Ecommerce website design is expected to see considerable continued change this year – not least the move to a firmly ‘mobile-first’ approach. Web design may be a slow-moving discipline, but we certainly expect significant evolution – at the very least – in how designers think about the design process.
Here are three of the trends we anticipate.
- Web design becomes mobile design
- Hamburgers head left
- Long scrolling and continual loading
Articles about web design written a few years ago frequently mention the importance of creating a responsive or adaptive design for your site, so that a site intended to be viewed on a desktop computer can be accessed and used easily on a mobile device as well.
That idea is increasingly being turned on its head, with many ecommerce sites being designed to be mobile first and then made responsive for larger screens, in acknowledgement of the tendency for many customers today to shop on the mobile rather than desktop versions of online stores.
A hamburger menu, in case you aren’t aware, is the button or icon consisting of three horizontal lines that can be clicked or tapped to open up a side menu with various navigational options.
While a hamburger menu can appear on either the far left or far right of a page, there is an emerging tendency for Google and other leading sites to prefer the left. This makes the menu one of the first things a user notices about a site, even when they are using an assistive device such as a screen reader.
When you are designing a site for mobile users, it can sometimes make the most sense to have objects added to the current view as they scroll down, instead of loading a completely new page or view.
This is increasingly leading to web designers creating pages that scroll to considerable lengths, with portions of a page only being loaded as and when the user scrolls down to them.
In the case of your own ecommerce site, you may do this with your product category pages, having 100 or more products on one page but only loading 10 products at a time to keep page load times short and site performance high.
With these and so many more ecommerce website design trends likely to affect how you should approach the creation of your own new site, here at Piranha Designs, we can advise you on the most relevant of them when you take advantage of one of our ecommerce site design packages. Simply enquire now to find out more.
