Keeping up with the latest web development trends can seem harder than keeping up with the Kardashians. It also doesn’t help that new web development technologies and trends almost seem to pop up overnight, making your task as a decision-maker harder.
But if you want to make a mark in the digital world, there’s simply no other way to do so than matching a step with the latest web design and development trends. Today, engaging with your customer is a crucial requirement for success in the online world, and adopting innovative web development trends can help you acquire and grow customers.
But we also realize you need to run a business, which is why as, we’ve put together the hottest web development trends in 2022 by looking back at past trends, their impact, and how they shaped customer experience and expectations.
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7 Web Development Trends in 2022 to Watch Out For
PWA (Progressive Web Applications)
PWAs are not new, the term was coined back in 2015, but their impact on the web development scene is becoming more apparent by the year. PWA is a website that offers functions usually considered part of mobile applications, viz. hardware access (camera), offline usage, push notifications, etc.
As you might’ve guessed, a PWA aims to offer the user experience of a native mobile app but through a website, and there are sound reasons to do so. As this report shows, over half of the worldwide web traffic has come from mobile devices since 2017. There’s also the fact that mobile users, on average, spend over four hours a day using mobile apps.
You canhire dedicated developers teams to build PWAs as they’re free from common issues plaguing most websites, viz. slow, inconsistent experience, lack of offline and hardware access. Companies that have used PWAs successfully to improve their user experience and conversion rate include Alibaba, Virgin America, and The Washington Post.
Voice Search Optimization
We already know that accurate and anticipatory search is a huge draw with online shoppers. But did you also know that a significant chunk, 30% if you go by Gartner, of user searches will be driven by voice by 2022?
This trend is likely to be amplified in the coming years, thanks to the rising penetration of smart speakers in markets worldwide. For instance, in the US alone, almost 90 million adults have smart speakers, representing over 30% of the consumer base.
As a result, the US and the UK markets alone are expected to clock over $40 billion in voice-driven online shopping by 2022. Some benefits of voice search optimization that will propel this growth include saving the user’s time and understanding your customer’s behaviour and preferences.
With natural language processing expected to make great strides in the near future and the rise of API-driven development, voice search optimization is one web development trend you simply cannot ignore.
A blanket statement can be dicey to make unless you’re talking about interconnectivity. One can safely say that the future will revolve around ecosystems where different devices, technologies, and solutions interact to offer a seamless user experience.
With mobile phones becoming more powerful and the rise of wearables and smart devices, the need is for web development solutions that help these different devices interact and integrate with one another. This is where API-driven development comes into the picture.
Unlike the traditional approach, API-driven development is more agile, which allows your web development teams to work in parallel, reduce your ‘Go to market’ times, and cut app development costs. With API-driven development, you can hire dedicated developersteams to build web applications with interconnectivity and a seamless user experience at their heart.
AI Chatbots
The web development trends discussed here are geared towards providing better customer experiences, none more so than chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. As businesses extend their reach across multiple and diverse time zones, providing instant and quality customer experience is difficult and costly.
At the same time, human-powered customer support has a narrow scope. For instance, it cannot come to the rescue of a customer who’s unable to make up their mind about a purchase or needs help with product recommendations.
These gaps in customer experience can be bridged by AI chatbots, which offer instant and 24×7 support for your customers, before and after purchase. Such chatbots use machine learning, consent-based user data, and analytics to learn more about your customer while answering FAQs, offering product recommendations, taking an order, and even connecting them to human support.
Motion UI
Visual elements are an essential part of user experience, with 84% of customers considering a website’s design as important to their purchase decision as the product it offers, according to one Salesforce report. But there’s more to website design than just fancy pictures or eye-catching palettes.
Good website design comprises responsive and intuitive user interfaces that your customers will keep coming back to. This is precisely what Motion UI can help you achieve with its vast front-end library that proves handy when creating animated and customizable UI elements.
Based on extensive research, Motion UI uses visual cues to guide your customers towards what they need to do on a particular page on your website or application. Apart from creating a more fluid user experience, the UI also makes it easier for your web application to respond to the user’s actions.
Low-code development is a web development trend that focuses on the business side of things. It’s a visual approach to building websites and web applications, whereby you can abstract and automate each step of the application development process.
This streamlines and speeds up the delivery of different software solutions. It’s hardly a surprise then that over 65% of application development activity is poised to follow the low-code route by 2024, as per Gartner.
The ability to piece together software using building blocks frees up your custom web application development company team from having to code every feature and functionality by hand. This has a direct bearing on your application’s development time, access control, and costs.
Given the dynamic nature of market trends and user preferences, low-code development is a valuable weapon to have in your web application development arsenal.
Cloud Technology
Businesses across different sectors had already started to recognize the importance of the cloud before 2020. But the past year has catalyzed that recognition into rapid adoption, with Flexera’s status of the cloud report finding that 98% of businesses have at least one public or private cloud component in their processes.
With benefits such as greater scalability, quicker time-to-market, delegated maintenance, and cost-effectiveness, cloud computing offers a bouquet of opportunities for web development. For instance, it can help you build web applications with dynamic UIs, more reliability, and data security.
Customer expectations in 2022 have been influenced by the events of the preceding year. A mobile-centric user experience, interconnectivity, cloud-centric technology, interactive UI design, and artificial intelligence will not only help you meet these constantly changing expectations now but also in the future, beyond 2022.
To know more about how web development trends can help increase your user engagement and overall customer experience, talk to our experts now.
Named as a top web application development company USA by TopDevelopers.co, we’d be happy to talk about the intersection of web development and customer experience and which technologies are suitable for your purpose.
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Responsible for developing and managing web presence, Sarah has been associated with eLuminous Technologies for 7+ years. Strategic and innovative with a passion for Content Marketing and enhancing brand awareness. Administered all business marketing operations and advertisement campaigns that eventually increased web traffic. She works under the motto “Think like a Publisher, not a Marketer.”
