Top 5 trends influencing UX in 2012

An interesting question about the state of UX in 2012 was raised on Quora last weekend, one that I actually found quite difficult to answer, given that there are so many cool things rocking the UX world at the moment.

Whether or not my top five influences will be the top five or not remains to be seen, but these are certainly five trends and movements that will have a massive impact on UX over the next 12 months and onwards. This post expands on my answer on Quora, which was written at about 11pm on a Sunday night, and so probably wasn’t an insightful read.

1. Mass adoption of HTML5

At Riff Raff, we’ve been using HTML5 since 2008, first tentatively quarantined within tightly controlled boundaries, such as in Content Management Systems, intranets and back-office web applications. But the rest of the digital world hasn’t been quite so adventurous, and even now we see discussions springing up amongst designers and developers around whether or not it’s “okay to use it yet”.

HTML5 is now beginning to take hold, and those “cow paths” Jeremy Keith spoke about in HTML5 for Web Designers will soon be well and truly paved — perhaps even decorated with shrubberies and twinkling street lights.

The mass adoption of HTML5, regardless of its current state, promises to wield the most powerful influence over UX as we know it, in my opinion, and will become all the more pervasive as browsing technology becomes more standardised and we scrape the last festering winnits from the sphincter of modern web design.

Native support for video, audio, complex animations and interactions courtesy of canvas, not to mention sockets, storage and myriad other features, all make HTML5 the most promising hope of a consistent and unified approach to cross-platform, cross-device experience development. And this will have a huge influence on UX, in the same way that Flash changed the face of web design at the turn of the century.

Just as we saw back then, we’ll no doubt witness an eager generation of UX designers, frustrated with the limitations of boxes and arrows, push the boundaries of usability with beautifully exquisite, but ultimately unusable navigation paradigms that will fire up controversy amongst the ‘standardistas’. But it’s exactly this kind of over-the-top rebellion that will breath new life into a space dominated (and somewhat stifled creatively) by standards-obsessed purists and super-conventional OS look-a-likes.

2. Standardisation of browsing technology

Apart from the obvious relics now (thankfully) in their final death throes, browser compatibility isn’t quite the nightmare it once was, and it’s getting easier as browsers become themselves more standards-compliant, and less dependent on proprietary technology. This will only improve as adoption of emerging standards such as HTML5 continues to grow.

As Smartphones and cheaper, faster mobile broadband effectively push ‘feature’ phones into obsolescence over the next couple of years, the hell-on-earth that was mobile browser compatibility will be a thing of the past, too (unless your audience is the developing world, of course). This gives UX designers a great deal of creative freedom, as they can focus more on designing rich, engaging user experiences, whilst worrying less about compensating for lowest common denominators.

3. Multi-touch interaction

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how much this is already changing our digital world. With iOS apps like Clear pushing multi-touch gesture-based user experience to its limits, designers and developers are already breaking away from existing interaction paradigms and crafting experiences specifically designed around the technology.

Of course, this can be a two-way street, and having technology lead design doesn’t always bring us to the best outcome. That said, since tactile finger-tip interaction brings us one step closer to true physical involvement with the software we use, this is something that I think will usher in a new generation of genuinely intuitive user interface design.

With the release of OSX Lion, we can already see Apple’s potential transition to an entirely gesture-based range of machines, perhaps only a generation or two away. The entire operating system feels less and less like the desktop experience we’re accustomed to, and migrates ever so slowly towards a preference for touch-based user inputs. This of course has a subliminal impact on user interface design as a whole, as designers subconsciously reinvent those patterns and conventions they see and use every day.

Most importantly though, multi-touch devices are forcing UX designers to think more proactively from the user’s point of view. The subtleties of tactile human interaction draw a more physical relationship between user and software than ever was possible with a mouse and keyboard, which in turn draws us ever closer to something approaching genuine intuitive behaviour.

4. Divergence

Interactive Whiteboards, TVs, Games Consoles, Desktop Computers, Kiosks, Interactive Table-tops, Laptops, Netbooks, Tablets, PDAs, Smartphones, MP3 Players, Car Dashboards… the number of screens and environmental contexts we have to cater for is growing everyday, and shows no sign of slowing down. The archaic notion that we must create one experience to rule them all is slowly beginning to erode as better analytics and a healthy attitude towards insight over assumption are putting the consumer first, and driving better decision-making.

This has already had a considerable effect on UX conventions, as more and more digital experiences are designed to be responsive to the screen (and resolution) on which they’re displayed. But it’s not just aesthetics or responsive layouts that are evolving; our thought processes as designers are gradually evolving too, designing our interactive experiences specifically to make the most of new input devices like multi-touch, or to reinvent old ones like voice control.

5. Convergence

History tells us that convergence only really happens in devices small enough to fit in the consumer’s pocket, but we’re already seeing the influence of the big-screen convergence in UX, and this will only increase as Google TV, Apple TV and (possibly) YouView emerge into the mainstream over the next year or two.

Web connected TVs and the continuing metamorphosis of the games console as media entertainment system in the wake of social gaming’s rabid consumption of the gaming market will have a huge impact on how we design for our users in the future. It’s perhaps too early to say whether or not this will really begin to rock the world in 2012, or if the kind of standardisation necessary to reach critical mass is still too far away.

Either way, as spoiled UX designers from a web design background get to grips with comparatively restrictive user-input devices (i.e. the TV remote), the influence of navigation paradigms used in video games (where restrictive input devices have been the norm for decades) will form the bedrock of UI convention in this space.

So that’s my top 5 trends influencing the world of UX design in 2012, at least in my world. Do you agree? UX in digital is an ever-expending space, and I’m sure there are other things going on that I’m not feeling the impact of just yet. What will change the way you work in 2012?