UI/UX Design Trends in 2025

UI/UX design is an evolving industry with unique ideas and solutions to major problems.
This year, we can expect AI to be heavily involved in the industry, creating immersive, adaptive, and empathetic user experiences.

A few design choices are consistently being adopted by designers. This is due to their functional advantages and how users have responded or adapted to them. Their continued use has led to impactful trends. These trends can be applied to keep both your design and UX choices up to date.

Here are 7 trends that can uplift your design functionally as well as aesthetically

1. Bento Grids

Bento grids are a famous choice by designers to create a clean and visually balanced design. This design style was adopted after inspiration was taken from the neatly organized Japanese lunch box called ‘Bento’.

This trend was soon brought into the spotlight for its modern aesthetic and for enabling the creation of visually balanced designs through the use of boxes of varying sizes, each of which could be filled with unique content—ranging from images to chunks of text to design elements

It was realized by designers that this method could be used across almost all screen sizes due to its scalable nature.

Here are a few Benefits of using Bento grids in your design

Flexibility

The content within the Bento grids can be unique and different and can still fit together as a complete design. This is because space is allocated to each grid to be used as a separate area, allowing it to be flexibly utilized for adding content, images, videos, and mockups, thereby creating a unique layout.

Visually Balanced

Though composed of grids and blocks of various sizes with unique content, it creates a layout that appears visually balanced, simple, and efficient, facilitating the structuring of designs.
This is another reason designers prefer Bento grids in websites to create Dynamic yet visually balanced designs.

Responsive

These grids can adapt to different screen sizes from mobiles to desktops, making this a great choice for responsive designs due to its simplicity and flexibility.

Visually appealing

Due to its dynamic nature, this can be a great choice when user interaction is required or to grab their attention to read something important, the grids can be designed dynamically with unique colors and design elements to catch the attention of users.

2.  Micro-Interactions

Over the years, we have seen a major improvement in the user experience by incorporating, adding, and adjusting elements after understanding their effect on the user. The use of micro-interactions has been incorporated as a trend to guide the user’s eye to areas where interaction is needed.

There can be different reasons for the usage of micro-interactions, based on the context and requirements

On Trigger

These are usually micro animations when we click, scroll, swipe, etc. These are typically utilized as indicators that an action needs to be taken in order to move forward.

For example, Swiggy has implemented a simple swipe animation to indicate that users have to swipe to pay and place their order. This has significantly improved their user experience as it avoids accidental clicks and many other websites and products like the example displayed below.

On Hover

On hover micro animations are used widely to indicate a clickable card or elements in a design, they can also be used as a way to lead and create importance and urgency among users to click and complete an action.

Many times, these interactions are also used when we want to avoid overloading information and want more information to be displayed only on hover, this way users can have a distraction-free experience and can choose and read-only topics they are interested in knowing more about.

User Feedback

Micro interactions can play a major role in some applications where we use it to validate users. For example in e-commerce platforms where payments are required. We can majorly notice some loading interactions to showcase processing payment and on completion of payment an interaction with an animating tick to validate the user that their payment was successful.

Here are a few benefits of using Micro interactions

– Helps user stay on track in terms of their progress

– Makes interfaces more Human-like due to its Responsive nature.

– Creates interest and curiosity that can lead users to do actions that are required.

– It can even showcase the Brand attributes and how the platform can be perceived.

– It increases usability of the platform.

3. Gamification

Gamification is a way to turn tasks into a fun & engaging experience for the users. This can help increase usability of an application by engaging users to do their tasks on time and use the app on a regular basis. In most cases, gamification is integrated in an app to do a task and either gain points or coupons that can be used for shopping or other purposes that makes the user more interested to use the application as there is something to gain out of it. Industries like Retail and fitness applications are mainly benefitting from Gamification.

Here are a few benefits of using gamification as a part of UX design

1. It helps boost motivation and productivity. Incorporating setting up challenges and goals helps motivate users to get their tasks done on time and gain confidence. This is a common form of gamification used among productivity and task tracking tools.

2. Gamification also helps in enhancing user engagement especially when used for tasks that are not so interesting to create an exciting experience. Immediate feedback and rewards are ways to keep users engaged while completing a task by giving them instant validation and attention.

3. Another advantage that can be observed is how learning becomes more interactive and exciting with gamification. Most of the learning platforms use this to help users stay on track and not lose interest while taking a course or learning a new skill. One of the biggest examples is Duolingo, which helps users get more excited about their learning.

Conclusion

With increase in demand for good user experience among platforms and products. It is important to create designs that are intuitive and useful to enhance usability and engage users. The trends listed above have significantly contributed to a better user experience and will continue to be used more often to enhance digital experiences.

Want to dive deeper into icon usage and discover the best libraries for your project? Check out our other blogs — ‘3 Best Open-Source Icon Libraries’ and ‘How to Pick a Good Icon Library for Your Project’ — for expert tips and recommendations.

Written by – Shashwathi Rajapur