For the third part of our series on 2016 digital trends, I’ve asked our insanely talented design team to provide some of their predictions for the New Year. I was not disappointed with the quality and range of responses and am excited to share four of the top trends here. The top web design and UX trends for 2016 vary greatly in scope, but all have one thing in common – if it’s better for the user it’s better for design.

Hamburger menus are here to stay

Hamburger menus are not a popular design option. Most designers would hope that this mobile navigation technique would disappear completely. Our Lead Creative Designer, Ben Wood, goes against the grain with the unpopular prediction that “hamburger menus are BACK, baby.” His mantra for the year is that even bad UX practices become good with a high enough adoption rate and with user familiarity.

Much has been written about how hamburger menus can be unrecognizable to some user groups, but they don’t seem to be going away. Their prevalence will be the deciding factor in usability. If you see enough red octagons, eventually you’ll learn how to stop. Today’s poor user experience can be tomorrow’s ubiquitous best practice.

Mobile-first is dead

To stick with the pattern of unpopular opinions, Ben’s other contribution to our 2016 trends list is that mobile-first design philosophies are going extinct. That’s not to say that mobile is going away—far from it. The mobile-first philosophy became a buzzword right around 2009 when m-dots were transitioning into responsive and adaptive designs. It wasn’t design that drove the mobile-first philosophy—it was content strategy.

Sites at that time were bloated blobs of content suffering from multiple personality disorders and too many cooks in the kitchen. Trying to port that content into a mobile design as-is was an impossible task. ‘Mobile’ was a hot topic and if you could convince your client to go mobile first, you could trim that content into something that was concise enough to fit on a first generation iPhone. As a result, desktop sites benefitted from it too.

Now that most clients understand the importance of content strategy, I expect to see a shift in this philosophy. Designers will have more ambition to create robust interactive experiences and starting with mobile will be a barrier to that objective because it lends itself to simplicity. It’s easier to work backwards and wrangle in from desktop than it is to start with something bare bones and try to build on top of it.

Internal design focus

In 2016, our Creative Director believes that the importance of beautiful UX and UI will expand beyond consumer-facing sites into the internal software platform. The tools businesses use that have a huge impact on a business’ reporting, profitability, forecasting and efficiency. Because of this importance, businesses are starting to realize that these internal tools can benefit from employee focused design experiences. The UX and UI approach is being shaped in a way that maximizes the efficiency of all employees’ daily responsibilities. Stale, linear, and overloaded dashboards are being customized to meet the needs at an individual level. More and more software suites are going to overhaul their experiences to satisfy the individual and bring employee satisfaction, engagement and efficiency to entirely new levels.

UI-less interactions

One of the more bold predictions for the future of UI is the disappearance of UI as we know it. Continued advances in technology, especially in wearables, have shifted how we interact with the Internet. The amount of sensors that are integrated into hardware lead to less actual touching and more gestures to interact with information. Whether it’s the Apple Watch that senses different hand movements or it’s built-in radar sensing chips in laptops, there will be a big shift in how we interact with the environments around us. This leads to a whole new level of UX Design. Experiences that were created on a flat or 2D plane now have an additional dimension to work into our designs.