UX/UI Trends to Watch in 2025: Voice Interfaces, Emotional Design, and Seamless Microinteractions
Staying well-informed about emerging UX/UI trends is crucial for businesses aiming to outperform their competitors. Long gone are the days when design was seen as a support role or a simple “make it pretty” department. As we approach the second quarter of 2025, we can already tell some pivotal trends that will redefine user experiences.
By researching multiple companies and communication channels, we identified the following trends in UI/UX: voice interfaces, emotional design, and seamless micro-interactions. Users nowadays enjoy having a more personalized experience on multiple touchpoints, as a recent article in the Harvard Business Review revealed that companies that place higher on the personalization scale are growing at a 10% faster rate than their peers.
Understanding and learning how to integrate these trends can help your company significantly enhance user engagement and customer satisfaction. This will offer a more personalized experience for your customers and position your business for success in an increasingly user-centric world.
Now, let’s explore these trends in deeper detail.
Voice interfaces: Rise of conversational interaction
Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) have transitioned from a novelty to a necessity for modern products. It has transformed how users interact with technology. The data behind this ever-growing trend has been slowly uncovered as the years have passed. A 2023 report from eMarketer, for instance, showed that around 60% of millennials use voice assistants in some shape or form, with a forecast for that number to reach almost 70% for newer generations.
The convenience of hands-free operation and the naturalness of voice communication have propelled VUIs into mainstream adoption. Even in 2018, 90% of users in the U.S. mentioned how they’d prefer to do voice searches instead of typing. While that number didn’t come to fruition for the exact results, the likelihood is that these systems were still being improved and were insufficient to replace written queries.
The current state of VUI and its potential
As of 2024, approximately 62% of Americans aged 18 and older use voice assistants on devices they own, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart speakers. Considering that the number of adults in the U.S. is over 258 million, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates, over 160 million people use voice-enabled software or hardware.
The proliferation of smart speakers and voice-activated devices underscores the growing importance of VUIs. In 2024, it is estimated that 64% of all US-based households owned an Amazon Echo, indicating a significant shift towards voice-first interfaces and products.
How to allow your business to grow with VUIs
Integrating voice interfaces and voice-enabled features, especially in digital products, can be done in numerous ways, such as enabling voice-activated messages, search, and simple commands. We can even see newer platforms like ChatGPT adopting voice-enabled features. It offers numerous advantages, such as:
- Enhanced accessibility: It allows users with varying abilities to interact with your product fully, making technology more inclusive.
- Improved user engagement: Users utilizing natural language can lead to more personalized and engaging user experiences than written search queries or template-based text.
- Competitive advantage: While it’s not a new technology, and users are adopting it at high rates, businesses are still following behind to implement VUIs that can differentiate themselves in crowded markets by offering a more interactive user experience.
Challenges and considerations to implementing VUIs
Of course, adding a VUI to a product doesn’t immediately equal success. So, it’s essential to understand the following challenges before adding this type of system to your product:
- Understanding context: The system has to understand the context of the users’ requests to handle them effectively. It is critical that the system accurately interprets what the user is saying and abstracts to the correct contexts. As for other voice-enabled features such as audio recordings, the application has to be able to function properly on all devices users utilize.
- Handling ambiguity: Another challenge to overcome is to ensure that the mechanisms can distinguish ambiguous commands or a lack of them, such as an accidental tap, or allow the user to edit and personalize the audio input before sending it to the system.
- Privacy concerns: Another critical aspect to consider is the user’s privacy concerns, since they can influence how much the user is willing to share when utilizing the functionalities. For businesses that deal with sensitive information or information that could embarrass the user, privacy and data protection must guide the design of a VUI feature.
Emotional Design: Crafting connections beyond functionality
In the U.S., the average screen time is around 7 hours. Much of those seven hours are spent in applications and digital products, and while logical, humans are highly impacted by emotion during decision-making. That’s why crafting an emotional design can help you leap over competitors.
Emotional design focuses on creating products that elicit positive emotional responses, fostering deeper connections between users and digital interfaces. Its three main aspects are efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.
Now, more than ever, ensuring user satisfaction while interacting with your product is of the utmost importance since users will spend almost half their waking hours on screens. Developing a system that satisfies users who enjoy using your application can foster growth for your company and better relationships with your customers.
We’ve seen how each new feature on popular social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram is maximized to drive user engagement and satisfaction. We see you scrolling down the endless short videos on many platforms.
Now, let’s explore emotional design a bit deeper and see how you can use it on your application. Move beyond functionality to create satisfaction that resonates with users on an emotional level.
The importance of emotional design
Satisfaction is such a crucial aspect of any design that 88% of internet users are less likely to return to a website after a poor user experience, highlighting the importance of positive emotional engagement. Let’s avoid that situation, since there’s virtually no downside to adding a postional emotional design and experience in your products.
Strategies for implementing emotional design in your product
There are a few ways you can incorporate emotional design into your product, since a lot of it is contextual to the features you offer. Some of the main paths you can take are through:
- Storytelling: You can craft small narratives within your application about the user’s journey as they use the app. For a task-based application like Asana and ClickUp, you add blurbs and animations at each step of the way before a task is completed.
- Visual aesthetics: Color schemes, typography, and imagery alone can evoke desired emotions in your users. Let’s use Professor Alan Dix's example in an article for the Interaction Design Foundation: RGB coming from a well-crafted PC with multiple graphics cards. That imagery alone can be enough to take the user from passively standing by to desiring to play a game.
- Personalization: As we’ve explored before, personalization is of the utmost importance in today’s world. Here, you can use personalization alongside the storytelling and visual aspects. Let’s say it’s a user’s birthday. When they use the application, they’re met with beautiful messages, cake and party imagery, and a different color scheme for that day.
Seamless Microinteractions: enhancing sser delight
Taking note of the previous emotional design trend, micro-interactions are subtle design elements that are part of that overall emotional design. They facilitate user interaction and provide instant feedback, contributing significantly to the overall user experience.
One of the most cited micro-interactions is the Asana unicorn leaving a rainbow trail. When a task is completed, it jumps across the screen from one end to the other, leaving a beautiful rainbow trail.
Other more subtle micro-interactions are things such as a button animation upon clicking or a notification sound. Micro-interactions contribute to intuitive navigation and a satisfying user experience.
Forrester’s research, from 2016, show that a well-crafted UX and UI can lead to over 400% increase in conversions for e-commerces.
Best Practices to implement microinteractions
Effective micro-interactions create moments of delight for the user while they navigate through your digital product or website. They can be as prominent as the unicorn mentioned previously or a simple animation, so let creativity take you by the hand.
Most importantly, they must follow these best practices:
- Consistency: The micro-interaction must be consistent through the user journey on each action the user takes, so don’t repeat it for different actions. Ensure uniformity in interactions across the platform to avoid confusion.
- Responsiveness: Ensure your micro-interaction is responsive, so that the user associates it with the action immediately. Imagine you successfully finish a task, and while you’re creating another task, the micro-interaction of the previous task pops up and interrupts you…
- Contextual relevance: You need to maintain a contextual relevance of the interaction with the user’s action, so they can have their expectations met. It’s important to look at competitors, but also to understand that when you have a genuinely unique action you have leeway to experiment and surprise your user, setting a new context for others to imitate.
The best-fit UI/UX talent on demand: The Awesomic way
As we see, building an exceptional digital experience in 2025 requires great ideas and the right team to bring them to life. With voice interfaces, emotional design, and micro-interactions shaping the newest trends in UX/UI innovation, businesses need specialized talent to execute these strategies effectively. But hiring in-house can be costly and time-consuming.
That’s where Awesomic comes in. With Awesomic’s new Super Plan, you have a flexible, on-demand access to skilled UX/UI designers, developers, copywriters, and more. You can scale your team based on project needs without long-term overhead and save up to 70% on costs.
Whether you need experts in user interfaces or behavioral design, we connect you with the best-fit talent, and you can focus on scaling your product while we deliver exceptional user experiences to your customers.
Staying well-informed about emerging UX/UI trends is crucial for businesses aiming to outperform their competitors. Long gone are the days when design was seen as a support role or a simple “make it pretty” department. As we approach the second quarter of 2025, we can already tell some pivotal trends that will redefine user experiences.
By researching multiple companies and communication channels, we identified the following trends in UI/UX: voice interfaces, emotional design, and seamless micro-interactions. Users nowadays enjoy having a more personalized experience on multiple touchpoints, as a recent article in the Harvard Business Review revealed that companies that place higher on the personalization scale are growing at a 10% faster rate than their peers.
Understanding and learning how to integrate these trends can help your company significantly enhance user engagement and customer satisfaction. This will offer a more personalized experience for your customers and position your business for success in an increasingly user-centric world.
Now, let’s explore these trends in deeper detail.
Voice interfaces: Rise of conversational interaction
Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) have transitioned from a novelty to a necessity for modern products. It has transformed how users interact with technology. The data behind this ever-growing trend has been slowly uncovered as the years have passed. A 2023 report from eMarketer, for instance, showed that around 60% of millennials use voice assistants in some shape or form, with a forecast for that number to reach almost 70% for newer generations.
The convenience of hands-free operation and the naturalness of voice communication have propelled VUIs into mainstream adoption. Even in 2018, 90% of users in the U.S. mentioned how they’d prefer to do voice searches instead of typing. While that number didn’t come to fruition for the exact results, the likelihood is that these systems were still being improved and were insufficient to replace written queries.
The current state of VUI and its potential
As of 2024, approximately 62% of Americans aged 18 and older use voice assistants on devices they own, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart speakers. Considering that the number of adults in the U.S. is over 258 million, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates, over 160 million people use voice-enabled software or hardware.
The proliferation of smart speakers and voice-activated devices underscores the growing importance of VUIs. In 2024, it is estimated that 64% of all US-based households owned an Amazon Echo, indicating a significant shift towards voice-first interfaces and products.
How to allow your business to grow with VUIs
Integrating voice interfaces and voice-enabled features, especially in digital products, can be done in numerous ways, such as enabling voice-activated messages, search, and simple commands. We can even see newer platforms like ChatGPT adopting voice-enabled features. It offers numerous advantages, such as:
- Enhanced accessibility: It allows users with varying abilities to interact with your product fully, making technology more inclusive.
- Improved user engagement: Users utilizing natural language can lead to more personalized and engaging user experiences than written search queries or template-based text.
- Competitive advantage: While it’s not a new technology, and users are adopting it at high rates, businesses are still following behind to implement VUIs that can differentiate themselves in crowded markets by offering a more interactive user experience.
Challenges and considerations to implementing VUIs
Of course, adding a VUI to a product doesn’t immediately equal success. So, it’s essential to understand the following challenges before adding this type of system to your product:
- Understanding context: The system has to understand the context of the users’ requests to handle them effectively. It is critical that the system accurately interprets what the user is saying and abstracts to the correct contexts. As for other voice-enabled features such as audio recordings, the application has to be able to function properly on all devices users utilize.
- Handling ambiguity: Another challenge to overcome is to ensure that the mechanisms can distinguish ambiguous commands or a lack of them, such as an accidental tap, or allow the user to edit and personalize the audio input before sending it to the system.
- Privacy concerns: Another critical aspect to consider is the user’s privacy concerns, since they can influence how much the user is willing to share when utilizing the functionalities. For businesses that deal with sensitive information or information that could embarrass the user, privacy and data protection must guide the design of a VUI feature.
Emotional Design: Crafting connections beyond functionality
In the U.S., the average screen time is around 7 hours. Much of those seven hours are spent in applications and digital products, and while logical, humans are highly impacted by emotion during decision-making. That’s why crafting an emotional design can help you leap over competitors.
Emotional design focuses on creating products that elicit positive emotional responses, fostering deeper connections between users and digital interfaces. Its three main aspects are efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.
Now, more than ever, ensuring user satisfaction while interacting with your product is of the utmost importance since users will spend almost half their waking hours on screens. Developing a system that satisfies users who enjoy using your application can foster growth for your company and better relationships with your customers.
We’ve seen how each new feature on popular social media websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram is maximized to drive user engagement and satisfaction. We see you scrolling down the endless short videos on many platforms.
Now, let’s explore emotional design a bit deeper and see how you can use it on your application. Move beyond functionality to create satisfaction that resonates with users on an emotional level.
The importance of emotional design
Satisfaction is such a crucial aspect of any design that 88% of internet users are less likely to return to a website after a poor user experience, highlighting the importance of positive emotional engagement. Let’s avoid that situation, since there’s virtually no downside to adding a postional emotional design and experience in your products.
Strategies for implementing emotional design in your product
There are a few ways you can incorporate emotional design into your product, since a lot of it is contextual to the features you offer. Some of the main paths you can take are through:
- Storytelling: You can craft small narratives within your application about the user’s journey as they use the app. For a task-based application like Asana and ClickUp, you add blurbs and animations at each step of the way before a task is completed.
- Visual aesthetics: Color schemes, typography, and imagery alone can evoke desired emotions in your users. Let’s use Professor Alan Dix's example in an article for the Interaction Design Foundation: RGB coming from a well-crafted PC with multiple graphics cards. That imagery alone can be enough to take the user from passively standing by to desiring to play a game.
- Personalization: As we’ve explored before, personalization is of the utmost importance in today’s world. Here, you can use personalization alongside the storytelling and visual aspects. Let’s say it’s a user’s birthday. When they use the application, they’re met with beautiful messages, cake and party imagery, and a different color scheme for that day.
Seamless Microinteractions: enhancing sser delight
Taking note of the previous emotional design trend, micro-interactions are subtle design elements that are part of that overall emotional design. They facilitate user interaction and provide instant feedback, contributing significantly to the overall user experience.
One of the most cited micro-interactions is the Asana unicorn leaving a rainbow trail. When a task is completed, it jumps across the screen from one end to the other, leaving a beautiful rainbow trail.
Other more subtle micro-interactions are things such as a button animation upon clicking or a notification sound. Micro-interactions contribute to intuitive navigation and a satisfying user experience.
Forrester’s research, from 2016, show that a well-crafted UX and UI can lead to over 400% increase in conversions for e-commerces.
Best Practices to implement microinteractions
Effective micro-interactions create moments of delight for the user while they navigate through your digital product or website. They can be as prominent as the unicorn mentioned previously or a simple animation, so let creativity take you by the hand.
Most importantly, they must follow these best practices:
- Consistency: The micro-interaction must be consistent through the user journey on each action the user takes, so don’t repeat it for different actions. Ensure uniformity in interactions across the platform to avoid confusion.
- Responsiveness: Ensure your micro-interaction is responsive, so that the user associates it with the action immediately. Imagine you successfully finish a task, and while you’re creating another task, the micro-interaction of the previous task pops up and interrupts you…
- Contextual relevance: You need to maintain a contextual relevance of the interaction with the user’s action, so they can have their expectations met. It’s important to look at competitors, but also to understand that when you have a genuinely unique action you have leeway to experiment and surprise your user, setting a new context for others to imitate.
The best-fit UI/UX talent on demand: The Awesomic way
As we see, building an exceptional digital experience in 2025 requires great ideas and the right team to bring them to life. With voice interfaces, emotional design, and micro-interactions shaping the newest trends in UX/UI innovation, businesses need specialized talent to execute these strategies effectively. But hiring in-house can be costly and time-consuming.
That’s where Awesomic comes in. With Awesomic’s new Super Plan, you have a flexible, on-demand access to skilled UX/UI designers, developers, copywriters, and more. You can scale your team based on project needs without long-term overhead and save up to 70% on costs.
Whether you need experts in user interfaces or behavioral design, we connect you with the best-fit talent, and you can focus on scaling your product while we deliver exceptional user experiences to your customers.
