Most businesses are now considering having a web presence as an essential part of their marketing scheme. As web apps allow businesses to reach out to the wider audience all over the world while staying open and accessible all round the clock, web app development is gaining popularity among businesses of all sizes and niches. Naturally, too many enterprises now have considered building web app development as part of their marketing strategy.
Here in this post, we are going to explain the key benefits of building web apps and after that, we are going to explain some of the most important trends in web app development.
Key Benefits of Web Apps for Businesses
Though the important benefits of building web apps are well known to many of us, in the context of discussing the web app development trends, we feel it necessary to have a look at the important benefits once again.
- Enhanced operational efficiency for businesses.
- Round the clock availability.
- Optimum data security.
- Having a presence across multiple device and OS platforms
- Highly customizable user experience and scalable capability to accommodate evolving requirements.
- Easier installation and maintenance.
- The minimum cost of development.
- Easily expandable with tools and extensions.
- Optimum data security.
Key Trends in Web App Development
Now that we have come to know about the most important benefits of web app development for businesses, it is time to take a quick look at the key development trends that dominate building web apps. Here we have picked some of the most dominant web app development trends of our time.
- Faster Loading Speed
There are no bigger requirements in the world of web app development than the faster loading speed. Faster loading speed directly impacts the user experience of a web app and accordingly impacts the business conversion for enterprises. Moreover, most of the leading web search engines are partial towards fast loading websites just because they offer a better user experience.
Google search engine directly rewards the fast loading speed of the web apps. Google considers faster loading time a crucial consideration for ranking websites.
Another important reason for the web apps to give increased emphasis on loading speed is that the attention span of the web audience is increasingly decreasing. Most users are impatient to wait longer than a few seconds for a web page to load.
Lastly, as most web browsers access websites and web apps through their mobile browsers and on the go, faster loading speed is crucial to keep them engaged. It is understandable that mobile users are more impatient and show more reluctance to stick to a website taking too much time. This is why offering optimum loading speed is crucial for web development.
- Motion UI
Apart from speed, trying other means to keep users engaged on a web page is extremely crucial. The actual goal of any web page is to deliver the optimum user experience. One of the crucial ways to improve user experience is to utilize the scope of motion in the User Interface. Widely regarded as Motion UI, this is going to be a lasting web development trend in the months to come.
Motion is UI can actually create a perception of performance which creates similar impacts as the actual performance. It is important for websites to create a feel of fast-paced loading. By using loading animations and small micro-interactions developers can easily create such perceived performance.
The motion in the user interface created by the simple animations often is proved to be highly effective in delivering great user experience. On the other hand, you must know where to stop. Maintain a balanced approach in introducing a motion in the user experience to deliver a fluid user experience.
- Chatbot Interactions
Almost every website and mobile apps representing businesses are now opting for automation and intelligent chatbots for communicating with their customers and visitors. Both automation and intelligent communication based on AI-powered tools are going to be the biggest web development trend in the years to come.
AI chatbots can really help websites to do away with many functions and features or the manual support for which they needed to maintain a workforce. Though AI is far from taking over the web development tasks from the developers, they are increasingly playing a great role in delivering optimum maintenance and support and making people engaged by solving visitor queries.
- Voice Search and Voice Interactions
Thanks to the mobile browsing habit that offers less scope for typing and more opportunities for easier voice commands for all sorts of actions, voice search, and voice interactions became a popular and consistent feature of many websites and web apps now including that of mobile web search engines like Google.
Almost all leading web apps across the niches including stalwarts of e-commerce and other service niches now facilitate voice search and voice commands for finding contents and products. The introduction of smart speakers such as Google Home and Amazon Alexa that allow voice search for news and web content makes this even trendier than ever before.
- Citizen Development and Low-code Development
Some call it as low-code development while others call this self-service development or citizen development. Whatever be the name of this increasingly popular web development trend, this is going to dominate the web development scene for the years to come.
Since building a fully-fledged and well-featured app is always time-intensive and cost-intensive many small businesses simply cannot afford them. Instead, they can just use some third-party tools and with little development, skills can prepare a simple yet effective solution that perfectly addresses their need. This trend of self-service IT solutions is increasingly getting popular that are offering relief to small businesses that can afford large in-house IT departments.
- Progressive Web Apps or PWA
Nurtured and created by Google, the concept of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have become extremely popular just because they combine the flexible advantages of both traditional websites and mobile apps. Actually, users just use their regular browsers and access a website but they can save the website like a dedicated app on their screen, access contents offline, and use device features while using the website.
As mobile apps take a lot of mobile screen real estate and storage space besides drawing a lot of battery power of the device, a PWA by offering both the features of mobile apps and flexibility of websites make a nice solution. In the months to come, this can be the way to go for all those small businesses who want to have their mobile presence besides having a website for the brand.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP
This is another gem of a project from the house of Google. Launched a few years ago Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) created faster loading of web pages and mobile apps across all devices. Google already pushed its plan to advance and popularise the technology and in effect, the web pages that embraced AMP have experienced a quick increase in their traffic volume.
As faster loading speed and glitch-free performance across all devices are extremely becoming crucial for the user experience and search engine ranking of websites, AMP as technology is likely to gain popularity in the months to come.
- Website Data Security
Hacking efforts and malicious intrusions in websites are increasing with every passing day. Naturally, maintaining optimum data security and safeguarding the information of the users are strong priorities for the web developers across the niches.
As hacking efforts are increasingly getting sophisticated and more well-equipped, web developers today have to give increased emphasis on the set of measures intended to make data security better.
Conclusion
All the above-mentioned web development trends we explained here just represent the present scenario and the priorities of the websites across niches. Website space is tremendously evolving to accommodate new changes and approaches and so there can always be additions and alterations with this list of trends in the months to come.
