Dominant UX trends: Forecast for 2025
What’s happening in UX design in 2025? Are we doing the right things? What’s important to us as UX professionals? What lies ahead in the industry?
We should ask ourselves these when envisioning developing products and designing interfaces fit for 2025. While exploring ideas for staying ahead, delving into current UI trends is a valuable exercise. Yet, we shouldn't limit our focus to the UI. Contemplating the function of UX in 2025 is equally important.
2024 was about trends like AI-driven personalization, ethical design, and inclusive experiences. Generalist UXers, who bring diverse skills, were in high demand due to economic shifts, while generative AI was making design processes faster and more adaptive. We expected growth design to boost engagement through tailored user experiences, and highlighted that an ethical approach was going to be essential to build trust and inclusivity in digital interactions.
Let’s see what changed in 2025.
UX trends 2025
in 2025 we should be on the lookout for the following UX trends:
- AI: Products with AI features and AI-driven tools for UX professionals
- Personalisation
- AR/VR integration
- Voice user interfaces
- Inclusivity as a mindset
- Sustainable design
Products with AI features
We can’t talk about the latest trends in UX without mentioning AI. Artificial intelligence is here to stay with us, with more and more digital products using some sort of AI integration in their products.
During the process of AI becoming more widespread, many users will be expecting their interactions with digital products to be enhanced by AI-driven features.
As AI becomes integral to user experiences, UX designers must be able to integrate AI-driven features into products. While designers should be getting ready to follow UX trends in 2025 and include AI in product design, UX researchers should prepare themselves for testing these new, often more complex, products. Prototyping and usability testing for iterations involving AI features may bring new challenges that UX professionals need to solve working together.
AI-driven tools for UX professionals
As UXers are getting ready to design and test more and more AI-powered interfaces in 2025, they should also be aware of the growing number of AI tools for UX design and research.
We reviewed AI-powered design tools that are reshaping the creative landscape by offering fast, high-volume ideation capabilities. While they can boost efficiency, these tools face limitations like generic outputs, inconsistent designs, and a lack of deep contextual understanding. For these reasons, they’re ideal for simple projects or early design phases to help with ideation, but human expertise will remain essential for complex designs and nuanced audience targeting.
We should also point out that design and prototyping tools have lagged behind AI advancements, making it harder to test and iterate AI-specific challenges like realistic behavior and real-world scenarios. Without updates from tools like Figma to include AI-focused testing features, designers might only see realistic testing in beta versions, increasing costs and reducing the efficiency of early prototyping.
When evaluating UX Research tools enhanced by AI, we had similar experiences. These tools are useful for simplifying repetitive tasks and for basic data analysis and by doing so, they are great for speeding up initial work.
However, it is important to point out that these tools often miss context, produce general answers, and lack creativity, therefore they are not suitable for presenting nuanced insights.
As these tools produce overly broad results, human supervision is needed to add depth and creativity, as well as to check accuracy to ensure the research results are reliable.
Each individual UXer may have had a preference on how much of their tasks they were willing to hand over to AI, but we should all be aware that with AI being able to automate some of our tasks, faster project timelines will become the norm. To keep up with this UX trend, UX professionals should learn how to integrate AI tools into their workflows to meet more demanding timelines without losing quality.
Personalisation
Personalisation is another UX trend to keep in mind when designing digital products in 2025. Products with hyper-personalisation elements rely on users’ data to adapt to their individual needs. By analysing their behaviour, products can predict their preferences and produce content that is tailored for individual users.
Types of personalised content can include recommendations based on users’ interests, adjusted layouts that resonate with what people previously interacted with, or dynamically changing the amount of content that is displayed.
In practice, it could mean e-commerce platforms reorganising their interfaces to highlight users’ preferred categories, financial apps providing budgeting tips, investment recommendations, or spending insights tailored to a user’s financial habits, or e-learning platforms adjusting course difficulty and pacing based on a student’s progress and learning style.
Regardless of what type of personalisation features a product will contain, following this UX trend will allow designers to create experiences that resonate more with users.This way they can increase user satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, business growth. Some areas that could be improved by adding personalisation features to digital products include:
- User engagement: Hyper-personalisation can enhance user engagement. It keeps users more involved with the product or service. The key is delivering personalised and relevant content, features, and recommendations.
- Retention: Personalised experiences are more likely to capture and keep user attention. As users find value in tailored content and features, they are more likely to stick around. This way, they are more likely to continue using the platform.
- Conversion optimisation: Hyper-personalisation can improve the effectiveness of conversion strategies. It presents users with personalised calls to action, promotions, or recommendations. These align with their preferences and behaviours.
Personalisation is something products have been implementing successfully. Spotify’s AI-curated playlists and Netflix’s personalised suggestions are prime examples of how personalisation drives engagement and loyalty. But entertainment is not the only industry where AI is shaping how we interact with digital products.
For example, the Generative Canvas by Salesforce could revolutionise teams’ efficiency, by dynamically generating outputs on its interface – such as tables, charts, summaries, or other components – that are adapted to each user’s role and tasks. Whether based on written or spoken interactions or already existing data, it instantly creates actionable insights for the users.
These examples also form people’s expectations, so we should prepare ourselves to deliver products that satisfy users who are looking for more personalised features.
AR/VR integration
Another UX trend to be aware of is the increasing importance of augmented and virtual reality integrated into our phones, tablets, or even into our computer interfaces to enhance digital experiences by merging virtual objects with the physical world.
AR integrations may improve online shopping experiences by allowing people to visualise what a piece of furniture would look like in their homes, how different shades of lipstick would suit their faces, or which outfit would suit them best. But ecommerce is not the only industry where this UX trend can be useful.
In the field of logistics, DHL improved their warehouse workers’ workflow by creating an AR guide for them that overlays digital information onto their environment to improve their efficiency.
Another area where AR can be utilised is education by creating hands-on learning experiences. Our Letter Looter’s educational game for children uses AR to make learning the alphabet interactive and fun.
AR/VR features can be impactful and will be expected by more and more people in the future. At the same time, we should be thoughtful about when to follow this UX trend.
Not every scenario requires augmented or virtual elements, and using them unnecessarily can complicate the user experience or distract users from their original goals. We should only use AR/VR elements when they provide real value, and make sure the implementation will work properly when creating these immersive experiences for our users.
We collected some guidelines to keep in mind when creating AR/VR features in digital products:
- Provide clear instructions for calibrating augmented-reality features.
- Avoid using overly simplistic or cartoon-like AR graphics.
- Ensure that the size and scale of items are accurate.
- Refrain from crowding the augmented-reality product-view screen with too many functions
- Provide clear feedback and guidance during AR/VR interactions to keep users informed of their actions and progress.
- Test AR/VR features in a variety of lighting and environmental conditions to ensure consistent performance.
- Integrate seamless transitions between AR/VR features and other parts of the product to maintain a smooth user experience.
Voice user interfaces
Voice user interfaces (VUIs) are also among the latest trends in UX as people are growing more accustomed to interacting with technology through voice commands. Speech recognition and language processing abilities of these technologies are constantly improving, leading to fewer errors and misunderstandings, and also eliminating the need for users to mimic some specific accents for VIUs to understand them. These advancements will encourage more people to take advantage of voice-activated interfaces and their growing demand will shape the UX landscape.
VUIs are not only useful for convenience, but they can also help with accessibility. Voice-activated interfaces allow people to accomplish tasks quickly, making them particularly valuable for people with mobility or visual impairments. By simply speaking, users can control devices, access information, or place orders, making technology more accessible to all.
At UX studio, we created voice-activated interfaces both to improve accessibility and to simplify the users’ flow. Korero is a communication tool aimed at helping hearing-impaired users leveraging voice recognition at its core. Our other project, Glide, is a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) companion app concept, where we designed a voice recognition feature that simplifies the process of logging in meals.
While VUIs offer convenience and accessibility, designing for voice interfaces brings unique challenges. Not everyone may be comfortable using voice commands yet, for various reasons, such as unfamiliarity with the technology or concerns about speaking aloud in some settings. Additionally, noisy environments can interfere with voice recognition, which can lead to frustration in users, so if there are no solutions for these problematic scenarios, usability can be limited. Privacy concerns can further complicate the adoption of VUIs, as many users are uneasy about devices that are "always listening" to process voice commands.
Solving possible issues that arise in connection with VUIs is a bigger task connected to different stakeholders. How data is stored, managed, and analysed is a business-ethics-policy decision while making sure products work seamlessly in noisy environments is an engineering problem that requires more precise sets of microphones and better noise cancellation algorithms.
While UX design alone cannot solve these issues, we should be aware of any problems users may face when attempting to take advantage of these alternative interaction methods. By having an understanding of these issues we can bring other departments’ attention to them while also thinking about UX solutions to ease users’ reaction when any of the problems arise.
Inclusivity as a mindset
Designing for inclusivity is also becoming a defining UX trend for 2025, focusing on creating digital products that address the needs of every user, regardless of ability or background. The goal of inclusive design is to create experiences that are accessible and usable by the broadest range of people.
Even though regulations are now emerging to make products more accessible, such as the European Accessibility Act, having inclusivity as a mindset goes beyond compliance with accessibility standards. To create inclusive products, we should be proactively seeking to include people with varying needs and abilities in the design process. Some aspects of inclusive design and how it acts as a mindset shift to form better UX are the following:
- Diverse User Perspectives: Inclusive design involves understanding and incorporating the perspectives of a diverse range of users. This includes considering age, gender, cultural background, physical and cognitive abilities, and more. The mindset shift here is from designing for a perceived "average" user to designing for a spectrum of users.
- Empathy and User-Centered Design: Inclusive encourages designers to empathize with users with different needs and challenges. This mindset shift leads to a user-centered design approach that prioritizes the needs of real people.
- Accessibility as a Core Principle: Accessibility is a crucial aspect of inclusive design. Yet, it extends beyond meeting basic standards. Inclusive design considers a wide range of abilities and disabilities. It seeks to create experiences that are not just accessible but truly usable and enjoyable for everyone.
- Early and Continuous User Feedback: Inclusive design encourages designers to involve users throughout the design process. They seek feedback from diverse individuals. This ongoing collaboration helps identify potential issues early in the design phase. It also allows for continuous improvement based on user input.
- Consideration of Context and Environment: Inclusive design considers the various contexts and environments in which users may interact with a product or service. This includes considering different devices, network conditions, and environmental constraints. The mindset shift is towards designing for real-world situations rather than idealized conditions.
- Long-Term Thinking: Inclusive design considers the long-term impact of design decisions on users and society. It aims to create sustainable and resilient solutions that stand the test of time, accommodating changes in technology and societal norms.
At UXstudio we decided to explore how we can incorporate inclusive design and accessibility in each stage of the design thinking process, see our journey with inclusive desing here.
Sustainable design
Sustainable design is the final UX trend on our list to keep an eye on in 2025. This trend is driven by the need to create digital products that are environmentally friendly fueled by the growing awareness of the notion of digital carbon footprint.
We can create more sustainably designed digital products by optimising interfaces for lower energy consumption by using lightweight images, power-efficient color schemes, and implementing dark mode to reduce energy usage. Such UI considerations are important, but looking deeper into digital products is also essential.
More sustainable products can be created by reducing data usage and improving performance. Faster loading times, achieved by streamlining processes and minimising the amount of data used, conserve resources while they also improve the overall user experience.
Sustainable design principles often overlap with practices that also improve usability. Fewer steps in a checkout process or a clean clutter-free layout not only reduce energy consumption but also make navigating the product easier by reducing cognitive load. This approach leads to seamless, efficient experiences that are not just better for the planet but also more engaging for users.
We should also be aware of how different UX trends may be clashing with each other. While we started the collection of the most important trends for 2025 with AI, when we talk about sustainability we should also mention the carbon footprint AI has.
When individuals are using AI to find answers to simple questions instead of using a traditional search engine, they may be using a lot more energy solving the task would really require. But putting the blame on individuals is not fair: Google’s greenhouse gas emissions between 2019 and 2023 have risen by 48%, and in their 2024 Environmental Report they name the culprit by explaining that the rising emissions are "due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute".
Summing up the upcoming UX trends
As we look ahead, the latest trends in UX design for 2025 emphasize innovation, accessibility, and sustainability.
Artificial intelligence continues to transform digital products, offering smarter features and reshaping workflows for UX professionals, while personalisation will be another central feature, allowing products to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with individual users, and therefore driving engagement and loyalty.
Technologies like AR/VR will be used to create immersive experiences in everyday environments, while voice-activated user interfaces will be key features to achieve accessibility and create more convenient digital products. Inclusivity as a mindset ensures digital products can meet diverse user needs, and sustainable design prioritises energy-efficient, streamlined experiences that benefit both users and the planet.
By embracing these UX trends, professionals can design digital products that are innovative, user-centric, and ready to meet the demands of users of the future.
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As UX professionals, our goal is to create digital products that will be useful and desirable for people well into the future. We should always try to be one step ahead to anticipate their needs and expectations about digital products. What can seem like a niche trend or too much effort can very quickly become a basic expectation. To make sure that users will be satisfied with our products in the long term, we need to be aware of emerging UX design trends, and integrate them into our products.