From AI to Motion UI: What trends determine the future of web development

What’s in store for web development in 2019? Artificial intelligence, progressive web apps, Motion UI, and that’s not the end of the list. In this article, we’ve gathered the hottest web development trends to keep you up-to-date. Check these seven web development solutions to improve the usability and performance of your product and knock out the competition.

JavaScript 

Javascript continues to hold leading positions in the web development world. Since the big uptick in 2011, Javascript has been trending on GitHub for the eight years in a row. There are more repositories created in JavaScript than in any other language. 

The recent recent Stack Overflow research also features JavaScript as the most popular programming language. Why has Javascript gone in vogue? 

One of the most significant is that JavaScript enables to create quality websites or apps for the web using only this one language. JavaScript has a few frameworks that broaden the opportunities in building the web. It has become ubiquitous after the release of a Node.js package of libraries for backend development, that started a “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm.

Other strengths of JavaScript are its frameworks for front-end development such as React, Angular, and Vue. Angular is maintained by Google, and React is maintained by Facebook. React serves Facebook, another gigantic platform. The newer Vue.js appeared in 2014 is more flexible than older frameworks and easily integrates with third-party libraries. Hence this framework is more appropriate for smaller applications. Still, it loses points in scalability and reliability because of the template syntax.

Each of the frameworks mentioned has an army of supporters. They will maintain JavaScript's popularity. 

Automated chatbots based on AI

Chatbots are the applications of artificial intelligence that can answer customers' questions in real time. Chatbots can send an automated welcome message, answer user queries, and connect users to human support operators if needed. 

Chatbots bring real benefits to both your business and your internal team:

• boost team productivity: chatbots make communication between teams more efficient helping with onboarding new members, staff training, and technical consultancy.

• cost-effectiveness: chatbot requires far less money than developing a mobile app. Besides, a chatbot helps your business save money on 24/7 call-centers and still provide users with the information they are looking for.

• highly-targeted marketing and increased sales: chatbots help customers purchase goods and services and process the orders within the app. Businesses don’t need anymore to spam their customers with blatant ads, they can just use chatbots to remind customers about sales, special, or recommend things that suit to the items they’ve bought previously.

• improved satisfaction rate: businesses can use chatbots to measure the customer satisfaction level via a request to rate a chatbot’s work or questions like Was this conversation useful? AI chatbots programmed to determine customer mood and react to it appropriately. Moreover, chatbots collect a numerous amount of data about customers such as their preferences, behavior patterns, and ordering history.  

If people can’t reach you at a convenient time for them, they will probably choose a service of your available competitor. None of the businesses wants to be outplaced, so chatbots are still one of the most significant web development trends. 

Blockchain

The blockchain is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way”. This technology was first used for cryptocurrency transactions when the bitcoin appeared. 

Today the crypto market is going down, but the benefits of blockchain remain to be very promising. The blockchain is decentralized and provides a high-security level for the preserved data. It enables users to see the whole history of transactions without revealing its participants. Because of this feature, the technology can bring more transparency to organizations. 

Blockchain is a trend in many industries from banking to medicine and the media. Many companies offer blockchain-based solutions as part of their web development services. Large companies such as IBM have launched blockchain platforms to let software developers deploy their blockchain applications. Medical institutions implement blockchain for supply chain, storing medical data, and hospital administration. 

Progressive Web Apps

Since around 60 percent of all internet traffic comes from smartphones and tablets, businesses have to target customers on mobile devices. Yet, smartphone users started to download fewer applications over the last years. They already have everything they need. 

Progressive web apps (PWA) is a new trend in web development the idea of which is to make websites look and behave like mobile applications. It enables users to open the app by typing URL in a browser and install it without any hassle at the app store.

Progressive Web Apps have a few useful features:

• are always available and load instantly;
• provide people with app-style interactions and navigation;
• users can open them from every browser and device, such as desktop, mobile, or tablet;
• can send push notifications and work offline.

SPA (Single Page Application)

SPAs are interactive websites that don't reload full web pages from a server. They only re-render part of the content in response to user actions. That's why they work faster. 

SPA works similarly to a desktop application, which doesn't take much time to load.

SPAs dramatically improve the websites’ speed as they don’t update the entire page but only required content. This is a huge relief for businesses. Based on Google research, even 200 milliseconds delay in the page load can affect sales.

SPA allows developing a smoother and more controlled UX, hiding web complexity such as requests, responses, etc. These apps are a suitable option for landing pages, which reload faster and involve real-time actions. 

Push notifications

Media uses push notifications very often as it helps to grab readers' attention and make them click on the news. Businesses apply push notifications to:

• inform customers about current promotions or discounts;
• catch-ups or re-engagements to motivate users to use your product more;
• notify customers about the current status of their order;
• send the creative and entertaining content like notifications that repeat the article’s headline posted on the company blog;
• and more.

This way push notifications can improve in-app engagement by 88 percent and convert users into long-term and loyal customers. 

Motion UI

In web-design all matters: fonts, colors, size of elements, and attractive visuals. You have a few seconds to grab the attention of users and make them scroll down the page to get the critical content. And Motion UI copes with this task very well.

Motion UI is an awesome-looking web design tool that allows developers to easily create engaging experiences for users without in-depth knowledge of JavaScript and jQuery. The Motion UI library is full of pre-made CSS classes which means that you can apply them to UX elements as quickly as possible:

• Transitions;
• Animations;
• Series Animations.

All of these effects are built directly into Motion UI. This way Motion UI helps make the animation process extremely simple and time-effective. So this tool is going to remain in demand.

Be up-to-date

Broadly speaking, 2019 is full of technology advancements and new opportunities. Don’t miss a chance to try these trends on your product. Make your team an efficient army and your product an ideal fit for your core market. Put this year to a good use!