Last year, I wrote about the top web design trends to watch in 2016. My predictions received a lot of attention and questions about what’s next not only in the web design but UX design world.
I reached out to 10 UX design experts and asked them to share their opinion on what’s going to be the biggest UX trend in 2017.
Read on to find out why founders, designers and executives bet on AI, chatbots and VR.
Noam Alloush is the founder of SITE123, a free website builder empowering people to make a website using ready-made styles and layouts.
Noam Alloush: I think that the UX trend will still be the mobile. Most of the desktop websites will look like an app. This is something that Google search engine, already began this year by removing their ads from the right menu – and the industry follows. It’s important because any brand wants its users to use the same interface without the need to learn a new one each time they use a different device.
The second thing will be building apps with a lot of features but without losing the UX. This one is very difficult. To understand it you can see how for instance Facebook separated Facebook Messenger app from their main app. Personally, I don’t think that they are dealing with it in the best way, so it’ll be interesting to see what will be the solution here.
One more important thing is how “voice recognition” will change the UX industry. I believe that in about 5 years from now I will not use server side or front side anymore, I think it will be “voice side.”
Tomas Jasovsky
Tomas Jasovsky is a product manager leading the InVision LABS team. Photo credit: InVision.
Tomas Jasovsky is a product manager leading the InVision LABSteam. They’re building innovative tools for designers that speed up their workflow and enhance collaboration.
Tomas Jasovsky: In recent years, product designers went crazy for responsive design—adapting any layout to a wide range of devices. I’m now starting to see age-responsive design, which adapts content and structure to a wide range of ages.
This is a natural progression—websites shouldn’t be one size fits all. Based on all the metadata provided, it’s easy to identify unique visitors and offer a “stripped-down” interface where font-sizes and spacing increase to accommodate the eyesight of the elderly, color blindness, or brightness sensitivity. There’s a lot of potential to meet the needs of the user of tomorrow with a more sophisticated design approach.
Ignas Rubezius
Ignas Rubezius is a co-founder of MailerLite, an email marketing service. Photo credit: MailerLite.
Ignas Rubezius is a co-founder of MailerLite, an email marketing service that helps more than 220,000 companies worldwide to keep in touch with their customers.
Ignas Rubezius: I think that Conversational UX will be the most interesting trend to watch for next year. With the fast development and growth of messaging platforms and chatbots, it’s clear that it’s going to play a major role in the future of UX. Chatbots open lots of new possibilities how you can interact with users. On the other hand, it will be a huge challenge for UX designers as it’s very different from what we were building before and will require new skills. Still, it looks very exciting and promising!
Bill Bodin
Bill Bodin is the CTO of Kony, one of the leading enterprise mobility companies providing application development platform and custom solutions. Photo credit: Kony.
Bill Bodin is the CTO of Kony, one of the leading enterprise mobility companies providing application development platform and custom solutions.
Bill Bodin: The User Experience and design of a mobile app go hand in hand. That’s why, in 2017, designers will have a lot more say in terms of User Experience. It’ll be the year of the designer because with the help of visualization-based tools, they’ll be empowered in the mobile app development process. They’ll be able to produce more than just screen flicking prototypes but a prototype that runs and shows the stakeholder the vision of the application as it will be used in practice.
Also, mobile app UX will transform with the help of chatbot and artificial intelligence in 2017. We’ve seen chatbot technology integrated into consumer apps for quite some time now. For example, the capability to order a pizza through a conversational interface in a mobile app, but we’ll begin to see this technology move into other industries. One example is retail banking. Once started as a cool niche feature, will become the norm. We’ll be able to connect to artificially intelligent customer service representatives on our mobile or connected devices to check account balances, report lost cards, and many other features that may not exist in the conventional user interface, like advanced portfolio analysis based on “what-if” scenarios provided via voice by the customer.
There is tremendous opportunity and interest in creating holistic conversational solutions that can strengthen the ability to do business on mobile and connected devices. These dramatic improvements can be made on the backend of the mobile app and can transcend onto the User Experience and allow companies to expose capabilities that don’t exist from a glass perspective. Like retail banking, we’ll begin to see the adoption of chatbot technology and conversational interfaces in more and more industries. It will be interesting to see the different approaches and applications as this type of technology provides endless opportunities.
In addition, we’ll see dramatic growth in virtual and Augment Reality extensions for mobile. We’ll see conventional solutions such as Field Services complimented by robust image recognition technologies allowing advanced mobile backend services to analyze and deliver specific guidance. 3D interactive schematics and even highly guarded guidance with intellectual property implications will be seamlessly delivered to the field service worker, with specific safeguards which prevent data leakage. Basically, all the information a technician needs to repair any problem.
While I think 2017 will be a breakthrough year for many solutions to become multi-channel and multi-platform, it will also be a year filled with new and exciting features extending the mobile experience for everyone, enterprise user and consumer alike. It will be a year that we see specific examples of several different technologies, geolocation, biometrics, voice recognition and many others combined to make tasks like authentication and identity management – even the simple but often time consuming action of logging into your favorite app seamless and in many cases a wholesale elimination of conventional user ID and password entry.
In many ways 2017 will be as much about the technology we don’t see – as much as the interface we do.
Pete Rojwongsuriya
Pete Rojwongsuriya is a UI/UX designer over at The Pete Design. Photo source: Pete Rojwongsuriya.
Pete Rojwongsuriya is a UI/UX designer over at The Pete Design, the founder of Travelistly, BucketListly, and a digital nomad.
Pete Rojwongsuriya: The biggest trend right now in UX world is the craze over chatbots and the possibility of it becoming the new type of interface people interact with. Bots have been around for ages but the reason why it is trending now is because the advancement of AI seen on products such as Google Assistant and Siri that have gone beyond a fad to become a useful product with real impact on the mass. I believe the reason behind this trend lies within the behavior of our mobile usage and the overwhelming numbers of apps seeking for our attention.
Based on statistic provided by Statista, we ended using only around 5 apps per day, and one of those apps is a messaging app. Why not provide your services where your audience are most active? It is only natural for businesses to try and capitalize on this and provide their service platforms like Skype and Facebook Messenger.
The development of chatbots are still in its infancy and we have yet to see a product that capitalize upon its potential but I think in 2017, we will see more and more creative products that take chatbots to the next level. Imagine an internet provider customer service bot that contextually knows all about your router setups, and can troubleshoot your problems promptly at any hours and provide a richer services than the usual customer service. I would kill for this kind of product to exist right about now!
Mariusz Ciesla
Mariusz Cieśla is a lead designer and co-founder of Lifetramp, a startup that lets you try a new career. Photo credit: Anna Kusyk.
Mariusz Cieśla is a lead designer and co-founder of Lifetramp, a startup that lets you try a new career.
[Source:-Forbes]