Implementation

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Defining The UX Strategy

Avis team, as a team that knows its customers very well and cares about their expectations, came to the first meeting with the user experience problems they aimed to solve. We drew a route together to discuss a common UX strategy and shed light on the actions to be taken during the project.

What was the main goal of the Avis team with this project?

• Improving the digital channel experience and reducing call center traffic

What feelings did Avis provide in the real world to its users in the digital environment?

• Confidence
• Perfect Service

Concept Design

Some of the basic principles we attach importance to during the design process:

• Good design offers easy navigation to the user.
• Good design shows the answers in the right place at the right time to clear the question marks in their mind without the user having to click anywhere: Does the vehicle model I choose change? What are the additional service fees? What are the assurance options? What are the payment options? …
• Good design is ergonomic design: It does not force the user to make critical choices in tight spaces, it allows the user to interact with the interface in an ergonomic way.

To see the interface we have designed pay avis.com.tr a visit.

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Eventually, though, they find out that there is no way around it, as a significant amount of their customers are letting this know in an unpleasant way. As designers, we always see the ideal world as a place where we can create things without racing against the clock.

Unfortunately, most of the time we do, which challenges us to come up with solutions to deliver the best possible quality in the least amount of time. We had one of those projects a few weeks ago, where we had just one week to redesign a user interface, which would affect the user experience of approximately 100.000 daily users.

Even though UX in Turkey is becoming more and more mature, there are still plenty of software companies that are not aware of the fact that listening to users can be very beneficial.

Some other software companies, on the other hand, are proactively looking at opportunities to continuously improve the usability of their products to increase client satisfaction. A couple of weeks ago, we have worked with Nebim, one of Turkey’s leading independent software vendors, which pursues the strategy of continuous UX improvement. Their product, Nebim V3 ERP, being the leading local Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software system geared towards non-food retail and wholesale market segment with tens of thousands of daily users, was receiving feedback from their customers’ end-users regarding opportunities of UX improvement, specifically in its reporting applications. Nebim was investing in on-site and remote training to assist end-users in how to leverage advanced options of their reporting applications, which on the long run was not a cost-effective approach.

This is where we stepped in. Our goal was to redesign the reporting-related applications of the product in such a way that it would be easy to learn for new customers, but also not that different to upset existing and advanced customers. Eventually, this should decrease the amount of time and resources spent on support and training. Sounds like a typical UX project, right?

But here is the fun part; we only had 7 days to deliver the designs…

Day 4, 5, 6, and 7: Test with Real Users

In the remaining four days of the project, we have focused on testing and improving the product we had designed and developed in the days before. As mentioned earlier, we had decided to use an iterative testing method, which means that we have several repetitions (iterations) of testing the product with actual users. Our goal was to conduct one full iteration per day. As we had four days left, this meant we could conduct four full iterations if everything would run smoothly.

Days before the start of the first iteration, we have discussed together with the stakeholders the number and types of users we would like to include in the tests. Based on our experience and the tight schedule, we had decided to include a number of four users per iteration, which would mean we would require a total of 16 users for the entire project. Luckily, Nebim was helpful in taking care of the recruitment of users, which saved us a lot of time.

Planning one full iteration per day seemed like a challenge at the start but was actually quite fun and viable. We started each iteration with the user tests early in the morning. Testing with four users would take us approximately 2 to 3 hours. During each session, we listened, observed, and took notes. After all user sessions were completed, we needed an hour or so to list and summarize the findings, after which we presented the results of the iteration to the stakeholders.

In this 1-hour meeting, we discussed the highlights of the iteration, brainstormed possible solutions, and compiled a list of to-dos that should be brought into the next iteration. After the meeting and in the remaining 2 to 3 hours, we quickly updated the prototype based on the to-do list and prepared for the next iteration. The same process was repeated for each of the four iterations that we have completed in the following days.

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Design is a rather broad and vague term. When someone says “I’m a designer,” it is not immediately clear what they actually do day to day. There are a number of different responsibilities encompassed by the umbrella term designer.

Design-related roles exist in a range of areas from industrial design (cars, furniture) to print (magazines, other publications) to tech (websites, mobile apps). With the relatively recent influx of tech companies focused on creating interfaces for screens, many new design roles have emerged. Job titles like UX or UI designer are confusing to the uninitiated and unfamiliar even to designers who come from other industries.

Let’s attempt to distill what each of these titles really mean within the context of the tech industry.

UX DESIGNER (USER EXPERIENCE DESIGNER)

UX designers are primarily concerned with how the product feels. A given design problem has no single right answer. UX designers explore many different approaches to solving a specific user problem. The broad responsibility of a UX designer is to ensure that the product logically flows from one step to the next. One way that a UX designer might do this is by conducting in-person user tests to observe one’s behavior. By identifying verbal and non-verbal stumbling blocks, they refine and iterate to create the “best” user experience. An example project is creating a delightful onboarding flow for a new user.

“Define interaction models, user task flows, and UI specifications. Communicate scenarios, end-to-end experiences, interaction models, and screen designs to stakeholders. Work with our creative director and visual designers to incorporate the visual identity of Twitter into features. Develop and maintain design wireframes, mockups, and specifications as needed.”

–Experience Designer job description at Twitter

Deliverables: Wireframes of screens, storyboards, sitemap

Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Fireworks, InVision

You might hear them say this in the wild: “We should show users the ‘Thank You’ page once they have finished signing up.”

UI DESIGNER (USER INTERFACE DESIGNER)

Unlike UX designers who are concerned with the overall feel of the product, user interface designers are particular about how the product is laid out. They are in charge of designing each screen or page with which a user interacts and ensuring that the UI visually communicates the path that a UX designer has laid out. For example, a UI designer creating an analytics dashboard might front load the most important content at the top, or decide whether a slider or a control knob makes the most intuitive sense to adjust a graph. UI designers are also typically responsible for creating a cohesive style guide and ensuring that a consistent design language is applied across the product. Maintaining consistency in visual elements and defining behavior such as how to display error or warning states fall under the purview of a UI designer

“Concept and implement the visual language of Airbnb.com. Create and advance site-wide style guides.”

-UI Designer job description at Airbnb

The boundary between UI and UX designers is fairly blurred and it is not uncommon for companies to opt to combine these roles.

Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Sketch, Illustrator, Fireworks

You might hear them say this in the wild: “The login and sign up links should be moved to the top right corner.”

VISUAL DESIGNER (GRAPHIC DESIGNER)

A visual designer is the one who pushes pixels. If you ask a non-designer what a designer does, this is probably what comes to mind first. Visual designers are not concerned with how screens link to each other, nor how someone interacts with the product. Instead, their focus is on crafting beautiful icons, controls, and visual elements and making use of suitable typography. Visual designers sweat the small details that others overlook and frequently operate at the 4X to 8X zoom level in Photoshop.

“Produce high-quality visual designs–from concept to execution, including those for desktop, web, and mobile devices at a variety of resolutions (icons, graphics, and marketing materials). Create and iterate on assets that reflect a brand, enforce a language, and inject beauty and life into a product.”

–Visual Designer job description at Google

It is also fairly common for UI designers to pull double duty and create the final pixel perfect assets. Some companies choose not to have a separate visual designer role.

Tools of the trade: Photoshop, Sketch

You might hear them say this in the wild: “The kerning is off and the button should be 1 pixel to the left!”

INTERACTION DESIGNER (MOTION DESIGNER)

Remember the subtle bouncing animation when you pull to refresh in the Mail app on your iPhone? That’s the work of a motion designer. Unlike visual designers who usually deal with static assets, motion designers create animation inside an app. They deal with what the interface does after a user touches it. For example, they decide how a menu should slide in, what transition effects to use, and how a button should fan out. When done well, motion becomes an integral part of the interface by providing visual clues as to how to use the product.

“Proficiency in graphic design, motion graphics, digital art, a sensitivity to typography and color, a general awareness of materials/textures, and a practical grasp of animation. Knowledge of iOS, OS X, Photoshop and Illustrator as well as familiarity with Director (or equivalent), Quartz Composer (or equivalent), 3D computer modeling, motion graphics are required.”

Tools of the trade: AfterEffects, Core Composer, Flash, Origami

You might hear them say this in the wild:”The menu should ease-in from the left in 800ms.”

UX RESEARCHER (USER RESEARCHER)

A UX researcher is the champion of a user’s needs. The goal of a researcher is to answer the twin questions of “Who are our users?” and “What do our users want?” Typically, this role entails interviewing users, researching market data, and gathering findings. Design is a process of constant iteration. Researchers may assist with this process by conducting A/B tests to tease out which design option best satisfies user needs. UX researchers are typically mainstays at large companies, where the access to a plethora of data gives them ample opportunity to draw statistically significant conclusions.

“Work closely with product teams to identify research topics. Design studies that address both user behavior and attitudes. Conduct research using a wide variety of qualitative methods and a subset of quantitative methods, such as surveys.”

–UX Researcher job description at Facebook

UX designers also occasionally carry out the role of UX researchers.

Deliverables: User personas, A/B test results, Investigative user studies & interviews

Tools of the trade: Mic, Paper, Docs

You might hear them say this in the wild: “From our research, a typical user…”

FRONT-END DEVELOPER (UI DEVELOPER)

Front-end developers are responsible for creating a functional implementation of a product’s interface. Usually, a UI designer hands off a static mockup to the front-end developer who then translates it into a working, interactive experience. Front-end developers are also responsible for coding the visual interactions that the motion designer comes up with.

Tools of the trade: CSS, HTML, JavaScript

You might hear them say this in the wild: “I’m using a 960px 12-column grid system.”

PRODUCT DESIGNER

Product designer is a catch-all term used to describe a designer who is generally involved in the creation of the look and feel of a product.

The role of a product designer isn’t well-defined and differs from one company to the next. A product designer may do minimal front-end coding, conduct user research, design interfaces, or create visual assets. From start to finish, a product designer helps identify the initial problem, sets benchmarks to address it, and then designs, tests, and iterates on different solutions. Some companies that want more fluid collaboration within the various design roles opt to have this title to encourage the whole design team to collectively own the user experience, user research, and visual design elements.

Some companies use “UX designer” or simply “designer” as a catch-all term. Reading the job description is the best way to figure out how the company’s design team divides the responsibilities.

“Own all facets of design: interaction, visual, product, prototyping. Create pixel-perfect mocks and code for new features across web and mobile.”

–Product Designer job description at Pinterest

“I AM LOOKING FOR A DESIGNER”

This is the single most common phase I hear from new startups. What they are usually looking for is someone who can do everything described above. They want someone who can make pretty icons, create A/B tested landing sites, logically arrange UI elements on screen, and maybe even do some front-end development. Due to the broad sweeping scope of this role, we usually hear smaller companies asking to hire a “designer” rather than being specific in their needs.

The boundaries between each of these various design roles are very fluid. Some UX designers are also expected to do interaction design, and often UI designers are expected to push pixels as well. The best way to look for the right person is to describe what you expect the designer to do within your company’s process, and choose a title that best represents the primary task of that person.

Source: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3032719/ui-ux-who-does-what-a-designers-guide-to-the-tech-industry?utm_content=buffer567dd&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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Google, Google Material

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Without further ado, here are some predictions for 2015 from our contributors:

A Rise in “Slippy” UX – Shannon Copfer, JW Player

Up until now, we’ve seen a lot of focus on creating “sticky” user experiences—experiences that engage the user and keep them interested, as well as bringing them back for more. “Sticky” has been considered one of the most desirable design traits possible—a way for digital experience designers to show off their talent, eliciting “oohs” and “ahhs” from consumers, critics, and peers alike.

What we will be seeing shortly, however, is a purposeful trend towards “slippy” experience design. Jake Zukowski, Assistant Creative Director at Frog Design (and the coiner of the term “slippy” in a UX context) has a particularly poignant illustration of this concept: digital automobile screen design. Here, UX literally finds itself in a life-or-death situation: can a digital experience in a car operate effectively, yet invisibly enough to not affect the safety of a driver and her passengers? A successful design in this concept is “slippy” because it is designed for glance-ability, minimal copy, and use in potentially high-stress situations.

“Slippy” UX makes sense particularly in the context of a connected home—nobody would want a house that is constantly interrupting them. It’s the opposite; a truly successful connected home would operate without even being seen. Once set up, it would deliver seamless service and an experience that enhances other, analog activities: laundry, sleeping, comfort, conversation. Wearable device UX design will also necessarily follow this pattern, if people are going to need to be so close to their devices as to have constant skin-to-skin contact, those devices had better tangentially enhance their world and their personal experiences (both digital and analog) rather than interfere with them.

The Death of Web Design – Sergio Nouvel of Continuum

2015 will be the year when web design finally dies of irrelevance. High-quality templates are everywhere, and the value of a “custom-built” design is no longer evident; self-service web design is close at hand and every year more it becomes effective with the addition of artificial intelligence.Facebook Pages have become the “de-facto” web page for small businesses, and, most importantly, without a proper strategy (which must include SEO and social media) even the most beautifully crafted design is destined to have an audience of two: you and your client.

Web design patterns are already mature. Trying to reinvent the wheel in contact or checkout forms is pointless and likely to produce sub-standard results. Stripe, for instance, is leading the payment services providing not only a layer for processing credit cards, but also ready-to-use and massively tested interface design for checkout forms. This has happened as well with log-in functionality (now provided by social media services), and it’s likely to happen with other components of classic Web design.

We can no longer understand and design web pages as self-sufficient entities. We are in the product design business, and this involves designing and managing an ecosystem of touchpoints and services to deliver value. So where does this leave us as designers?

We’re in the product design biz, managing an ecosystem of touchpoints and services to deliver valuetweet this

2015 must be the year where we shift our focus to unsolved problems, especially ones we’ve been inadvertedly feeding all these years: the overload of information. The world needs designers to simplify, not to add up to the noise. Artificial intelligence is becoming the way of extracting sense and relevance of seas of information we have no human bandwidth to process. As professionals meant to be the experts in the creation of sense, this challenge needs us on board.

The Race from Good to Great Customer Experience Intensifies – Harley Manning, Forrester

2014 wasn’t a good year to be average. Since 2007, the average customer experience in the industries that Forrester tracks has gone up across the board, and the number of truly awful experiences has dropped like a rock.

In 2015, the race from good to great CX will speed up. Smart CX teams will increasingly use customer data from diverse sources like social listening platforms, campaign management platforms, mobile apps, and loyalty programs—to personalize and tailor experiences in real time so that they inherently adapt to the needs, wants, and behaviors of individual customers. And as companies strive to break from the pack and gain a competitive edge through the quality of the CX they provide, we’ll see the battleground shift to new areas like emotional experiences.

Our latest research shows that emotion has a bigger impact on customer loyalty than either ease or effectiveness. And so in the shadows of Deloitte’s purchase of Doblin and Accenture’s acquisition of Fjord, expect a land grab for design agencies that can provide emotional intelligence to traditionally left-brained companies. In 2015, the likes of Bain, McKinsey, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers will compete to snap up firms like Continuum and Livework. And the prices on these deals will reach some dizzying heights. Why? The consultancies will have to bid against aspiring CX leaders like Delta Air Lines and Verizon that want to match Capital One’s recent bold move to acquire Adaptive Path.

Deeper Integration of Digital and Physical Experiences –Anders Arnquist, Veryday

With the rise of the Internet of Things, the line between digital and physical experiences has blurred. To bridge these two dimensions, we must take the user context into account. We are transitioning to a world where physical products are expected to come with a digital experience—for information, for added value, or for administration and configuration. But in 2014, there was still a frustrating disconnect between digital and physical experiences.

Take a home furnishings company as an example. The time you spend surfing their website while sitting on your couch gives you nothing in return when you enter the store—not in the layout of the merchandise, the display of the offers, or in the signage. There is, in short, no communication between the physical and the digital experience of the brand. In order to remedy this disconnect and become more relevant in service communications, we need to be able to determine user context.

Over the past year, small, cheap Bluetooth sensors (“beacons”) that interact with smartphones have been used to build indoor navigation systems that will help us acquire the contextual information we need to bridge the experience gap. The technology is constantly changing and becoming more tailored to the task and we now see systems that combine multiple technologies, such as analyzing magnetic fields, Wi-Fi signals and light.

These indoor navigation solutions fill a blind spot by tying people to specific places and objects, thereby giving services the valuable data they need to make their information more relevant and timely. In order to further explore and investigate how new technology may be harnessed to benefit users, I created REC, a prototyping tool that makes it easier to build customized indoor navigation systems using Bluetooth sensors. In 2015, we’re going to see digital and physical experiences come closer together than ever before.

House of Cards – Will Hacker

Card-based design became really popular in 2014 and its use will continue to expand in 2015. The trend reflects both the continued increase in the use of mobile devices and their smaller screens, and a corresponding increase in people’s desire to consume information in bit-sized chunks. Cards are widely used in social media like Twitter and Facebook when users share content with their networks. Google Now relies heavily on card-based design, as does the Notifications panel oniOS devices. The beauty of cards is that these small, bit-sized information chunks can be combined and assembled in novel ways based on user preferences, device type and screen size, the user’s location, or the time of day.

Twitter on a mobile device (left) and Twitter on the web (right) both use cards as a way to organize information

More Celebrity-Driven Apps – Josh Tyson, UX Magazine

Apps created by (or on behalf of) celebrities were a notable trend in 2014—one with the ability to draw deeper connections between famous folks and their fans. A couple of celebrity app entries from late in the year suggest that the trend isn’t slowing down and that it might even mature a bit.

While it certainly doesn’t sound all that mature, Yo, Bitch (or YB), an app released by Aaron Paul ofBreaking Bad fame deftly combines two disparate bits of pop culture ephemera. Paul’s character on the show, Jesse Pinkman, managed to turn a very basic nugget of profanity, “bitch,” into a catchphrase, and he’s combined it with the basic premise of the Yo app for a slighty enriched experiece.

The official app description reads like this:

• Want to say hello to someone? Say “Hello, b****!”
• Want to make your special someone feel loved? Say “I need you, b****!”
• Fed up with your friend? Say “Why, b****?”

Definitely not a sohpisticated experience, but a nice bit of hybrid satire. A far more considerate and cool app comes from former White Stripe, Jack White, whose THIRD-D app employs the Viewmaster-esuqe Google Cardboard to give users a 3-D concert experience.

So what’s next? We’d like to see a Michael Keaton app that lets you appy a Birdman skin and vocal effect to your personal videos, but that’s just us.

The Ascent of User Experience as a Business Strategy –Scott Plewes, Macadamian

User Experience continues to move to the forefront of what differentiates products and the organizations that produce them. It fundamentally matters to those of us who love and see the value of UX, because if you influence the business/product decision makers in an organization you influence the product and, potentially, society. Recently there have been a number of design firm acquisitions by large corporations, UX hiring sprees across a wide range of businesses, and, perhaps just as importantly, hiring of senior UX personnel in Director, VP and other influential positions within companies.

Exactly where and when UX began its most recent and impacting ascension is arguable. It is probably a combination of factors but user expectations in consumer products have now spread to enterprise, and organizations are reacting by adopting UX as a key marketplace differentiator. As part of growing importance of UX, companies are recognizing that successful execution requires UX professionals at all levels across the organization.

The more sophisticated among these companies are adopting UX as part of an overall customer experience design and adopting “design thinking” across their operations. While, in some ways, aspects of this trend have been around for many years now, the culmination of (senior) hiring, influence, decision making, acquisitions, market positioning, process adoption, and other fundamental indicators of the importance of UX to a company’s business model and strategy have never been higher. It is a great a time to be in UX.

More Targeted and Tailored Experiences for Different Device Types – Doug Hopkins, Isobar

In previous years, the “first wave” of adaptive and responsive design philosophies focused on delivering experiences that sought to be as universal and similar across device types and screen sizes as possible, typically taking a mobile first approach that would work back to larger screen sizes and view ports.

Now that many brands have accomplished this, the next wave of design approach is about extending and tailoring the experience to the native device type and size in order to deliver an optimized experience. These techniques include things like parallax scrolling behaviors and other rich navigation schemes that best lend themselves to larger screen sizes. We’re also seeing smart contextual menus and interactions that are especially handy on smaller, hand held form factors. Furthermore, predictive navigation and suggestive wayfinding will migrate out of standalone app experiences such as Google Now and Microsoft Cortana and begin to appear as mainstream offerings, especially for smart phones and tablets.

More evolved and robust development frameworks that have many more built in, native abilities to render responsive experiences are enabling teams to push further beyond the efforts to standardize experiences across device types. More time and effort can now be spent applying design and development to tailoring experiences outside of the core symmetry across devices, and to think in terms of more optimized experiences that are truly suited to context of desktop, tablet, or smartphone user needs and interests.

Embracing the Materials of Design – Steven Hoober

Google did something truly good this year with Material Design and I hope that it will be fully-understood and embraced by the design community and other OS makers in 2015 and onward.

A lot of people still call this flat design, but the key feature is that it has dimensionality. Some are therefore insisting it is skeuomorphic, which of course is bad without explanation. The principle is we’re forcing flat phones to be dimensional by pretending they are made of bits of paper layered up behind the display.

But phones are not flat. For the entire history of GUIs there has been a concept of layering. Items are displayed on top of others. In Android, “the stack” has always been what they called the software-driven principle of displaying views of information. Not just dialogs that appear on top of content views, but that the current view is literally on top of the previous view, and hiding it. Putting transparent parts on your view will let the other show through. Pressing back takes the user to the previous view automatically.

So it’s not skeuomorphism in the bad sense of trying to impose some other style onto digital. It is Good Design in the 1950 MoMA sense. It embraces, contextualizes, and builds on the forms and materials we use in digital spaces.

This is one of those things I have been lamenting and hoping—barring my own ability to start the discussion—someone would bring about. An actual, permanent, material-based design ethic for digital media that everyone can understand and embrace.

Prepare for a World of Automation – Rebekah Rousi

In 2015, the reality of vehicles, devices, and helpers which are fully automated becomes ever more nearer. Particularly with the development and sales of self-driving cars, people are beginning to question what their lives will be like when they don’t need to bother worrying about who will drive when everyone’s tired. And naturally, issues about work will also be on people’s mind—when there are robots that can dance, serve dinner, assemble delicate machinery, and perform surgery in a matter of minutes, what will the role of people be?

These issues have been the stuff of dreams for decades—f not centuries—in the realms of science fiction and philosophy, but more and more in the fields of IT and particularly human-computer interaction, we are seeing evidence that concerns in the near future do not pertain to how people learn to use technology, but how technology learns to adapt to humans. Just take a look at the CHI conferences as well as discussions by people such as Don Norman and Marc Hassenzahl, that will give you a clue.

Due to its longevity in the minds of dreamers and scientists, this trend is inevitable. And for the most part, the trend element is just the era of adjustment for people entering into this new world. It comes with pros and cons. Pros possibly include fewer accidents and mistakes, more accuracy, and more satisfaction when we receive our burger made “just right.” The cons are of course concerns with employment, and let’s face it, if we expect consumption and growth to continue people do need jobs. But this might mean new opportunities, too. Certainly, many are concerned about the human touch, particularly in the healthcare sector. But then there is deliberation between the current deficient conditions of understaffing, risks of neglect and error, and the possible alternative of robot helpers that don’t forget, neglect, or suffer emotional ups and downs.

Online Learning Comes Into its Own – John McGloon

In 2015, instructional designers, educational technologists, and user experience designers will form alliances to improve the delivery of the massive demand for online learning. Major universities and private companies will employ user experience designers to make their educational offerings much more usable for learners.

Security and Privacy – Mary Brodie

With the growth of data devices for health and fitness, digital wallets and other digital financial services, and now wearables, there is the opportunity for collecting an abundance of personal data. Where will this data be stored? How will it be used? Could it be leaked or hacked? How will we confirm our identities online or offline if something happens? This is one of the next challenges awaiting us. We will need to solve these questions for users so they start using the devices and it becomes part of daily life:

• How do we communicate security and data safety to users?
• How do we make a high-security site easy to use, from gaining access to accessing data, without it requiring insane levels of passwords?
• What are the best methods of securing personal data (e.g., voice or custom gestures)?
• How do we confirm identity online and offline, beyond using fingerprints or retinal scans, which can also be “hacked” in real life?

These are the key questions we need to consider in the coming year if we want more personal devices to be used and leveraged.

Source: https://uxmag.com/articles/the-top-ux-predictions-for-2015 

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Wihtout further ado, the top UX trends of 2014:

Welcome Back Social Media, We’ve Decided You Are Useful – Rebekah Rousi

After years of deliberating the benefits and popularity of social media, with conflicting views and sentiments over whether it was healthy or not—promoting loneliness through abundance of “friends” but no real relationships and of course the deflated interest levels of disgruntled users filtering through waves of selfies and “words of wisdom”—people have decided that services likeFacebook are once again “a good thing.”

The figures alone explain the growth in popularity of Facebook in particular. In 2014 the number of active monthly users has been 1.35 billion, up from 1.23 billion in 2013. There is no doubt that statistically the figures have increased each year, but discussions over whether Facebook and other SNSs are a good or bad thing have tended to sway towards the negative in the social psychological arena (check out some of the talks given by internet psychologist Sherry Turkle).

Yet, while the direct social and personal use of social media is highly debated, the importance of its integration into business practice in terms of online presence and information flow has become a necessity rather than an option. If a site or online solution does not have a social media function (for customer-to-customer or customer-to-business interaction) or at least connections to social media activity, customers and other users immediately want to know: “why not?”

If you consider users’ and consumers’ sense of influence and control in the direction of product development and application a good thing, then yes, it’s great. From an experience perspective, consumers and users are taking on a more active role, and the findings of a recent study suggest that facilitating consumer empowerment through social media leads supports value creation and development. Or on the other hand, you might want to question the amounts and types of information people are freely giving corporations—and yes, that information has staying power, but do we want that?

The Best Jobs in UX Started Moving In-House – Dallas Sargent, Design for Experience

This year, the big shot heard round the UX world was the acquisition of Adaptive Path by Capital One. In a blog post titled “Where We’re Going Next,” Jesse James Garret followed the announcement with the statement “I know, weird, right?” He said that no one at AP was more skeptical than he was, but that, “when it comes to truly human-centered thinking, Capital One is among the top tier of all the organizations I have worked with in 15 years of consulting.”

While this left plenty of practitioners scratching their heads, plenty of us were nodding them instead. UX isn’t a boutique offering anymore. There are still scores of agencies out there doing incredible work that pushes the boundaries of experience design, but the value of putting users at the center of it all is now widely understood. That’s why we are seeing more companies and organizations investing in in-house teams. My guess is that we might see more mega institutions buying agencies, but being very cautious not to disrupt the finely-tuned environments that keep their work fresh and their teams happy and engaged.

As Peter Merholz noted in a blog post earlier this year, “In the past, agencies could say, ‘Yes, but we respect and value design in the way that in-house companies don’t, and you’ll get to work on a range of things, instead of just one thing over and over.’ That doesn’t hold true anymore, and most of the interesting design work is emerging in-house, and designers want to be where the action is.”

So while agencies will have to find ways to compete with the bigger salaries that tech behemoths and industry juggernauts can offer, these new in-house operations will have to work harder to make sure their teams feel challenged, appreciated, understood, and rewarded, which may prove to be even harder than it sounds.

The Desktop Hamburger Menu – Brenna Randlett, Yellow Pencil

This trend has a few names: the Three Horizontal Lines, the Pancake Stack or, my favorite, the Hamburger Menu. The icon is usually found on the top left or top right of a page and when clicked, the main navigation slides out. Normally seen on mobile, the Hamburger Menu has been appearing on the desktop versions of sites such as Time, Serial podcast, Tictail, and Gawker.

A slide out menu on mobile can save precious space but some strongly advise against the Hamburger Menu entirely. The three stacked rectangles represent a minimal view of a list and, although simple and clean, it doesn’t always effectively communicate a main navigation. So why is this icon appearing on desktop sites that have the visual real estate for an entire navigation? I believe we can point a finger at responsive web design for this 2014 UI trend. Somehow we looked at the mobile and desktop versions of a responsive site and thought, “Dude, just keep the menu the same, it’ll look cleaner.”

I say no to the Hamburger Menu. It limits discoverability and doesn’t communicate clearly. While the slide out menu on desktop websites is acceptable in certain circumstances, if you’re going to hide a menu then slap a minimal icon on top of it—you’re going to lose some usability. If you must have a navigation that’s so large it needs to be hidden away on a desktop view or if you want that minimal and spacious look, consider using the word menu. This communicates language to the user. We’re killing global navigation with this Hamburger Menu business.

Retina Everywhere, or Death of the Pixel – Shannon Copfer, JW Player

Though resolution- and device-independence have been growing for several years now, there are a few notable things in 2014 that have helped to dig the grave for the “pixel” as we know it, which might be setting the stage for a tidy “burial” in 2015.

Among them are:

• Mobile’s ongoing push for the highest resolution possible. As of the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus this year, Apple now requires support for current device sizes that span, at minimum, from the 1136×640 iPhone 5c up through the 1920×1080 iPhone 6 Plus (with even higher resolutions for iPad apps, and even lower resolutions for iPhone 4 support). And on the Android side, this year’s LG G3 has a 2K (!) screen. Phone screen resolutions will only continue to rise. Even outside of what’s officially “supported” by the Apple or Android dev communities, developers and designers who wish to effectively address the needs of as many of their users as possible will need to take into account the likely substantial number of those users who aren’t constantly upgrading their devices with every release.
• The rise of 4K monitors as well as content. This year, Netflix began supporting 4K streaming of some shows, and Amazon Studios began shooting their original series in 4K as well. Apple even released a 5K desktop screen. From here, it’s only going to get harder to design for (and even keep track of!) all the device sizes and resolutions in use (as if it weren’t hard enough already!).

We’re already getting more thoughtful in our approach to responsive type and graphics overall. Here are some exciting examples of interesting resolution-independent design possibilities in action:

• Designer Joe Harrison’s “Responsive Logos”
• Strategist and designer Jason Pamental’s concept for designing and coding beautiful, responsive typography

From a user standpoint, true resolution independence (done right; with vector graphics, fluid layouts, and well-planned breakpoints) is the best answer. It might make early-stage UX and product planning slightly more complex, but in the end a smooth transition between screen sizes will allow for a better overall experience and fewer design bug fixes and layout tweaks down the line.

Celebrity-Driven Apps – Josh Tyson, UX Magazine

A few years ago, most celebrities had their own websites. These days, a true public profile seems incomplete without a personalized app, and this year saw some interestnig ones. The most high-concept entry came from writer and performance artist Miranda July, who unleashed Somebody, an app that promised to send a stranger to deliver your message to a friend. Basically, users compose their message and are given the option of adding emotional and physical directions. Then they choose a Somebody user in the area to deliver the message.

The app was immediately hobbled by a myriad of technical issues, but July recently announced that she’ll be releasing a fully-functioning version of the ambitious project in the near future.

One celeb app that burst from the gates ready to go was Hanx Writer, which turns your iPad into a virtual vintage typewriter, complete with the sounds and movement of the real thing. The Hollywood star behind the app? Typewriter enthusiast Tom Hanks, of course. There were other apps as well: a celebrity adventure app from Kim Kardashian, a greeting card-creation app from Taylor Swift, a zombie-fighting game from Shaquille O’Neal, and Snoopify, an app from Snoop Dogg that lets you spruce up your photos with stickers of things he likes (joints, pot leaves, et al.).

Sure it all seems a little silly, but in a world where Domino’s has an app that let’s you whimper, “I need pizza” into your phone and place an instant order, why shouldn’t William Shatner have an appthat lets you hear your poetry read in his inimitable voice?

These apps, when created with a solid sense of the celebrity’s public image, can forge a deeper connection with their audience while also growing their fan base—in a sense bringing users closer to their favorite celebrities and maybe even forging an emotional bond. When they offer lazy or lackluster experiences (like Madonna’s app) they seem to fall by the wayside without causing much collateral damage. A bit of a win-win.

The Year The Customer Experience Laggards Stepped Up – Harley Manning, Forrester

Forrester’s annual Customer Experience Index (CX Index) measures the quality of the customer experience provided by major US firms. By comparing data over the past seven years we see that the overall number of brands earning a “very poor” or “poor” rating from their customers has declined drastically.

This year in particular we saw just 1% of brands rated as very poor and only 10% of brands rated as poor. That’s a big drop from 2013 when customers rated 8% of brands as very poor and 17% of brands as poor. Which companies stepped up into the “okay” and “good” categories? Unsurprisingly, they were mostly from the industries that dominate the bottom of our rankings year after year, like health insurance providers and cable companies.

This trend is a direct result of changes in the competitive environment. To put it bluntly, companies that have to fight for customers can’t afford to ignore customer experience. New healthcare laws started a battle for health insurance customers, especially the younger, healthier customers who pay more in premiums than they get back in claims. And a range of new entrants plus alternative solutions like streaming video has turned the once monopolistic cable industry into a customer battleground, as well.

This trend is very good news for consumers, who already see a decline in the number of truly horrendous experiences they encounter. It presents a new challenge for brands, however: Now that okay is the new poor, firms can’t gain a competitive edge by being less awful then their rivals. Instead, companies will have to learn how to exceed their customers’ expectations and engage their positive emotions.

And now, here are a few of last year’s predictions that came true, or at least came close to coming true.

Thinking (and) Machines – Hunter Whitney

An increasingly better understanding of the workings of the brain will propel technology and conversely new technologies will help us better understand our brains. The differences between pure pattern recognition done by computer and human intelligence will become less distinguishable.

Whitney was right that new technology tied to the brain and it’s fucntionalities would make some waves. Case in point, earlier this year, Philips, Accenture, and Emotiv announced a project involving a piece of headgear and an app that allows users to control Philips products using their brainwaves. The intent was to give patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) and other neurological diseases greater independence—letting them make a call, send a pre-set text or email, or turn lights and television sets on and off.

This was an impressive release, but as Whiteny notes: “[These types of products] are fairly easy to use for sensing brain activity, but they do have drawbacks. Imagine there’s a raucous party and you are standing in an adjoining room. If you put your ear up to the wall at different places, you may be able to discern a few clear patterns in all the noise. For example, you might know what kind of music is playing and even get a sense of some conversations. If you put a cup against the wall, you could get a clearer sense of what you are hearing. Similarly, our brains are filled with a cacophony of electrical signals, which are a fundamental part of how our brain cells communicate with each other.”

Shy Public Self – Joe Macleod

People will become aware of the long term impact of their personal content online. Many companies are built off the backs of people’s personal content: Facebook, Twitter etc. With big stock market debuts users will see that these cool tech start-ups are big multi-nationals with taxes to pay, and appetites will change regarding what users share.

Last year saw a number of public figures experience phone hacking and an enormous political debate ensue between the U.S. and Europe over privacy issues. The will continue to raise interest in the business and politics of privacy. In the short term, this will mean dealing with some challenging and delicate design issues. In the long term, I think we will become better designers for considering some of these rights of use in a public place and the philosophical issues that are attached.

The massive leak of nude celebrity photos that were stolen from iCould accounts gave everyone a reason to stop and think about where their information is kept and how secure it is. Just this month, the Guardian published a story exploring the resurgence of flip phones, noting that many celebrities burned or scared by the aforementioned hacking scandal have gone back to the basic, and presumably more secure, clamshell.

Meaningful Serendipity – THE MEME

As technology around us gets smarter we have become used to products and services tailoring to our individual needs. But in many cases excessive personalization can remove valuable aspects of surprise, playfulness, and happenstance. For 2014 we see a growing trend for digital experiences that aim to surprise users by offering opportunities for random and spontaneous discovery.

Labeled as an “experimental photo exchange platform” Rando allows users to send a photo (or “Rando”) to strangers in anonymity, with only location data shared. Social discovery apps like Highlight and Banjo are evolving in to robust tools for serendipitous realtime discovery of relevant social connections, activities, and events. Stumbleupon is enabling a different web-browsing experience where personal preferences allow for playful recommendations of randomly selected sites. Netflix recently added a “random picks” in response to the sometimes cumbersome process of selecting content from a vast personalized catalogue of multiple categories.

While not the same thing as meaningful serendipity, the rise in big data and sensor technology has meant more opportunities to reach out to customers in context, creataing a similar feeling. For instance, a store’s app can enable a “shop mode” that is triggered on the device by a geofence when a user enters the store, and have that functionality displayed prominently so users don’t need to dig through screens to pay for their purchases.

Source: https://uxmag.com/articles/the-top-ux-trends-of-2014 

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