Apply the Top UX/UI Design Trends to Make Your Device’s Software Stand Out
It is essential to pay attention to emerging user experience trends in regard to your medical product. User experiences for software serving the medical industry have traditionally run a bit behind the consumer-based user experiences found in the apps people interact with daily. There is a good reason for that: Medical software typically needs to focus more on usability in life-critical environments that demand a very straightforward interface design.
Companies often fail to improve their user experience to avoid associated design and development costs. Your software experience may work well enough, or you have little competition for your product. Allowing your user experience to fall behind allows an opportunity in the market for a better-designed product to come along and unseat your position in the industry.
Awareness of user trends and planning for continual improvement to your product’s user experience can ensure your place in the industry and even elevate it.
The Most Significant UX Developments Influencing Medical Products
Evolving visual design trends
One of the most widespread recent interface design trends is the evolution toward a more visually rich representation of information and interface controls. This visual change can be good or bad, depending on how far you take it. Flat design has been the reigning UI design style for almost a decade now. It thankfully replaced many of the detailed interface design textures that the original iPhone gave us with more crisp and clear interface design elements. One drawback was the occasional difficulty of distinguishing between information and items to interact. Google evolved flat design into material design, which reintroduced a bit more 3D depth and elements such as drop shadows to allow the user to see information in layers. These improvements were an excellent step to improve the user’s ability to comprehend interactive features. Like everything, UI design has started to evolve again. There are now gradients, abstract shapes, and softer UI elements to identify interactive features further and add a fresh visual appeal.
This new style is called neumorphism, a bridge between the more straightforward visual design of material design and the texture-rich design of skeuomorphism.
Neumorphism is an exceptionally modern looking design style. It looks like what the future is supposed to be. Clean, simple, and with a softer visual affordance to interactive elements. The look fits right in with medical devices, but the subtle nature of the visual design could pose a problem to usability. By constraining some softness, you still have a fresh interface that leverages usability with a softer aesthetic.
You can choose less utility-oriented screens giving way to a higher degree of design flair. Paying attention to the aesthetics of your medical product’s user interface will significantly improve your product’s perception and provide a pleasant experience for the end-user.
Improved on-screen animations
With devices such as smartphones employing higher-powered tech, users have become accustomed to more abundant, quality animations. Animations can be complex, illustrated examples of how to do something in your app or as simple animated icons or graphics that convey meaning, also known as microinteractions. Microinteractions are highly useful in guiding and educating the user in an elegant way that is easier to comprehend without using words. Employing animations gives your software application a distinct level of sophisticated while remaining simple to use.
Voice-controlled interfaces
Voice control has been a growing trend, and its evolution will continue as users become more accustomed to using it in software applications. Is it applicable to the medical industry? Depending on the environmental conditions, it could provide an excellent tool to navigate software hands free.
All medical software aims to reduce human error, and voice control could assist users to directly activate specific functions of software without manually navigating a user interface. Imagine a doctor in the operating room who can navigate a software interface displayed on a monitor by voice rather than go through a technician in another room! There are certain instances where there is either a lot of noise or the user is dealing with sensitive information that requires privacy in medical settings. In those instances, voice control might not be appropriate. As technology empowers new methods of interaction and users adopt those methods, it will be fascinating to use more natural experiences using the software.
Augmented and virtual reality
AR and VR have been around for quite some time now but commercial applications are still limited. Like most advanced technology it takes time to mature, develop hardware, and be applied to practical use cases before going mainstream. My experience with AR in the past was cumbersome due to implementation. Today, better hardware exists that allows a medical technician to wear glasses with an integrated informational overlay that helps them perform required tasks. Coupling AR with voice activation could be revolutionary, enhancing user’s abilities and efficiency. Virtual reality is already used in many industries for immersive training in a safe environment, but imagine using it with advanced imagery of a human’s body to see what is going on with the patient! It could also allow a virtual meeting place for experts from other hospitals to assemble to solve a problem.
Artificial intelligence and machine Learning
Artificial intelligence is being employed everywhere in the world of technology. While not a visual aspect of the user experience, it can create more seamless experiences by automating specific tasks, cross-checking information locally and through the cloud, to ensure more accurate results. Facial recognition has gone mainstream and provides a protective security measure for sensitive data, which makes it a great fit for the medical field. Through Siri and Alexa’s use, people have begun to learn to talk to technology and have it talkback, which is part of the new era of interacting with intelligent technology.
Taking advantage of the latest user experience trends depends heavily on what your device has in hardware, chipset, OS software, displays, and other capabilities. Employing a visually fresh interface design with animations can engage and inform users better. Utilizing voice control could completely change the way products are used, and AI could greatly aid human users of your products in real-time. The opportunities technology offers to increase the user’s ability to interact with your device in a simple and intuitive way are endless. If you find just the right way to include them in our device you Finding the right way to include
Keeping your finger on the pulse of these trends can help you stake a unique spot in the marketplace.
