his article is brought to you by Usersnap, a bug tracker and feedback tool that helps you to communicate visually. Get a 15-day free trial here. We have just entered year 2016 and it’s already a couple of days old. Just before New Year’s Eve, I showed you our take on the year 2015 in web development. Now it’s time to take a look at the new year. With upcoming frameworks, powerful development tools and evolving technologies, this year looks very promising for web developers. Here are our thoughts on the top web development trends for 2016.  

Motion User Interface or Motion UI

Motion UI is a Sass library which is one of the three parts of Foundation for Apps by Zurb. It is widely used for quickly creating animations and CSS transitions. With Motion UI, it is less complicated to make an app’s transitions look smooth and rich with predefined motions. The way prototypical animated elements integrate seamlessly into websites makes Motion UI one of the most preferred libraries by developers. Last year, we saw an emerging trend of Motion UI which is sure to stay for the next few years.

Advanced platforms mean new responsive design

A lot of new tech is coming to the market and that means things are about to change. New technologies are only just showing their first applications but development in 2016 will set the stage for the coming years. Responsive design will no longer be restricted to ‘mobile-first’ or mobile responsiveness only. There are already a plethora of other devices, screens and integrated wearable gadgets like Apple watch, Google Glass and Oculus Rift which are some of the most talked about technologies. These technologies continue to grow in popularity. In addition to these, Semantic UI is a new design framework from last year that continues to be in demand.

Internet of Things (IoT) will have a huge impact

The Internet of Things has taken app development to a new level. According to Technavio, IoT will grow by 31.72% (CAGR) between 2015 and 2019. Gartner also predicts that at least half of the IoT development will come from startup companies which are in business for less than 3 years. By linking smart objects to the internet, IoT enables the exchange of data that was never possible before. As more and more devices are being connected and accessible to the network, we’ll find web developers coming up with upgraded solutions to help users control and communicate with their everyday gadgets and equipment.

Browser based IDEs

Odds are that you have your own favorite development environment. Maybe you fell in love with VIM years ago or you’re an IntelliJ fanatic. That’s going to change soon as more and more people are starting to use cloud-based versions of IDEs. They’re fast and they’re accessible, and some of them have a huge community behind them. Flexibility is key here, and while you may not use these tools full time, it’s definitely good to know that they’re available if you want to do a quick test of a bootstrap code of Jade without having to download a single file.

Full-screen navigation design

Full-screen navigation design is a feature that improves the user experience on mobile devices. Let’s say a user is navigating a website on his mobile phone and he comes across a registration form. As he taps on the registration form, the form jumps to a full-screen size enabling the user to fill out the form in a more natural way. More and more web developers and designers are developing sites for full-screen navigation designs and this trend is going to continue.

Foundation for Apps

Foundation for Apps is an upcoming single page app framework which is built around AngularJS and the flexbox grid framework. This framework enables quick and easy responsive web app creation facilitating developers to quickly start writing code that’s unique to the application. Introduced only in late 2014, the potential of Foundation for Apps, with its positioning capabilities and clean code, has yet to be discovered used. We will surely see a lot of companies using this advanced responsive front-end framework this year.

Real-time everything.

2016 will see a rise in new apps that work in real-time. Real-time analytics is rapidly finding its implementation in desktop and mobile apps. Similarly, live streaming will also become increasingly important in the social media marketing world with apps like Periscope and Meerkat gaining prominence. Real-time is just about to break out.