These words mean a lot in this digital era where web and mobile applications affect a major part of our daily life including:

• Ordering a meal,
• Booking a ride to work,
• Communicating with friends,
• Working remotely for clients,
• Planning a weekend, and the list goes on.

The success of an application depends largely on its user interface design and the connection a user establishes once they start using the application. A lot has been tried and tested over the last decade but nothing really made an impact the way Google’s most recent Material design did.

Read 2015’s top web design strategies which were in vogue and led to the rise of Material design.

Material UI design has literally reshaped the way web designers used to think about designing user interfaces for web and mobile applications. Gone are the days of dark shadows and gradient colored headers and footers. The world is bewitched with paper-ink styled clean, minimal and flat layouts.

Today, we aim to explore the rise of Material UI and how Material UI is reshaping the ways in which web and mobile applications are developed.

By the end of this post, we hope to provide our perspective to:

• What is Material UI design
• Why is it so successful
• The evolution of React UI
• What it takes to implement the Material design with React applications
• Material UI React libraries for ReactJS and React Native

Let’s begin…

What is Material Design?

Material Design is a design language introduced by Google way back in 2014 as “a visual language that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation of technology and science.”

Built originally for the Android application ecosystem and inspired by the study of paper and ink, the essence of “Material” in mobile applications aimed at creating designs that are grounded in reality. A reality which originates from physical surfaces, edges, seams, and shadows that establishes meaningful user interactions.

Since then, evolution has kicked in rapidly and what was once a UI concept limited to Android OS has rapidly evolved to web applications and even IOS apps.

Why is it so successful?

There are 3 major reasons that contribute to the success of Material UI’

• Detail oriented: Material design is detail oriented and as Google puts it – There is no pixel too small to be overlooked when creating an intuitive experience. With its detail-oriented animations, shadows, and edges, the design itself contributes to the brand’s establishment.
• Cross-device compatible: The designs were built to complement Google’s responsive approach for a web application. This means that the UI remains consistent regardless of the device (mobile, tablet or desktop) you are using to access the application.
• Well supported: It is comprehensively documented and wholeheartedly supported by Google with regular updates being pushed at a periodic basis. On top of that many third-party vendors realize the underlying potential and have published their own UI libraries that support material design components.

The Evolution of React UI

Design and technology go hand in hand, and while the material design was gaining ground as the new benchmark for visual interactions, Facebook launched REACT – a JavaScript library that can be used as the “View” for any MVC(Model View Controller) based framework.

The key features of this language were it’s component-based approach and a virtual DOM that keeps track of changes in the UI and implement them to the actual DOM without having to regenerate it – hence optimizing UI speed by manifolds.

On top of that, at the code level, ReactJS is a blend of HTML and JavaScript aka JSX which is an extension of the traditional ECMAScript. This extension added the ability to embed HTML code within JavaScript, hence making it more flexible as well as easier to understand.

ReactJS was an instant hit for developing web application front-ends and just after a couple of years, Facebook introduced it’s younger sibling – React Native to develop native mobile applications following the same componentized approach.

Reach Native has a lot of potential to take your business to the next level. You can take help of react native experts to build powerful mobile applications at low cost. With a seamless UI, you get a full-fledged platform to reach your market. It is cross-functional. You can use it on any platform without spending on development for each.

Developing Material UI React

The idea of developing React (JS/Native) based application UI with Material UI aka Material UI React is selling like hotcakes. React UI built as a Material design means you get access to:

• Modern and user-friendly UI
• An application that runs with supreme speed
• Quick development time
• Highly robust component-based code which is easier to extend as well as track bugs

But What’s the Best Way to Implement a Custom React Template?

Certainly developing everything from scratch is an option, but that would eat up a lot of coding time.

With so much underlying potential, the React community has been highly active off lately and continuous open source contributions are being made in the form of libraries for both ReactJS as well as React Native to establish Material UI React.

Using these libraries, React developers can get access to customizable components for the complete interface including:

• Form styles
• Headers
• Footers
• Buttons
• Animations etc.

If you have decided to use React for your web or mobile application and plan on implementing a custom Material UI, then we would always recommend you to choose one of the following libraries.

While the core objective for all these libraries are the same, i.e to provide out of the box reactjs components which you can use in your Material UI React theme, the difference mostly lies in the component styling and in most cases the styling language. We are not highlighting any of these libraries in any way and you can pick your choice based on their key features.

Recommended Material UI design libraries for ReactJS:

Material UI

Key features:

• Provides all the necessary components with a variety of attributes
• Easily customizable.
• Great support
• JSS based component styling
• 20+ components out of the box

.

React MD

Key Features:

• SaSS based style styling
• 30+ components out of the box
• Default inclusion of media queries for each component
• Comprehensively documented
• Fully open source but with fewer contributions so far.

React Toolbox

Key Features:

• CSS modules based component styling
• 30+ components out of the box
• Highly customizable
• Easily themeable components using out of the box react CSS themer
• Really well documented

Recommended Material UI design libraries for React native:

React Native Elements

Key features:

• Cross-platform compatible styling
• Comprehensive documentation
• Well supported
• Easily customizable
• 15+ components out of the box

React Native Material Kit

Key features:

• Around 12 basic components out of the box
• Well documented and consistently maintained
• More interactive customization options
• Well documented customization API

Material UI React – Final Words

While working with material libraries is a simplified way to create Material UI React applications for Reactjs and React native material UI, it has its own issues as well. Depending upon a library would mean that you are now dependent upon the component styling of the library – and don’t even ask what it takes to switch libraries when you have already implemented an application.

However, that’s pretty much it. It all boils down to choosing the correct library for your needs. We duly hope that we were able to provide some perspective on how material design works for React UI. What are your thoughts on the libraries we have recommended? Do let us know in the comments section below.

Using a React Component Library

This means that we’d use a library that has pre built React components. The library takes care of the styling and the React bit.

You can checkout the material-ui or react-md for an example of using this approach.

Working with pre-built React components is much faster but has its own issues. You’re now depending on this library for functionality and style of your component. Depending on the library, customization may become a challenge.

Material Design can give you guidelines to make better, more tactile user interfaces. It can inspire your designers to think about the hierarchy of information.

To summarize – if you’re using Material Design as a starting point to design better user interfaces, do it!

You shouldn’t use Material Design if you’re trying to keep up with the latest trend. Trends keep changing and your users probably care about other things more. To summarize – if you’re trying to reinvent yourself with Material Design, think twice. It’s not an instruction manual to create brands.

The post Material Design – Guide to Material UI React appeared first on DesignWebKit.

According to research by Accenture, AI could boost profitability rates by an average of 38% across 16 industries by 2035.

Driven by the vision to simplify how a customer finds a product, artificial intelligence in ecommerce has evolved a lot over time. Let’s take a look at the individual vertices of an Ecommerce business that have been augmented by AI.

Evolution of Product Search

The very beginning of Ecommerce was marked by  “Boston Commercial Exchange” in 1982, a marketplace that used online bulletin boards to post information of their clients who wanted to buy and sell computers. Online deals started happening that long ago and once Netscape launched SSL, monetary transactions started happening securely online.

However, while the Ecommerce operations were kicking off during that decade an easier product search mechanism was still missing. Products were reviewed through online catalogs (which was a humble discovery in itself) before a purchase could be made.

But things evolved in 1995, with Ecommerce giants Amazon and eBay stepping into the playground. By introducing a dynamic search bar on the Homepage, the time it took for buyers to locate their products was substantially reduced.

Even though the design of the website was not anything to die for during those years, the search bar had a magical effect that was really well received by the audience.

Check out our 2017 top 10 picks of Amazing Ecommerce website designs that are pushing the boundaries of user experience in this decade

Web search was introduced in Ecommerce stores to simplify the steps a customer need to take to search a product. While this is still a standard practice in modern Ecommerce websites, stores are using E-retail intelligence to enhance this further. Search bars in ecommerce stores can now be configured with AI-powered voice search along with text-based inputs to understand your context and provide relevant results.

To top it off, using AI assistants like Siri, Google now and Alexa you no longer even need to surf through a website to search for what you want to order.

Ecommerce AI has changed the dynamics of product search way beyond this. With machine learning and Big data powered contextual searches, Artificial Intelligence in Ecommerce also allows you to search through images.

For example, if you see a dress you like to know more about – just point your camera at it and find all its information with details about where it can be purchased.

Personalization And Recommendation Engines

With Ecommerce AI, we can now identify the onsite behaviors and interests of a potential shopper to set up personalized campaigns that establish an emotional connection with a customer.

How is this different from a usual marketing campaign?

With AI-powered Ecommerce personalization, you are NOT just grouping potential customers with similar likes and dislikes and sending them the same campaigns. Instead, you are able to track and record the behaviors of individual leads, create buyer personas and then track them based on their buyer journey.

For instance, Starbucks recently introduced ‘My Starbucks Barista’, powered by Ecommerce AI to enable customers to place orders with voice command or message. The algorithm collects a variety of inputs, including account information, customer preferences, purchase history, third-party data and contextual information.

This allows Starbucks to rapidly store customer information and then with machine learning and NLP, creating and delivering personalized messages and recommendations to its customers.

With AI’s ability to generate and leverage BigData coupled with machine learning algorithms, your customers will be surprised to see the way your website displays on-site recommendations call to actions, send out reminder emails, newsletters, deals and much more, not to forget, the behaviour can be recorded and used irrespective of the device (desktop or mobile) your customer is using.

Such a personalized experience will not only enhance the customer experience but their conversion rate for as well.

According to Ram Papatla, vice president of product at Flipkart, “our shopping app is developed under the Project name MIRA (an AI recommendation and personalization system). We cover 50 percent of search volume through Mira, and through Mira, we are currently seeing 12 percent cart additions. We are seeing a dramatic improvement in seller experience as well.”

MultiChannel Chatbots

Online chat portals can be seen on every other website nowadays. With a chat assistant behind the scenes, customer’s can get their queries answered right away. With AI stepping into the picture, surveys have noticed that AI-powered chatbots can provide solutions in at least 50% of the cases without any escalations.

What’s even interesting is how chatbots are becoming available on multiple business channels to help a customer right where they spend most of their time online.

Instant messaging platforms like KIK, Skype, Facebook, WeChat, Twitter are now featuring AI chatbot communication channels of different Ecommerce businesses including Pizzahut, ZOOM, MSN news, H&M, Sephora and more.

Felix Liu, Alibaba’s head of Customer Experience, was quoted saying that that AI has helped the company by obtaining massive customer data, discovering key issues and improving the company’s inquiry management channels. AI currently helps 100 percent of our customers with inquiries and resolves 50 percent of them completely.

Chatbots are effectively taking over mundane troubleshooting conversations and automating the customer assistance process is bringing down the manpower and investment of an organization while increasing its efficiency and ROI.

Fraud Detection

Amidst all its success, E-commerce has also become a hunting ground for fraudsters. Not only customers but merchants are also getting duped due to sly online activities that trick a business using its own terms and conditions.

According to a report from Economic times:

• October 2017: Amazon conned to the tune of Rs 50 lakh in New Delhi
• May 2017: Amazon India cheated off of Rs 69.91 lakh in Bengaluru.
• Dec 2016: Flipkart duped of Rs 1.05 crore, 152 expensive mobile phones in Kota

While merchants bear the monetary brunt, consumers are often tricked into buying a sham product as scammers exploit the fact that no one can see the actual product before buying, hence they plant fake comments about the product to influence a purchase of a counterfeit product. A single counterfeit purchase affects the customer’s product experience, marketplace image and brand equity on whose name the product was sold.

To tackle such scammers on online marketplaces, E-retail intelligence is steadily being put into action by many top marketplace owners.

Where Crowdsourced platforms like Fraud.net are partnering with tech giants like Amazon to detect fraudulent transactions, Alibaba has also launched it’s own Bigdata powered “IP Joint force system” to fight product counterfeiting by utilizing data from brands and Ecommerce marketplaces and feeding it to AI programs.

In another attempt to tackle product shaming,  Entrupy, a startup is using a portable microscopic camera to take photos of a product and then match it with scans of that product’s brand utilizing machine-learning and big data algorithms to detect whether a product is a fake. With each scan, the AI-powered system enhances itself to become more precise.

Inventory Management

Equipped with Predictive analytics, Ecommerce AI is also making big waves in Inventory management for ecommerce store – something that every merchant has to spend a lot of time on.

While overstocking can raise issues if the product suddenly goes out of trend, understocking can seriously impact the customer experience due to delay in shipment deliverability.

With AI-powered Ecommerce intelligence, store managers can now effectively optimize their supply chain and have much more reliable future predictions about how to order inventory refills.

Salesforce recently partnered with Coca-cola to demonstrate it’s very own Einstein AI that was installed in AI operated vending machines. These machines took pictures of buyers and saved their data and stock count for big data-based predictive analytics. Few months down the road, the AI system accurately started predicting stock refills based on seasonal variations and upcoming promotions.

Ecommerce AI Final Verdict

Ecommerce AI is steadily uncovering many areas in the industry that can be improved to deliver a superior customer experience and the rate at which advancements in artificial intelligence are being made, it’s essentialness in the near future cannot be denied. As of now, Artificial Intelligence is a painting which is still not ready.

How soon will AI-powered solutions become a norm in the Ecommerce industry and whether they will be able to match the expectations is something that remains to be seen. But looking at the current advancements, the future sure looks promising.

The post Ecommerce AI Trend: Evolution of Artificial Intelligence in Ecommerce appeared first on DesignWebKit.

Attractive websites always play an important role in the success of an eCommerce store as they increase the value of the products and work to make your website look more trustworthy. Now, if you are planning to create a new eCommerce website or wish to redesign your existing website, the list below can give you ample design inspiration to take your online store to the next level of interaction, engagement, and, finally, conversion.

Ecommerce Website Design Inspiration

Hebe Boutique

Hebe Designer Boutique eCommerce website design is a destination for style seekers and shoppers. This website is beautiful and well designed. The thing that stands out the most is the great photography. High-quality photos are important when running an online eCommerce business. The font is also a little bit thicker than you usually see online. It makes website design stand out and look good even more, guaranteeing to boost the conversion rates.

Delori

Delori is an unusual template that can be used to create an Instagram online clothing or accessories store. But, in general, you can safely choose this ready-made solution if you need to present some goods related to fashion. Many Google fonts and relevant images are already included in the template package, so no one has to spend time on additional elements in terms of personalizing the template. In addition, an excellent design will please you with a quick and simple process of creating a unique look for a future online store.

This great template will allow you to create an online store with an extensive list of products. It will easily speed up and simplify the browsing of products in various categories. The mega menu, slider, various options for sorting products, and the ability to subscribe to the newsletter will also attract the attention of many potential buyers. You will undoubtedly appreciate the possibilities of this theme.

DryBar

A great color scheme paired with subtle animations gives this eCommerce website both style and personality. Mouse over the little hairdryer, and it bounces on its cord; hover over the icons at the top, and a tiny animation gives you some feedback. Touches like this make the site fun to use without being overwhelming or annoying, making the visitor return repeatedly.

Chef Plaza Food And Wine Store

This winery eCommerce website design is a perfect combination of imagery and colors. The clean background turns the focus to stunning pictures and highlights calls to action. The design looks great on any mobile device.

Shun Cutlery

Beyond its fashionable modernity, Shun Cutlery still holds on to shades of a traditional eCommerce store. The best example is the home page. A full-screen photo carousel partnered with a minimalist navigation menu over a pure white background gives the site a futuristic appearance, and the result is an amazing-looking website.

Zoe Ecommerce Website Design

This ready-made template for an online store features a stylish design in a clean style. The White color is used as the main one to move the focus to the products. This template also shows us a good example of functional and well-organized footer website design. The design is responsive, and it looks amazing on any device.

Obey Clothing

The Obey online store is not a complex design. However, a minimalistic approach towards putting the product in the consumer’s eyes and concluding a sale effortlessly. The black-on-white design here works really well. On the checkout page, you have a few selections of sizes and colors, and the checkout button is fairly straightforward, which encourages a quick purchase.

DressUp

Dress Up sells clothing online with a mission to help women realize their worth. It is no wonder their eCommerce website design is full of photos of beautiful women in stylish clothing. Their homepage is filled with various promotions such as free shipping, a few sales, new arrivals, and promotional offers that engage the visitor on the page and make him/her buy the items.

Northernism

This eCommerce website design creates a fresh look by moving away from established eCommerce design patterns, placing images and text on a grid that feels much less familiar. There is plenty of white space, and each page contains a few simple images, making it seem a lot less busy than most of the web. The description is formatted conventionally with an eye-catching call-to-action.

Sweet 4 you Ecommerce Website Template

The designer accentuated large images and bright colors, and this was a great choice! The design elements are combined wisely, and the design makes a great impression on visitors.

Paul Valentine

Paul Valentine takes a few risks; however, it still pulls out ahead. They open on a text, less on an image, showcasing two of their most popular watches. Without any navigation, they are hoping that the visitor will figure out that they need to scroll. Another risk is the vertical navigation menu, and the bag icon at the bottom left instead of the top right. These enhanced visuals take attention away from the design and place it on the product.

Roxxe Multipurpose WooCommerce Theme

Wondering how to promote your business in the beauty sphere in a preferable way? There is one efficient method that will help you in boosting any salon or cosmetics shop. Meet Roxxe multipurpose WooCommerce theme based on which you can build a modern and high-quality website. Exploring what is on the surface, we first see the design. The stunning design of Roxxe can attract more customers and create an atmosphere of a friendly and fashionable beauty center. Then, please take a look at the pages and their minimalistic content, focusing on client and product trading.

Roxxe Tools

Now, it’s time to find out what’s under the hood and how effective the Roxxe multipurpose responsive WooCommerce theme works. Roxxe is based on Bootstrap 4, Elementor page builder, and WooCommerce plugin. These tools allow anyone to build web pages easily and rapidly:

• Bootstrap 4 frameworks will help to create a responsive website that fits any device.
• Elementor editor boasts of drag-and-drop technology, which is the most helpful for even rookies in-page editing. Thanks to it, you can fill each page with the necessary widget, as their number is almost limitless and let you make your design ideas real.
• WooCommerce plugin is oriented toward launching an online shop. Its package includes a product page with a smart filter system and a capacious wishlist, leading to the shopping cart’s favorite product. Besides, equip an online store with a personal account and save their order history there.

Moreover, Roxxe contains loads of ready-made layouts that will save you time. Use any suitable pre-styled elements or sections, and forget about the code lines.  As a bonus, fill your website with a Megamenu to raise the usability and boost the website’s functionality and provide the visitors with the latest products.  Roxxe is a multipurpose responsive WooCommerce theme, so it’s suitable for all screen sizes and creates smooth adaptiveness to let the customers use your beauty shop on any device. Mobile-first websites are on top today. One more element to boost a website is search engine optimization as well as responsive design. The SEO-friendly theme can raise your website to the top of Google results.

Use full-width sliders, attractive banners, and multiple testimonials to make clients confident in your shop. Also, add engaging galleries full of images with your services. Don’t forget about the Contacts page with a Google map and info to help visitors find your beauty center. Certainly, Roxxe gets ready for producing brand-new templates to increase your collection of eye-catching websites. So be sure you will meet new Roxxe skins pretty soon.

KarDone Multipurpose Shopify Theme

In case you’re in search of a vivid, charming, and just modern theme for building an online shop to any taste, then the KarDone Shopify theme will leave no one cold. This theme is a rich all-in-one collection of templates with a diversity of marvelous stores. Get a chance to build product pages with a wide range of items, which categories and exclusive features can sort.

Please the customers with a wishlist, shopping cart, and manageable menu full of the elements that make the website navigation free. Draw your attention to the customizable homepage with ready sections. Just change the order, take out the segments you don’t need, and create a fully unique layout.

Also, all the pages are responsive and look stunning on any screen, so the customers can use the device they want and freely use the website. If there are any questions, a friendly support team is ready to give advice.

Vendy Fashion Multipurpose Shopify Theme

Many people know that in the field of the fashion trade, online stores compete with offline stores. There is no surprise, as online shops can afford more tempting prices for buyers. This is possible due to the noticeably lower costs of maintaining business and the absence of geographic restrictions. And these are just some of the benefits. And, what about you? Do you want your online store always to stay up-to-date? Then, just have a look at the design of Vendy. This fashion multipurpose Shopify theme is a winning mix of innovative UI elements and clean design. There also lots of pre-made page sections and eCommerce elements for quick customization of product grids, listings, gallery styles, shopping carts, wishlists, lookbooks, and more.

Plus, you don’t have to be tech-savvy to work with Vendy and dozens of its features! Feel free to change anything you prefer in the user-friendly drag-n-drop Shopify Visual Builder. As a bonus, Vendy goes with 10 homepage layouts and:

• Listing pages;
• Product pages;
• About Us pages
• 2 Lookbook pages;
• 2 Collections pages;
• attractive Blog pages;
• 3 newsletter pop-up variations.

They are addicted to probably the most popular eCommerce niche – fashion. As you may know, fashion covers clothes, accessories, shoes, and other branches. With the Vendy Fashion Multipurpose Shopify Theme, you can stay assured that your shop will be available on screens of all possible devices. The matter is that Vendy is fully responsive and retina-ready. As well it’s SEO-friendly, so it will be easier for you to grow your business.

Above all, Vendy is backed with live technical support and well-commented documentation. Hurry to check it on your own!

Mysterio – Fashion eCommerce Shopify Theme

The most successful websites have two things in common: great content and amazing designs. If your website design is lackluster, your content will not be able to shine, and you will impress all your visitors. This means that you need to start thinking about style and how to design the site from the moment you start creating a new project. You may not have thought about how important this is. Mysterio is designed for those who don’t want to spend time building a website. This is a turnkey solution that can be easily adapted to your business.

We want to share with you simple tricks that will help you achieve great results. Using the Mysterio theme, you will create an amazing site. Your resource will look stylish and interesting, even if you created it yourself, without the help of developers. Don’t worry. You can create an amazing website even if you are a beginner. So let’s talk about how to create a website!

Conclusion

Considering the above designs and templates, you can pull in more customers with an enhanced and improved website when you are all set to make your website more beautiful. Also, consider other tools that can be integrated to help get more customers to your online store to drive more sales. The Brihaspati Infotech can help you customize the website’s templates and design to make it more appealing and user-friendly to online shoppers.

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