valuable than a beginner in every trend. If you want to be good at AR at the moment of writing this note it requires up to 3 months to get familiar with a set of tools for it. What is really valuable about articles on medium with a list of the nodes is that they show all the horizons altogether, cool spot to choose which one inspires you to spend next quarter/half of a year to learn.
Don’t be scared that learning new trend can take half year before qualified implementation (it only means impossibility to learn all the trends at the same degree). After 5 years in design, from the height of a product designer, I can cheer you up by saying, good designer definitely spend more time in learning than in producing.
