User Interface and User Experience design trends face the uphill task of keeping online content optimized alongside changes in technology. What makes it difficult is that the changes must also retain functionality for older devices. UI and UX designers need to keep pace with technology evolution to insure their audiences have a good experience with their content. The following five trends in UI and UX are set to shape development and design in the near future.

Designing to browser performance

Designers and developers often find themselves working with computers, tablets, and smartphones that offer them better performance than most users who consume their content. If a website or application looks beautiful, but takes forever to load and offers sluggish performance on less powerful devices, the audience is going to stop using the product. Since UX is heavily invested in "how" a website works, UX designers are looking into concepts like load times, time to interactivity, and first paint in simulated environments. A site may run well on an iPhone XS on a fiber WiFi connection, but an iPhone 7 user on a slower 4G connection may have a sub-par experience.

Using design to improve storytelling

UX and UI are poised to work with content to better tell a story. This isn't just for articles or actual stories, but also involves marketing campaigns and sales pitches. Some of the ways UX is assisting in better telling stories is to use imagery and white space to break up content for easier consumption. UI is working with functional animations and using other visual effects to work alongside content.

Implement load transitions

UX and UI designers have previously ignored the time between actions and page loads as empty space that exists because of technical limitations. However, with the development of new CSS capabilities, single-page web applications, and PWAs, that's really not the case anymore. UI designers can make a more visually appealing experience out of what was previously considered unusable space. As far as UX is concerned, load transitions improve the user experience by letting the user know the next page/option is loading with a visual cue.

Utilize vibrant colors

More recently released desktop monitors, laptop screens, and mobile device displays are more likely to feature better contrast ratios and more visible space, which make vibrant colors more appealing. On older, lower contrast displays, vibrant colors didn't make as much of a strong visual impression, so UI designers would ignore them and stick with established web-safe colors. The newer screens let UI designers create better artistic experiences.

Embrace device agnostic design

Device agnostic design is the next evolution in responsive design. Responsive design emerged to let web developers create a single site for every device class instead of having to build three sites to house exactly the same content. However, responsive design trends used to assume that users on a smaller display would be using touchscreen controls and users on larger displays would be using mouse-based controls. With touchscreen laptops like the Microsoft Surface and tablets with "stylus" input like the iPad Pro, designers can no longer make that assumption. All screen sizes need to be designed with touch capabilities in mind and interactions like mouseover/hover won't be used for necessary interactions. It's essential for website and application designers to keep up with UI and UX trends to find ways to improve their content. Both UI and UX are developing on-going practices that constantly offer ways to improve content presentation.