Today’s world requires businesses to adapt to new market conditions. Industries that haven’t been digitized before are experiencing a profound digital transformation now. The business website has become the obligatory requirement of staying competitive in the new, more “digital” normal. It helps connect customers and companies, promote products and services, communicate the brand’s mission and values, and make the first evaluations of the team’s professionalism.
As the heart of the world’s digital innovations, Singapore nourishes emerging technologies and gives birth to some new trends grasping the global web development industry. How will websites look in the 2020s? What new web standards and trends are running supreme now and awaiting Singaporean online businesses in the nearest future? Let’s consider major web development trends in Singapore in detail.
Single-Page Apps Are Gaining Momentum
Single-page applications (SPAs) offer a much more enjoyable user experience, help avoid interruptions caused by the page reloading, and provide better overall performance. They are highly responsive and smoothly run on different user devices. Many website developers recommend SPAs as an optimal option for companies with a website supporting desktop, tablet, and mobile applications. With the rise of Angular and React, SPAs are predicted to become even more popular since these JavaScript frameworks are the most appropriate for building hybrid and cross-platform applications.
Motion UI Provides More Interactive UX
Animations in the user interface design are expected still to gain popularity in 2020 and the following years. Turning a traditional website into a more interactive user experience, motion UI has become a new competitive feature that helps online businesses stand out from competitors, create a lasting impression, engage users, and acquire new customers. Dynamic graphics and motion design can transform a website into an exciting story about a brand, its personality, and its values. Web animations allow companies to build a bright and stylish image that speaks about the company’s professionalism and innovative thinking.
Progressive Web Apps Are in the Limelight
Progressive web applications (PWAs) are a type of app software built on HTML, CSS, or JavaScript and can work on any platform that uses a standards-compliant browser. They combine the advantages of web and mobile applications. Developed using web technologies, a progressive web app acts and feels like a mobile app.
PWAs empower businesses to deliver a seamless and app-like user experience through the mobile web. They take advantage of the mobile application’s characteristics, offering higher user retention rates, faster loading, and better performance without plenty of the difficulties involved in mobile app maintenance.
Chatbots Become The Necessity of The Modern CX
Today, we can witness the fast expansion of chatbot technologies on websites of different industries across the web. From eCommerce and SaaS businesses to B2B companies to non-commercial organizations — brands are actively incorporating chatbots to enhance the user experience, increase customer loyalty, and grow user satisfaction from interacting with a brand online.
With the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, chatbots have become much “smarter.” They can recognize the user’s intent better, continuously learn from the user’s questions to provide relevant answers, account for each user’s entire conversation history when it interacts with them, and offer them more human-like interactions.
User Behavior Tracking Amplifies UX Research
Along with a buzz around user data collection, user behavior tracking has also attracted the attention of the tech community. Today, we can see the emergence of new conversion optimization tools (CRO) that allow webmasters to monitor user interactions on a website, including clicks, scrolling, tapping, and more. Some CRO tools allow heat-mapping the entire user journey. It enables companies to see how their customers navigate between pages, scan content, interact with UI elements, and what they find inconvenient or confusing on a website. By integrating CRO tools with a website, companies can obtain insights and collect qualitative data that are very beneficial for web development.
Horizontal Scrolling Changes the Concept of Site Exploring
Web development trends and concepts are quickly changing, being substituted by entirely new ones. As well, the standards of exploring the website by users are subject to change too. Along with more traditional up-to-down scrolling, horizontal website scrolling is becoming popular also. This new way of site scanning allows companies to present the content in a format similar to a book. This web development trend is rapidly gaining momentum as users quite easily adopt this innovation. Probably, in a year or two, scrolling from left-to-right will become a new standard of content presentation on the web.
Voice Search Optimization Becomes More Important
At the digital transformation age, enterprises are witnessing the emergence of many technological innovations, and voice-based assistants are one of them. After hitting the Internet of Things, voice-powered technologies have also started diffusing in other industries, including web development.
Since humanity is now equipped with intelligent devices, we use voice to control them and search for the information on the worldwide web. Voice searches are becoming a huge source of web traffic that can’t be ignored by SEO specialists. Voice search website optimization is a highly advisable measure in the new normal. It can help e-businesses multiply traffic, cover broader audiences, and acquire new customers.
Longreads Offer Better Readability
You might already be familiar with longreads as a trend of previous years. Offering a more convenient way of perceiving information, they still are popular today in the digital space. The longread represents the content intuitively and makes it easy-to-read. It usually includes the text combined with images, GIFs, animations, and icons that help to tell a story in a simple format. Longreads are particularly useful for representing huge chunks of content as they significantly increase readability and user understanding.
Push Notifications Are Even More Helpful
We used to receive push notifications from mobile applications. However, they have also become a website trend. Have you ever noticed a sign at the top of a web page asking for your agreement to send you updates? These are web notifications.
Push notifications constitute a new way of how brands can communicate with customers, update them about key information, announce sales, and motivate them to take specific actions. It’s a new kind of call-to-actions on a website that can significantly grow conversion rates and multiply sales if used appropriately. Companies should learn how to use them unobtrusively and transform website notifications into a whole art of communication with web visitors.
Minimalism Is Becoming The Web Design Classics
Minimalism has been widely used in recent years, and it has also gained a massive appraisal today. It has become a recommended web design standard as it keeps everything clear, easy-to-understand, and intuitive — that are the main requirements and preferences of modern users. Minimalist layouts help avoid the user’s cognitive overload and allow them to get into the main content idea and understand brand (or product) essence more quickly. Still using graphic elements and animations, web designers mostly try to keep them simple and not overuse them to prevent cluttering a user interface.
Conclusion
Web design and website development in Singapore are rapidly evolving, injected by a dose of innovations and emerging trends. From single-page apps, animations, progressive web apps, user behavior tracking, and horizontal scrolling to voice search optimization, longreads, push notifications, and minimalistic layouts — these are the most popular web development trends influencing the way customers interact with companies online. Incorporating them into your business website wisely allows you to ensure a distinguishable web presence and innovative-looking brand image. Hopefully, these insights will help you navigate in the modern web development trends and build your own remarkable website.
