Web development is progressing at incredible speed these days and trends that were hot in 2016, today will be considered nothing less than archaic. Users are having more control and power and companies are shifting their services according to the user needs, which may be unpredictable. In this article we will cover the biggest and most promising trends of web development.
Artificial intelligence
AI is something that is shaking modern IT world and companies are competing against each other to hire and maintain the best professionals of the industry. Started by Facebook and Google, artificial intelligence is applied in more and more apps these days allowing devices to think and act more like humans. The basic AI example is face recognition, which is widely used in Facebook photo tagging. The importance of AI is explained by the fact that it allow devices to act independently aka without manpower and this leads to increased efficiency, accuracy and overall better user experience.
Internet of Things
Internet of things is all about making devices smart and enabling them to communicate with each other. We are already familiar with smart houses and are now having more and more devices that make our life easier and are capable of collecting any data that can be collected.
As for web development, in the future developers may want to work on the apps that would allow to remotely control household devices and would help in device communication and data analysis.
Rise of JavaScript
JavaScript has been rising since 2016 and its rapid growth allows developers to work on chatbots, virtual reality and many other trending things.
The language grammar and efficiency of writing the apps were improved and overall, JS is now the most popular language among full stack developers.
Static site generators
These generators are able to create website from the text stored in files rather than in databases. This reduces the website loading time, offers better security and makes deployment of content and templates much easier.
Virtual reality
VR is something we normally associate with video games. However, big players (like Google) already started their work on APIs that are designed to help VR transition to the web. As we said, the market is demanding so this year may bring us apps that involve virtual reality (like real estate tours, for example). This innovation may bring user experience on new level and would become a strong marketing advantage for the companies.
GIFS
We know that GIFs are a fun and easy way to use in our messengers and conversations but developers want to take it further and use GIFs in web apps for better engagement with the users. Because the majority of people perceives visual information way better than plain text, videos are incredibly popular these days. However, they also weigh a lot so GIFs are a perfect way to capture attention and at the same time tell a story.
Bots
We are used to boring and old-fashioned bots but 2017 seems to level them up. Now bots are intended to become more personalized in order to provide better user experience, which, again is a huge marketing advantage.
Bots are now able to react more “human-like” and give personalized advice, for example, during shopping. Developers are trying to eliminate the feeling that you are talking to a machine and instead, turn the conversation with a bot into fun and useful process.
As can be seen, the whole web development is moving towards the possible user needs, trying to be proactive. There is a lot to explore and a lot to implement — still, developers’ creativity also play a major role in “likeability” of their app. The best advices we can give is — always listen to your client and don’t try to tailor them to some standards. Every client has individual requirements so your prior task as developer is to understand what they want and together come up with the best way to deliver it.
Source:
Author: Dmitry Budko
Website: hackernoon.com
