2017 is the year of User Experience (UX)! Period.

2016 went by in a jiffy. Major part of my year was spent on evangelising User Experience. I took sessions at meetups and corporate organisations, interacted with a few thousand students interested in UX and with a few hundred corporates & startups. I had numerous meaningful conversations on user engagements, UX KPIs and Return on Investment of investing in user experience. Some damn funny ones – one person asked me that did we start Fortune Cookie UX Design by selling actual Fortune Cookies.  

Based on these amazing experiences, I have come up with a few observations that will hit the industry in 2017. Call it a state of the mind of the industry from UX perspective:-

There is a clear divide between UXers and Non UXers!

By now the industry is divided into two sets of people. One are those who appreciate user experience and have incorporated UX in their product development cycle. Then there are those who still think User Experience is designing the skin of the app. They don’t appreciate the need of user research or in some cases, even interaction design.

2017 will see only those products being successful that have gone out and implemented a UX design process and do diligent UX in their product development process. 2017 will be the year of user engagement. A user will not download an app for every small task and hence there will be a big fight for many apps to stay relevant. Finding user engagement points through user research and implementing it with right interaction design will be imperative to success.

Digitalisation will drive efficiency. UX will drive digitalisation!

Digital Banking, Digital processes, Digital education, Smart city are the buzz words that you hear everywhere. The whole wave of digitalisation will hit the industry - different industry sectors at different times. In the first wave banks and financial institutions are adopting to digitalisation. Media houses, television channels, retail houses and pharmaceutical companies are towing very closely.

These businesses have been disrupted heavily with the use of apps. Winners are being decided on how efficiently digitalisation has been adopted in the companies’ processes. And hence UX will play an important role where all processes of a company that are cost centers will be converted to a digital app. It is for this reason that the Fortune Cookie UX Design - Digital by DNA framework, a design process that helps in digitalisation has been successful with many banks, manufacturing, pharma, travel and logistics companies.  

Product Team will have more UXers. Product managers will need to skill up in UX!

Gone are the days when engineers used to make products. Although 2016 saw most teams going out and adopting a small team of UXers. 2017 will see a larger rise of product teams with more UXers than engineers. Product Managers will need to skill up in UX for this eventuality. This would be a scenario where product roadmaps are defined by User Research, app launch go/no-go is defined by user testing.

Omnipresence will be the key to customer satisfaction

2016 saw the basic understanding of interaction design – easier you make it, the more it sells. With increasing number of touch points for users across mobile, web, wearable, television, tablets, fitness devices and physical contact points it would be imperative for companies to create an omnipresence experience. Think of the dreadful experience that users have had till 2016 –you have a problem with your cell phone service -  you go to an operator’s physical store, you explain your problem, you are asked to dial a few numbers, you are asked to wait for 2 hours, does not happen, call the call center – explain the problem again, go to self-service mobile app – explain it again. A lot and lot of frustration. Good omnipresence experience will also enable better selling, better customer service and better happy users with better brand recall. All through User Experience Design.

Visual Designers will become data designers. The world will finally understand what is Big Data!

Big data has been a buzz word from way before 2016. In 2017, the world will finally understand what is Big Data and how will it affect the lives of millions of users. This will only happen in the second half of the year, as in the first half many visual designers must become data designers. They will need to visualize various forms of data and give it to the user in piece meal, engaging formats. Gone are the days of just showing bar graphs and pie charts.

2016 saw various apps having a lot of data about their user’s interaction with their platform. Tinder even published the most right swiped names in 2016. In addition, enterprises could collect a lot more information about their customers, sales team, distribution, logistics and other business functions. AI engines will be used to sort through these large set of data and these inputs will be passed on to the UX team. The UX team will start integrating these snippets of information into engagement points and give more personalization to their users. Think Gaana.com creating an automatic playlist for you, Zomato giving targeted discounts on the restaurants that you eat regularly and a large FMCG creating actionable reports for the sales team through their CRM.

IoT and AR are going to be buzz words. We will see the first solid use case coming out of the manufacturing or the medical devices industry!

Although several home automation products will see the light of the day in 2017 – the real importance of IoT will come out when enterprises start seeing efficiencies in managing everything with a dashboard that lets you define your own borders. So, if a factory wants to save electricity by 25% and all systems are connected, you can achieve that in the most optimum manner by using a dashboard that prompts you and lets you play out scenarios. This is when we will see large investments in R&D in the IoT space and solid use cases will come out. Medical devices companies will see ROI in creating AR lead servicing for their devices. AR will also be appreciated in use cases of training, customer servicing, travel and tourism, logistics and warehousing.

Over all more industry sectors will take up user experience and all its aspects of digitalization, digital by DNA and omnipresence experience. Heavy investments will be made in user research and user testing - to understand the user better!

Shashank Shwet - Founder and CEO www.fortunecookieux.com and www.imaginxp.com