Designing for Platforms of the Future
Graphic Design in 2025
I’m the CEO & a Co-founder of Anima App, along with the talented Or Arbel and Michal Cohen. Our goal is to empower designers to own the design. And, bring designers to create the UI & UX of the actual product, rather than explaining the developer how to do it.
A major part of what we’re doing on a daily basis, is looking a few steps ahead, into the future of digital design. On this article I’ll be focusing on the platforms we design for, rather than design tools and features. A short history, and looking a few years ahead.
A Brief History of Digital Platforms
Allow me to skip the history of the print and jump straight to digital design.
Personal Computer. Apple had introduced the mouse, along with window-based GUI to the mass with the Macintosh. Microsoft later on copied these into Windows 2. If you’ve seen Jobs’ movie, you remember Jobs screaming at Gates after that. Apple was actually inspired by Xerox PARC for both features, but it’s all water under the bridge now. These are the roots of the GUI we still use today on our PCs, the first digital platform.
Web. The next revolutionizing platform was the web, or actually the web-browsers. HTML & CSS had a few major updates along the years. But the core is the same — content available online in a matter of seconds. And, cross-platform thanks to web-browsers.
Smartphones has changed our lives the most recently. The iPhone led the revolution with multi touch, and the whole iOS experience. It brought the internet to our pockets. Getting us online everywhere, and introduced a kind of user interface.
Platforms of the Future
Similar to the revolutions we’ve experienced with web & smartphones, there are a few new platforms just around the corner. Today’s design tools might not suit these new platforms, so we’re going to see a lot of new tools for a lot of new use cases. Here’s a short recap of a few of the next platforms to come, bringing even more niches to digital UX designers.
Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
We’ve been hearing about the AR and VR revolution for a few years now. Yet, putting Pokemon Go aside, the technology hasn’t hit the mass market yet. And it is for a good reason — Special hardware is required on most cases. Wearables like Facebook’s Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Microsoft HoloLens are expensive and doesn’t suit everyone. Google project Tango for Android also requires special phones. And anyway, that project has been dragging for years. On the wearables arena, Samsung leads with 5M units in sales.
Numbers according to The Verge.
The real bomb dropped with Apple announcing ARKit on iOS 11. Which means AR is coming to the hundreds-of-millions with just a software update. And after 100 apps for measuring distance, we’ll start to see new use cases for it and a new category of apps. For example — a walk through guide to repair your car.
You can’t design a rich AR experience using today’s common tools for User Interface design. Using existing 3D design tools for UI is a bit like using Photoshop to design UI vs using Sketch. It’s a bit too complex, not built for the same use-case, and might not suit everyone. The way I see it, it means a bunch of new tools are about to hit the market.
Smart Homes
Connected TVs are already available to everyone. And, its apps ecosystem is building up. That’s the first step in our connected homes. Sooner or later, your dishwasher, mirrors, locks, lamps and more devices will join the party. Some devices would be voice controlled (i.e using Alexa), and some would have its own display.
Great user experience is critical to consumer adoption. We’ve learned this lesson on the iPhone revolution. Connected phones existed before the iPhone, but Apple’s UX made the revolution. My “dumb” refrigerator works well, and I wouldn’t replace it before the smart ones gives me an amazing added value.
Connected Cars
Tesla is leading this field with cars that are connected 24/7 to the internet. These cars has a ‘’17 display and gets software updates overnight, with new apps, new features and bug fixes. It’s a whole new kind of experience, and it is up to designers to make that experience amazing.
Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are already in the market. Both allows third party apps. Today, the screens for these systems are pretty small comparing to Tesla’s and the experience is less smooth. It would probably evolve into larger screens, giving us a larger canvas for our interface.
Why do you need such a large screen in your car? With autonomous vehicles, you don’t need your eyes on the road. So you can work, shop, hang out and more. Your car should entertain you. So start thinking how your apps should behave on a car screen.
Summary
Each digital platform we have today have made big waves on the way we design. The personal computer, the web, and the iPhone, have all brought a new set of tools and methodologies with it.
The next wave of platforms will have a similar effect on the world design. We’ll design for Augmented Reality, Smart homes, like mirrors or refrigerators, and for Connected Cars. We’ll need to refresh our mindset and our toolbox as well.
Hope you’ve enjoyed reading. Feel free to comment this post with your predictions. I’m very interested getting your opinions, ideas and thoughts on the future of design.
As for today, if you design websites, you might want to check out Anima’s first product. Launchpad allows you to publish websites directly from Sketch, no coding required. Get Launchpad for Sketch here.
