Day 103: UX & Design Trends in 2020 — Part 3: Sensory Design
UX Design in the digital space is far more than just web design. Just to name a few: designing for professional software like Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite, native mobile apps like Instagram or WhatsApp, audio/video streaming services like Netflix or Spotify, immersive experiences like AR on Snapchat or VR or PS4, digital assistants like Amazo Echo or Google Home. For quite a while the major training of UX is web design related, but we’re seeing more and more different sensory design is needed in other format of media. In 2020, the related UX & Design trends are:
Immersive Experience: AR/VR
AR and VR technology is gaining velocity in professional field and entertainment industry; Surgeons use AR for operations, factory workers use AR in their training module for on-job training, and some autism therapy uses VR experience to prepare autistic children before they interact with the real world. With 5G technology which boost the data loading speed, AR & VR adoptions will increase in consumer space; therefore there will be more needs in UX Design talents in these fields.
Fortunately, the industry has accumulated enough practices to start to form standard guidelines about how to best define and ideate on AR and VR experience. Check out Google’s AR Design Guidelines and Leap Motion’s VR Design Guidelines. In 2020, we’re looking for innovative usage of AR & VR technology that can expand the market, and provide further convenience to users.
Digital Assistant: Conversational UI and Voice UI
With the maturity of digital assistants in the market, successful use cases are everywhere in using chatbot or voice UI to interact with customers. Not only you can inquire information like weather or stock price, users can also conduct simple and formulated actions like quick shopping & trading stocks. For businesses, the benefit doesn’t stop at cutting cost of human labor in customer services, conversational UI and voice UI also create additional marketing & sales channels to promote and sell products and services.
To many designers, this is a brand new field, and the required work is largely on system analysis rather than visual creativity. However, tradition user research work flow analysis, prototyping and testing are still as important as any other visual based user interface design. There are abundance of design guidelines to refer to, check out the link below:
Amazon Alexa skills design guideline:
Google Assistant design guideline:
Conclusion
The adoption of voice UI is the one thing that we’re sure to have more impact in our lives; a big percentage of mobile search is done through voice, and near half of the American own a voice-based digital assistant. With the power of 5G, the technology of AR & VR will also catchup in the consumer market. We’re seeing more needs of sensory design in the field to further enhance user journeys with these technology.
Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts around the UX & Design Trends? I’m eager to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
