*Boy does it die fast.
A designer pondering trends for 2017 on Medium
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Back in 2011 everyone was talking about Responsive Design. The possibility of designing and building one single web experience that was able to fluidly adapt to multiple screen sizes was eye-opening at the time. Interestingly enough, fluid layouts are a native functionality of HTML — but over the years web experiences had been built with too much focus on large, desktop screen resolutions.
We went back to the basics and proudly coined it “Responsive Design”. It was the topic everyone was writing, reading, and tweeting about that year.
Fast forward a couple years and designing websites that are responsive is the new norm. Now we only call out the exceptions, and in many teams, projects and companies, responsiveness is an assumption that everyone makes right from the get-go.
The evolving meaning of words
“Responsive Design” is just an example of adjectives that become unnecessary over time:
We don’t sell an experience as being “intuitive” — we prove it through user testing and positive feedback from customers.
We spend less and less time arguing whether a piece of content should live “above the fold” or “below the fold”; the plethora of screen sizes we see today are quickly making concepts like “the fold” outdated.
We don’t say something is “just two clicks away”; the burden of extra clicking was a bigger problem when interactions were limited to cursor and hyperlinks on a low speed connection.We don’t sell our process as being “human-centered”; it’s an assumption that any capable and successful company these days will bring users to the design process at some level and at some point in the project.
Want another example?
2016 was the year Google decided to remove the label “mobile friendly” from its search results. According to Google’s search team, “85% of all pages in the mobile search results now meet the appropriate criteria and show the mobile-friendly label”. Since the vast majority of mobile results are mobile friendly, there is no need to label them as such.
All websites are now (or should be) “mobile-friendly”, and as a designer you don’t need to keep stressing that over and over when you present your mockups to someone new.
Quickly, our vocabulary shifts and evolves to let us focus on new design challenges.
What words are you crossing out of your daily lexicon in 2017?
What new words will you be adding?
