The Next Big Thing in User Experience, Part 2

The Internet of Things

“My answer is integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) into our UX design arsenal,” answers Bob. “It’s already happening. How does a user experience translate from wearable technology to a smartphone to a desktop and even larger screens. I also think designing the Web for flat screens and delivering over-the-top media really are in their infancy. Will users need more portable keyboards or just better-designed remotes? Or will either matter because remotes will just become our iPhones and iPads?”

“The design of connected environments,” replies Steve. “The user experience of the Internet of Things. People are dedicating a lot of column inches to this topic, but IoT practices and principles are still very much an emergent space. The applications are many—from smart buildings and smart homes to connected cities, and all the way down to individual smart devices.”

Looking Beyond Mobile Design

“Mobile-app design is a solved problem.” answers Yury. “We already have great OS guidelines for a well-defined user experience, information architecture, and visual language. There is now less work for UX designers to do because the design teams at Google, Apple, and Microsoft have already done half the job. As the latest stats show, smartphone owners spend 75% of their time in just their four top apps, as described in ‘Chart of the Day: Most People Use Only 4 Apps’ and app downloads are declining. This is sad news for app developers. It’s hard to predict whether the evolution of mobile apps will stall—as has happened with desktop applications. If you still want to work on interesting products, you should consider these areas:

• screen-based designs for other types of devices, especially in-car user interfaces—This industry was lagging for a long time, and many manufacturers are still far behind. But there are already some great examples in Audi, Ford, and Tesla cars. I don’t believe in Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Manufacturers limit their features. We don’t want these user interfaces to be commoditized as has happened with smartphones and PCs. For further discussion, see ‘Ford CEO: We Won’t Take a Back Seat to Google and Apple.’ Look at new initiatives by Ford, as described in ‘Ford Service Helps You Get Around Town, Whatever You Drive.’ Toyota and GM want to be more than just manufacturers of cars and are thinking about a car as a service. ‘GM Quietly Buys Failed Uber Rival Sidecar’ discusses GM’s approach.
• new platforms and paradigms—These include virtual assistants and bots in messengers and virtual and augmented-reality helmets. I think these will merge someday. The UX-design language for such platforms is still young. You can be one of the designers who create it.
• better cross-channel interactions on more platforms—The idea of cross-channel, omnichannel, or multi-screen user experiences is not new. However, many companies still don’t approach such projects systematically. There are also complex, socio-technical systems that do this on a larger scale. Don Norman is pushing the new term DesignX to describe challenges where designers are working on constantly changing systems, not just objects.”
• anti-design—Visual design on the Web has become monotonous, with many Web sites built on similar templates. There is a lot of criticism about this—for example, in ‘Design Machines’ and on Twitter. In part, we can blame simple Web-site constructors and publishing platforms for this. However, similar to what happened to typography in the ’90s with David Carson’s grunge rebellion, there are now punks designing digital products, too. Web brutalism, subcultures like sea punk, and vaporwave break traditional patterns and inject a bit of trashy spice into homogenous Web design. While I doubt that ’90s desktop OS styling, CD encyclopedia–visual language, ASCII graphics, and intentionally ugly designs will form the foundation of products designed for the masses, they definitely bring a stream of fresh air to the modern Web.”

Motion Design

“From an interaction-design perspective, motion design is really exciting to me,” says Warren. “I’ve always had a love for animation and, with mobile, we have opportunities to really enhance the user experience through the use of motion. Obviously, the challenge is to avoid the gratuitous use of animation. But using animation judiciously always serves to make the experience better.”

“Interaction design has already started to mature,” replies Simon. “Though there’s still a long way to go on motion design. I guess the next thing after that would be haptic and sonic feedback. Some apps such as games already use vibration and sound to great effect. I think we could subtly enhance standard user experiences in other contexts through the use of sound and vibration.

“Of course, the need to get the basics right first still applies. But imagine getting physical feedback from your phone when it validates your input or processes your payment. I’m sure this would be more satisfying to users than our just displaying a confirmation message on the screen.”

Designing Physical Environments

“Another clear trend is the design of the user experience of physical environments,” offers Steve. “We’re seeing collaborations between architects and UX designers at various phases of the design process. A heavy focus of that work is around identifying the digital/technological landscape that is necessary to support the intended experience. However, a body of work is developing that directs our attention more squarely to the physical domain itself. Right now, there is a group of Italian-trained architects who are railing against the page, and that is justified. ‘But we’ve always worked like that!!’ you might say. However, this trend just hasn’t made it to the mainstream in the way we’re projecting on the horizon.”

Fitting User Experience into the Rhythm of Life

I think user experience is now at a similar point as the automobile industry when it started to make cars in colors other than basic black. Remember how Henry Ford said, “You can have any color car that you like, as long as it is black.” That was great when people needed basic, reliable transportation at a reasonable price. The innovations in automation that Ford and his team created were highly important to the industry. But once they had solved those problems, it was time to create a greater variety of cars for diverse customers.

User experience had meager beginnings—just make sure the product does what it is supposed to do and make it look pretty. But, as we all know, making a product that works reliably and is pretty is now the norm—well, at least for many product realms it is. Now, we need to make products work really well for the user. Remember that we have many users: the ones who actually use the system, the ones who create the input for that system, the ones who use the results of that system, the ones who manage the system, and the ones who decide to buy the system in the first place—among others.

Expecting users to put their personal style and needs aside just to use a pretty, reliable system is no longer enough. Products need to fit into the rhythm of the user’s life. I enjoyed my recent conversation with Greg Nudelman that I captured in “Lean UX for Wearables: An Interview with Greg Nudelman.” We discussed the idea that, if we understood the rhythm of our interaction with our devices as if they were music, we could better design the interaction between man and machine. You can read more about understanding the rhythm of our interaction with devices in “What Does Your Wearable UX Sound Like?” We dance with our devices every day in the artful production that is our life. Let us make it a more enjoyable and beautiful dance.

In the future, will your users fit their lives into your UX design solutions? Or will your UX designs accommodate their lives?

What do you foresee happening in user experience in the years to come? Please add your thoughts to the comments.