As we roll into another year of new COVID variants, new social distancing rules, and constantly updating work from home rules, we caught ourselves thinking about what 2022 will look like for UX (user experience )trends. With more time to reflect at home, designers around the world have had a unique opportunity to come up with innovative products and rebuild existing ones. This year, let’s realign with ourselves and understand who we are as designers and what makes us tick.

For this year’s trends, we’ve rounded up some of the classic as well as up and coming features that we believe will be the biggest UX trends this year 2022.

The average user uses at least 30 apps per month, remembering every password is quite a task. Often, a password is required to be a combination of numbers, special characters, and letters, which makes it more difficult to remember. And when we do forget, it becomes super frustrating as we have to go through the whole “forgot password” routine.

A simple solution is a transition to “passwordless” logins. Passwordless logins work like a charm — logging in through your Google account, social media accounts, fingerprints, iris scans, or phone unlock patterns that are just a few taps away!

Microsoft is an example of a brand that has worked hard on removing passwords. Microsoft’s Windows 10 Version 2004 introduced a solution called “Windows 10 Hello,” a biometric system to sign in. Users can now sign in using fingerprint, iris scan, face scan, or a pattern.

Biometric authentication is one technology that can embrace a security-first approach for both the businesses and the users, thus improving User Experience substantially. The promising biometric authentication market has been giving identity to people without being at risk of being impersonated.

Scrolling is an interaction of the past; apps and websites are rapidly moving towards the idea of ‘scrollytelling’. In this experience, the user sees each element on the page come to life through micro-interactions and creative storytelling through the action of scrolling down. There are no clicks, no hassle of choice, and no pop-ups.

Users are no longer interested in seeing a long page filled with information; they want to be a part of the narrative — much like in a video game. Scrollytelling does exactly this by providing a more immersive way to engage users.

This interaction requires designers to not only create cool visuals, but to also think of the story that we want to share, it’s plot, and the people we are telling it to.

Air Gesture Control is a touchless mechanism that allows users to control their devices through bodily gestures and air movements. Movements such as waving, pinching, opening of the palms, sliding or swiping, can all be used to initiate various actions. An example of this is users showing their palms to their mobile phones to open the front-facing camera and capture a selfie.

The Google Pixel 4 is fitted with a motion-sensing radar to facilitate many of these touchless interactions, making it a one of its kind device. We will see air gesture control being integrated across the board in 2022 as touchless interactions continue to gain traction in wake of an onslaught of yet more variants of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With people spending more time on their devices than ever before, screen sizes have been drastically increasing. Companies like Google have begun to adapt and optimize their design systems to respond to these new requirements.

This will have a knock-on effect on the entire industry with other competitors looking to jump on the train to compete with Material Design based applications. The rise in popularity of foldables and tablets will mean a greater number of designs for all form factors, and layout and component based responsiveness across devices. We all know that design based considerations are different for mobile and web. 2022 could just be the year to herald in a new age of synchronous design across screen sizes.

Advanced personalization makes use of emotive and sensory design in order to fine-tune technology to every need and want of an individual user.

Personalized UX is a very powerful tool for designers and businesses alike — we have all experienced it via what appears in our Netflix feed, the types of ads we see on Instagram, or the related products that appear while browsing through Amazon.

Not just from a user experience standpoint, but when users see personalized options, they are more likely to convert. In a world where we’re overwhelmed with options every time we open a device or website, personalization can make all the difference in what products we choose to accept into our lives.