E-commerce Web Design Trends in 2017: Things to know
2016 was the year of material design and responsive design for eCommerce sites. With the year, almost ending, there’s huge buzz going on in designers’ communities regarding the upcoming eCommerce web design trends. Designers from all over the world are found making predictions on which eCommerce design is going to rule in 2017. Predicting the future of design is really a challenging task for any web designer. The web design trend that is popular today might be outdated tomorrow. Nobody knows, what’s going to rule. However, we went through the current state of website design and tried to analyse what aspects of current design state will continue to grow its importance. In this article, we have compiled a list of eCommerce web design trend predictions for the upcoming year that you can work out for your business. Ecommerce Web Design Trends That Will Rule in 2017 More mobile responsive design
A few years back, eCommerce websites were designed keeping desktop in mind. And then the design was made responsive and adaptive to smaller screen mobile devices. But now, the trend has completely changed. With the increase in the number of customers making purchases through their mobile devices, designers have started to think of the site in its mobile form first. This means that, websites will be designed for mobile devices first and then made responsive and adaptive to larger devices. Mobile responsive design includes factors such as large images, buttons and icons, hidden menu bars, use of full width of screen and many more.
Evolution of semi-flat design
Despite a few issues, flat design has been a huge hit in 2016 and loved by many people. However, the popularity of this design trend has already started to decrease now and the design appears to be growing into semi-flat design. Semi flat design makes the designing more engaging, visually more beautiful and attractive and user experience wise, more usable. However, this web design trend keeps the simplicity, functionality and style of flat design. We can expect more changes in this area in 2017. Images, lots of images
Images are the best way to grab your customer attention. Recent research shows that 92.6% of people feel that the visuals are the most influential factor affecting a purchase decision. A site with lots of images to show off your products, services and brands is what customers are going to look for in 2017. Text is good for a site but, too much text included in your website can somehow drive your customer away. Like Malcolm Gladwell said in his bestselling book “Blink”, we’re worse than we initially thought. It turns out that, we don’t take 7 seconds to create a “first impression”; we take an incredible two seconds instead. So, store owners have only 2 seconds time to make a great first impression. Material Design to evolve further
Material design was first introduced in 2014 on Android devices by Google. Since then, the popularity of material design has increased rapidly. It has helped lots companies in the establishment of their brand identity. Today, many online stores have already adopted this design in their eCommerce websites. Some of the material design features include card-like layouts, responsive animations, transitions, and so on. The popularity of material design is going to continue in 2017. This design is surely going to be a huge benefit for eCommerce sites.
Long scrolls with lazy loading
In 2017, long page scroll designs is going to rule. It is somewhat bothersome to keep on clicking next page, especially when you are browsing through mobile devices. On the other hand, it too takes more time to load a new page, so it makes more sense to add more products to the current view page rather than loading a completely new page from both page loading and performance aspect. So in 2017, you are going to see more products in a single page view.
Rich animations and cinemagraphs
Images will continue to be the most important element of web design trend in 2017 and in future too, there’s no doubt on that but, you might also get chance to see more animations, GIFs or cinemagraphs in eCommerce sites. If you want to give an unforgettable user experience to your customers then, animations and cinemagraphs can be the great way to do that. Animations and cinemagraphs may appear in headers to motion graphic demos, 360 videos of products, background images, home page banners, product images and many more. Get ready for more animations and cinemagraphs!
Hamburgers on the left
Hamburger menus have been in the trend for years now and it will continue to be on trend in future too. You might have seen many sites using hamburger menus. Bootstrap is one of the most popular frameworks widely being used by designers all over the world. Sites built using this framework following Bootstrap Nav 3 has hamburger menus on the right. This pattern is widely being followed by other designers too. But, in 2017, you might see a small change in the placement of this menu. Google and many leading sites have started placing their hamburger menus on the left side of their sites. This change was made so that it is the first thing a user finds on the page.
Hand drawn elements
We are likely to see more hand drawn elements used in websites, yes in eCommerce websites too, in 2017. Stock images and graphics have been the designers’ first choice for icons, logos, banners and so on. But, in 2017, we can predict that hand drawn elements are going to be more popular. Incorporating hand drawn elements in websites is a great way of conveying originality as well as giving your customer an individual note about your brand. It creates a strong impact on your customers and makes your brand unforgettable. So, get out of those boring same images for your logos, icons and banners. Design different and be different with unique hand drawn elements.
Large and Flexible Typography
Like 2015 and 2016, 2017 is also going to be a year of large and flexible typography that works great on all kinds of devices from mobile devices to larger screen monitor desktops. Large typefaces send a powerful and assertive message to your customers and have a huge impact on multiple aspects of websites including readability, mood, and user experience and so on. With the increasing number of customers making their purchase through their mobile devices, you should make sure that your website has larger typography easily readable from any mobile devices. This will not only help you build a strong brand identity, but, will also attract your potential customers towards your products. Use of more bright colors
This is the last but one of the important eCommerce design trends I would like to mention. In 2017, we could expect the explosion of more bright colors. Websites are going to focus more on audience demographics. They are going to analyse the specific age group of people that frequents their sites and use the color that matches the preferences of their sites. Brace yourself; lots of bright colors are on their way.
Closing Up, Web design is a slow moving process which keeps on changing. An influential site like Google will introduce a design concept and later on web designers are found incorporating those concepts. There’s no solid way to find out which web design trends are going to fade out, which are going to continue being popular and which are going to appear next year. Even, the sites introducing new design trends don’t have idea whether their design is going to make it or disappear. However, by finding out what was
popular, usable and effective in recent years, we can predict the trends that are likely to be seen in the near future. I hope the above mentioned list of eCommerce web design trends will be a great help for you in 2017. If you have any design trend in your mind that you think will be in use in 2017, then feel free to share it with us in the comment box below. If you are planning to build an eCommerce website for your business or want to redesign your existing one, Nirmal Web Studio can help you. Our team of highly skilled designers always stays updated and follows the latest design trends to deliver your mind blowing websites that converts.