2016 was surely exciting for the user experience design and usability industries and most of our predictions for this year became true, but now that 2017 is quickly approaching, it’s time to look at what the next year is likely to bring.

🔮 Failure user flows

In user experience design (UX), user flows are the key to providing the framework for interactions with products and services. However, these are developed assuming the user is experienced, confident in all aspects of finding their way around a website or an app or, indeed, any product. What about those users who are less confident?

Well, as technology develops and the number of less confident online users grows in the next year and on, UX will have to cater for this. Failure user flows will need to be developed for the disproportionate number of these novices to allow an understanding of these sorts of scenarios and to enable products and services to handle this failure in a digital world.

At People for Research, we are getting asked more and more to recruit low confidence digital users for user experience design and usability testing.

As we are seeing this requirement grow, we believe the UX industry will have to develop failure user flows to accommodate the increase of new users online, as more and more of the population gains quality access to the internet, and as more and more products and services go exclusively online.

🔮 Age responsivity

We have seen device responsivity grow in recent years and, although this will continue developing in the next year, so too will age responsivity – creating and restructuring content for different age groups. Content will not only adapt to device, but also to age. As advertising has developed and tailored content to specific interests of users, so will websites develop and show content for a variety of age groups.

This is really all about web accessibility – something People for Research have been promoting this last year and will continue to do so next year.

Menus will be developed to cater for the competency of users, and those with difficulties will see different menus to those without to allow easier interaction: this could mean font sizes and spacing will increase for the elderly, to accommodate eyesight issues and colour schemes will change to automatically help the young, elderly and those with accessibility issues, for instance.

Gradually, user experience design will start to remedy the issues encountered by large proportions of the population and, in doing so, will help make the web more accessible, which is good for everyone.

🔮 Minimalism in user experience design

At last, what has been known for a long time in traditional print, will finally be applied to the digital world: a ‘less is more’ approach with larger fonts, but fewer words, and more images with brighter colours.

We have seen this develop in the last year or so, but we believe we will see this in all online design across websites and apps to make the experience online easier and more engaging.

As someone who has worked extensively in the traditional print world and seen what works and what doesn’t work, I am surprised it has taken a long time for UX designers to realise that the same things work online, where space is at a premium and key messages need to be clear and concise and visual. At last!

🔮 Mobile first

Websites used to be developed and only after that would people think about a mobile site – not any more, ‘mobile first’ is the new trend! As the device that most people use to access the internet is now the smartphone, so the process will be reversed.

Mobile sites will be developed and then adapted for desktop use; small screen devices first, big screen devices second.

At People for Research, we have seen that the majority of our participants moved from desktop to mobile this year, and we saw this coming and developed a mobile responsive site back in 2015. However, now we need to rethink that going forward, we need to start with mobile!

This will really make us think of what the key important content and messages need to be as the space we have to deliver them is small, not large. So many sites are crammed full of information that you don’t need to read, so good luck to those sites in slimming down in the new year!

🔮 Video content

Online video isn’t new, but adding video as content to websites will continue to develop in 2017 to provide a richer experience for the user. As the process becomes easier and easier, so we will see more and more websites using video as part of their design, not just embedded into it at a later stage.

This is what users will come to expect, and those sites that remain static will suffer, not just from an user experience point of view, but will also be punished by the search engines who will continue to give priority to those websites that use video as content.

Look out for more videos on the People for Research website in 2017!

🔮 No more app jumping

Well, maybe not next year, but in the coming few years some apps will corner a market or two by enabling their users to perform multiple actions from within the same app. There will be no need to leave one app for another! As you can imagine, the benefits are huge, so whoever gets there first in different markets will smash the competition.

Keeping users within your app – providing you are offering services that are compatible and sensible, but also services they want – may eventually create a couple of new companies that will be able to compete with the likes of Google and Facebook in the coming years.

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user testing or market research get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.