4 Most Influential Mobile UI Design Trends in 2019

A few more weeks and... “Chin-Chin: Happy New Year!”. Meanwhile, while you were making your final edits to your wish list for Santa and adding a few more lines to your New Year's resolutions list, we've been doing our homework, too. We've run our investigations and come up with our own list: one including the most influential mobile UI design trends in 2019.

Both those trends:

that have timidly stepped on the mobile app design scene this year and will just grow more powerful next year
and those that will emerge in 2019 and quickly take over the “scene”

So, here they are: the 4 major trends to look into and rush to capitalize on next year.

1. Buttonless Screens: From Niche to Norm

Mobile UI designs without buttons have been around for some time, but we somehow didn't consider this would become... mainstream, right?

Just think:

Instagram and its buttonless design that kind of forces you to rely on gestures for swiping through different stories on the page, for moving backward and/or forward
Apple, Samsung, and Google, that are advocating for edgeless, clean screens; they implicitly “force us”, mobile app designers, to drastically trim down our in-app button collections. To remove buttons completely...
all those e-commerce apps that have simplified their checkout processes by... removing the cart button; customers can just drag and drop items into their shopping carts.

Conveniently intuitive, right?

The “buttonless UI” will be one of most prominent mobile UX trends in 2019:

After the “power button & volume button & homepage single button" trio, we'll be witnessing the growth of the “buttonless screen” trend in 2019.

In other words: it's time to rethink your mobile UI/UX designs; to make them more gestures-focused. Which might be as simple as... adding animations to show the gestures that end users need to perform for carrying out specific tasks.

2. Visual and Voice Interfaces Will Work Together

“Will graphical user interfaces ever be taken over by voice user interfaces?” “ is a question on Quora.

On the contrary:

Not only that voice-assisted interfaces (VUI) won't “annihilate” the visual ones, but the 2 of them will... happily coexist starting next year.

Get ready to witness a seamless integration of the two types of UI in 2019's mobile apps!

Or, even better:

Instead of being one of the passive witnesses, how about leveraging this trend, one of the most influential mobile UI design trends in 2019?

How would these apps, supporting a cohabitation of voice and visual interfaces, look like from a user's perspective?

the mic button will become... optional; mobile app users can just utter their questions/commands and the apps will interpret them.
he/she (the user) will be able to speak commands like “Show me the cheapest option and book me...” or “Pick it up!” or “Narrate these 3 chapters to me!” and have the app read a book, book a flight or answer a call

3. Bottom Navigation: One of the Dominant Mobile UI Design Trends in 2019

Which side are you on?

Are you a top navigation or a bottom navigation “fan”?

Well, you can call yourself a “visionary” if the bottom navigation has been your top choice for some time now. It looks like it's going to be one of the prominent mobile app UX design trends in 2019.

Why? Because:

devices will have even larger screens
the single homepage button “rocks supreme” and app users got so used to the swiping gesture
“extreme” convenience is key: all the major buttons should be displayed within reach on the app's screen

And this type of navigation comes down to:

bottom sheets
swipe-up gestures

3.1. Bottom Sheets

Why will bottom sheets become app developers' top choice when it comes to displaying sub-flows?

Because they're highly flexible!

Users get to scroll both vertically, for unlocking more content, and horizontally (carousel), for swiping through similar content with no need to skip screens.

Pop-up dialogues, overflow drop-downs, hamburger side-drawers will start to fade compared to bottom sheets' “all within a swipe's reach” type of convenience.

3.2. Swipe Up Gestures

You'd swipe up to open an app drawer, then swipe up again to go back or to close the app... It's been a while since in-app swipe up gestures have started to “outshine” buttons/bottom tabs.

And they're perfectly fit for bottom navigation.

They enable you, the mobile app developer, to... keep everything“minimalistic” in your app:

the top area (content)
the bottom area (navigation)

Simple, intuitive, convenient. No wonder that this will be one of the most influential mobile UI design trends in 2019.

4. Mobile App Design for Larger Screens

You'll need to swiftly adapt your mobile UI designs to devices with increasingly large screens. They'll be the ones “dictating” how you'll design your mobile apps' interfaces in 2019.

And there are few challenges to expect, consider, and properly prepare yourself for before this trend becomes... a norm:

How will you seamlessly integrate in-app gestures into your mobile apps? “Fully” integrate them, I mean...
Losing buttons/bottom tabs will automatically enlarge the screens and leave you with more screen real estate; how will you fully leverage those enlarged screens?
How will you optimize your apps' UX and UI so that the user can rely on his/her thumb and thumb only to navigate through and perform actions within the app?

The END!

Let's recap, now! Here's your New Year's resolutions list:

"I'll design buttonless user interfaces in all my mobile apps in 2019"
"I'll somehow make voice and visual interfaces work together"
"I'll design “bottom navigation” and swipe-up gestures navigation in my next year's apps"
"I'll adjust and properly adapt my mobile app designs to fit devices with larger screens"

Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

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What Will Be the Most Influential Mobile UI Design Trends in 2019? Top 4

1. Buttonless Screens: From Niche to Norm

2. Visual and Voice Interfaces Will Work Together