10 Must-Know Front-End Development Trends

When you don’t follow the new tools and technologies that appear on the market you risk lagging behind your competitors. The IT industry is continuously evolving, so, in order to keep up with your competitors you should always be ready to learn something new. To help you stay ahead of the game, we’ve made up a list of 10 front-end development trends.

1. Trending Front-End Development Languages

JavaScript has been one of the most widely used programming languages for the past 10 years, as it has so many frameworks and libraries to choose from. It still remains one of the top programming languages for front-end development projects nowadays.

Another trending language, WebAssembly, appeared not long ago but is rapidly evolving. The greatest thing about WebAssembly is that it is not a stand-alone language but a low-level assembly-like language with a compact binary format that runs with near-native performance and supports languages such as C/C++, Rust, Elixir, Python, Go, C#/.Net, and Java. It is also now supported by all major browsers, which makes it much more accessible to web developers.

2. Static Websites

Static websites are a new old front-end development trend. It seemed like static websites were forgotten, however, they are coming back and gaining popularity. Simply put, static websites are cheaper to develop and are safer and faster than dynamic websites. Static websites do not require any back-end development or database configuration and can be created by simply building a few HTML pages and publishing them to a web server.

3. Progressive Web Apps

Progressive web apps are one of the key front-end development trends these days. PWAs are created for extremely smooth and fast user experience to increase customer conversion rates.

Progressive web applications are built with a single codebase and are enhanced with modern APIs to deliver native-like capabilities, reliability, and installability. They are fast as the main part of the data is stored in the cache, which means they load in a matter of seconds, and what is more, they can work offline. Also, if your business doesn’t require a comprehensive mobile app solution you may choose a progressive web app.

4. Single-Page Apps

Single-page applications are gaining popularity in front-end development because they are faster and cheaper to develop. In addition to that, they are not overloaded with lots of content and complex navigation. To find all the necessary information you are looking for, you just need to scroll down the page. One more advantage is that single-page applications are more mobile-friendly than conventional mobile apps, even though they offer limited functionality. Since simplifying everything is one of the main trends today, there is a chance that single-page apps will be on top in 2020.

5. Motion Design

Motion UI is a new way of communicating with the audience. Animations make the website more eye-catching and improve user experience, thereby, increasing conversion rates.

First impressions matter. Customers judge your company within their first few seconds of interaction and their judgment is often based on visual appearance. When used correctly, quality graphic design not only helps to catch users’ attention but also conveys valuable information. The key thing here is to keep the balance between “too much” and “not enough”.

6. Accessibility (a11y)

Accessibility, or a11y, is a principle that says computer systems should be available to all people, regardless of disability type or severity of impairment. Websites must now work properly for those who use screen readers or those who can’t easily use a mouse.

Though accessibility is an emerging trend, soon, all websites will be required to meet ADA requirements – making accessibility a compliance issue, not just a “nice to have.” In many countries, for example, in the USA, it is no longer an option, it is a legal requirement. This means web designers and developers will have to become accessibility experts as well.

7. Micro Frontends

Front-end is still largely more monolithic than the back-end. Micro frontends are designed to help with this problem. They are supposed to help split your front-end architecture things into smaller, more manageable pieces.

Each team can get autonomy over the lifecycle of their micro frontend so that every part could be developed, tested, updated, and deployed independently.

However, front-end developers are puzzled by issues like the deployment of separate frontends. There are tools to help you isolate, test, and update separate components. Though such tools are already used to gradually restructure parts of existing apps via components, they are mainly helpful when working with multiple apps.

8. Framework-Agnostic Web Components

Framework-agnostic web components allow working without a framework or with any framework-spelling standardization. These web components are free from JS fatigue and supported by most browsers. Because their bundle size and consumption are optimal, virtual DOM rendering will be great. Framework-agnostic web components provide front-end developers with  Custom Element, a Javascript API, that lets you define new kinds of HTML tags and HTML templates depending on the layout you need.

9. AI and Chatbots

Technologies are gradually replacing human assistance. A large share of customer interactions is already carried out without talking to a live person on the company’s end. Chatbots play the key role in this transition. There are already plenty of chatbots out there and users are no longer bewildered when a chatbot, not a human, responds to them. However, the quality of such interaction needs improvement.

Thanks to the continuous evolution of artificial intelligence, we are already seeing significant improvements in the quality of chatbots. Artificial intelligence already fosters the development of new front-end tools and technologies, so, we may expect that chatbots will cut through many routine tasks.

10. Low-Code Development

Low-code app development trend has been rapidly growing over the past few years allowing developers to build the apps with a minimum of hand-coding and with the focus on the most important aspects: user experience. Thus the use of low code platforms plays an important role in front-end development as they can help save time on building graphical user interface and configuration, thus, reducing the amount of traditional hand-coding and enabling accelerated delivery of business apps.

Low-code platforms act as a bridge between the interface visible to users and the developer who has to deal with coding, data and other technologies to build the app.

Bottom Line

Generally speaking, every 2020 front-end development trend is worth your attention. Some of those trends will continue growing for the next decade while others will become a norm in the coming months. If you are going to update your product in 2020 it would be wise to look through these trends and see which one can be useful for your project. In case you need to hire front-end developers you can contact us for help.