Eight UX Design Trends for 2013

ARTICLE NO. 948    JANUARY 30, 2013

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by THE MEME

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One of the best things about user experience design is that the consumer products and services it helps to crystallize are always evolving. With that level of change comes all sorts of speculation about the future.

Speculating is fun. Looking back on 2012 we saw a year brimming with innovations and ideas that set the stage for what we are likely to see in 2013. With that, here are some trends and concepts that we see setting the stage for this year’s coming advancements in user experience.

Downsampling

The Onion hit it spot-on when they joked that 90% of our waking lives are spent staring at glowing rectangles. Along with more screens in our lives, the volume and intensity of information that passes through these rectangles has also been increasing: more widgets, more animations, more feeds, more dimensions, more data. In 2013 we envision a counterbalancing trend towards digital abstractions—a compressive reduction of dense information sets into radically simplified communications and visualizations.

Little Printer skims headlines from your online feeds and spits them out as low-fi ticker tape for your bedside.Robotify.me creates a personalized avatar that morphs based on the quantity, quality, and content of your aggregated social media activity. And the lovably crude, Etch A Sketch-esque PopSlate case uses e-ink to display simplified content pulled from your smartphone on the backside of the device. This year, look for technology that pares down functionality and operates at the edge, rather than the center of your attention.

Foodism

Food has replaced art as high culture. We pay top dollar for the local, the organic, and the sustainable. We debate the finer points of terroir. We take pictures of our food and ogle glistening food porn provided byEpicurious and Evernote Food. Whole Foods and other premium grocers are expanding at a breakneck rate.

This year, specialized products, processes, and mobile applications will catalyze new levels of culinary geekiness. Look for more hyper-specialization, more exhaustive documentation, and more unique combinations of foods. In the home, look for continued professional aspiration and more high-tech tools in the kitchen as enhanced tools for measurement, timing, and sensing become standard components of cooktops and countertops. UX design will play a major role in shaping the character of interactions within this wired kitchen ecosystem.

Quantifed Ambition

“How to win friends and influence people” has been the core ambition of go-getters since Dale Carnegie’s influential 1936 book of the same name hit shelves. In 2013, it’s all about data-driven, quantified goal-setting and achievement. How popular and influential are you? Applications like Klout and Traakr assign you an "Influencer Score" based on your social media presence. How effective are your communication habits? You can use Google’s new email analytics tool to see how long you take to respond to people. With widespread public health problems stemming from poor nutrition and exercise habits, consumer technologies like Nike’s Fuelband, Jawbone, and Wii and Kinect games are also becoming key tools for lifestyle changes and improved personal fitness. A spirit of gamification will make measuring, analyzing, and optimizing your habits and behaviors more fun than ever.

Augmented Dialogue

Mobile tech has already stepped in to help us search and discover, navigate, and buy stuff. This year, look for app-assisted conversations. Missing social cues? Don’t know what to say, where to stand, or when to look away? Smartphones will help you navigate the unstable terrain of interpersonal dialogue. Can’t remember the name of that celebrity? Speech-recognition apps like Mindmeld listen to your conversations and recommend related info and content in real time.

Google wants to join the party too (not crash it) with plans to use voice and gestural inputs to make it easier to look up facts without violating dinner table etiquette. In 2013 we’re going to continue to outsource rather than improve our abilities, with mobile tech taking up the slack.

Sensory Bandwidth

In 2012, a rise in texting-while-walking accidents highlighted the absurd perils of mobile computing. We’re increasingly tapping into sensory reserves to juggle the virtual world and the real world at the same time. Voice control, with its potential to free up screen-strained eyes, surged last year with Apple’s integration ofSiri in iOS5, and has been rolled out in many mobile phones, TVs, and in-vehicle systems.

Audio outputs are growing too, especially for use in the car, with services like Aha Radio that reads feeds from the web aloud. But the auditory channel isn’t the only sensory channel with available bandwidth. Vibration and sense of touch are also being explored, particularly as a way of getting navigational directions while biking or walking, or getting tactile caller ID information without looking at the phone. In 2013, look for non-visual interfaces, especially those created for people with disabilities, to gain widespread traction as tools for mobile computing.

Agile Economies

Last year we saw a growing tension emerging between the static, stable, tax-paying substructure of urban businesses, and the networks of mobile opportunists that exploit its legal and spatial margins. Big cities draw a fairly firm distinction between a house and a hotel, but Airbnb’s entire business is based on obscuring that line, angering hoteliers and local residents. Restaurants, too, are fighting back against the rising tide of gourmet food trucks that siphon away customers without paying taxes.

Even the public street is being monetized, as companies like Parking Auction try to help drivers auction high-demand parking spaces before leaving. In 2013, we see even more granular capitalization of the public sphere, as open space and free time are put to work through innovative service technologies.

Faceted Video

In the vast intermeshed soup of hyperlinked Internet content, videos are the big, irreducible meaty chunks. They are heavy to move around, impenetrable to search, clumsily bracketed off by pause and play buttons, and still relatively hard to spread, embed, and remix. In 2013, look for new ways of breaking down, chopping up, and sharing video content.

Key indicators? The GIF—reemerged from its 1980s cryostasis as the format of choice for spreading Gangnam Style reenactments and other cool stuff—has officially been verbed by the Oxford dictionary. Apps for iPhone, like Cinemagram and Flixel, have popularized the image-video hybrid, or cinemagraph format. And with speech-to-text and audio recognition technologies like Shazam for TV and Google’s auto closed-captioning continue to advance, we can also expect greater video searchability as well as more ways to link video to the rest of the web.

RetroFuturism

As the objects of consumer technology literally disappear from our lives—becoming thinner, lighter, more invisible, and more seamlessly integrated—we've seen a resurgent and even nostalgic interest in the artifacts of technological physicality. But we don’t actually want the clunky old things. We want it both ways.

In 2012 we saw the explosion of Instagram, offering 1970s-era film patina instantly layered onto your 8 megapixel iPhone snaps. In fashion, the industrial neon futurism of Prada’s fall 2012 lookbook is a fine example. In music, everything from 8-bit Chiptune soundscapes to 90’s-era 808 drum kits to analogue synthesizers demonstrate how Pop and Electronic ideals continued to aestheticize the idiosyncratic sounds of 20th century production tools. In 2013, look for product design to join in this anterior gaze, as the history of technology becomes as important as its future.

6 Tips for Optimizing Your Content for the Latest Trends in Consumption

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By JIM LODICO | Published: JUNE 13, 2012

As content marketers, we publish content that drives our target audience toward a given goal. This might be anything from a Facebook “like” to capturing an email address to completing a final sale. Once our content has brought the target audience to our website, Facebook page, or other desired location, the landscape in and around that content is optimized in order to encourage the target to complete our given objective.

However, during the past six months, there have been some major changes in the way audiences consume information. These changes are happening simultaneously on two fronts, one in the form of content curation and the other in content shifting. While content curation is nothing new, the rise in the use of mobile devices — especially tablets, such as the iPad and Kindle Fire — is changing when, where, and how we read internet content.

Content shifting

Reading at a computer desk is physically uncomfortable. Along with the physical strain, traditional web pages are filled with distractions that interfere with the task at hand. Add in the day-to-day distractions of the workplace, and something as basic as reading can become a tedious, time-consuming process.

Mobile devices are allowing people to break free from the computer desk and shift both the physical environment and the time in which they read or consume content. As a result, content delivery is being shifted across platforms, allowing it to be viewed in a manner that differs from where it was originally published.

This content shifting can be as simple as using the “reader” button on an iPad or iPhone, or by using tools like Evernote’s Clearly on a web browser (which strips sidebars and distractions away from the text on a web page), or even viewing the content on a different medium, such as a tablet device or mobile phone. For example, apps such as Pocket (formerly Read it Later) and Instapaper allow us to save articles discovered on a desktop computer to read later on any internet-connected device. In the process, the programs often strip sidebar content and remove distractions such as advertising, allowing the reader to focus on the text of the article (or video/photos).  

Most content shifting applications strip away website sidebars, allowing the reader to focus on the primary content on the web page.

And don’t think for a minute that the increase in mobile usage isn’t having an impact on this growing trend. A recent study by Pew Research showed that nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population owns a tablet device, and nearly 30 percent owns an e-reader of some sort (a number that nearly doubled over the 2011 Christmas holiday season). According to another study by Infinite Research, tablet computer shipments are expected to increase to more than 147 million units by 2015 — up from 16.1 million units in 2010.

The time during which we read is also changing, as more and more users go through the day’s reading on their tablets while they relax in the evening.

Sifting through the glut of information

As our social media profiles get more and more cluttered with information, the need for tools to sort through it all has increased. Many social media platforms have taken on the role of content curators, developing algorithms in an attempt to help us weed out the information we don’t want and present us with the information we do. This has been evidenced through a variety of changes in the Facebook Timeline (trending articles, Edgerank scoring), the #Discover tab on Twitter, and social search results in Google.

Flipboard pulls from Twitter and shifts it into a magazine-style reading experience.

The latest wave of content shifting applications also curate and reformat articles to gear them toward our personal interests, fundamentally changing the reading experience as they do so. Programs such as Flipboard and Zite gather content from RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook streams (along with other media sites and social media platforms) and present it in a mobile-friendly magazine format. These programs push information to the front based on a combination of user stated interest, assigned social media feeds, and past user behaviors.

Zite creates a personalized e-magazine built around individual interests.

Reading Zite on the iPad is like reading a magazine where everything is tailored to my personal interests. I was at a point where I had all but given up clicking on the links in Twitter in a search for content of value, but I have no problem flipping through articles and viewing photos from my Twitter feed on Flipboard.

Tips to optimize for content shifting and content curation

Armed with an understanding of this changing playing field, there are a number of things we can do to optimize for this trend. Most of the tips below are nothing new; however, the importance of these tips continues to increase with the development of content shifting and content curation applications.

Here are five things you can do to optimize for content shifting and content curation platforms:

1. Incorporate calls to action directly into the text

As readers strip away sidebars, comments, and other elements of a website, we can no longer rely on sidebar space — or even the space directly under a post — to convert a given objective. Readers may not even see an email sign-up box or related posts that show under the text of a blog post. To compensate, incorporate calls to action directly into the text of the article. Keep in mind: This may require a much more subtle call than one that might be used in a website sidebar.

Interior links within the text can also encourage a reader to further explore and direct them to related posts or a desired action. Since the reader may not see comments when they read a post, encourage readers to comment and join the discussion from within the post. Be sure to include a link back to the original post when calling for comments. A sentence like, “Please leave your comments in the box below” does no good when you can’t actually see the box below.

2. Optimize for mobile

If your website isn’t easy to read on a mobile device, users aren’t going to stick around when they do click through from their mobile reader. Mobile is here, so if your site isn’t mobile-responsive, you are turning away potential clients.

Also check to ensure that your RSS feed is working, and that you’ve added it to your personal Flipboard, Zite, and other readers. This will allow you to see your content as it appears to others. It will also allow you to identify problems and see what works and doesn’t work as the content is shifted to the new platform.

3. Capitalize on compelling images

Images have always helped bring readers to a blog post or web article, but with the introduction of content curators like Flipboard and Zite, they are even more important. Both of these programs prominently feature images, and the decision to click through to the story is often based on a strong image. Infographics that beg for a larger view can also be effective, as users frequently click through to see the full-sized graphic.

Compelling images can encourage readers to click through to the full article.

According to a response on Quora by Gene Tsai, an engineer at Flipboard, when choosing which image to feature with a story, they look first at “proximity” to the main article text. From there, they look to patterns showing that an item is a photo and html tags to help them identify the proper photo. This would suggest that best SEO practices — such as including “alt image” tags and designating a featured image — may also help.

4. Write strong headlines, lead paragraphs, and meta descriptions

Along with a strong image, the decision to click through to an entire article is often based on a compelling headline that is followed by a strong opening paragraph or two. On platforms such as Flipboard and Zite, your content is in direct competition with other articles — all begging for the readers’ eyes. For the reader using Instapaper, the decision to clip an article to read later is often based on a quick scan of headlines and opening paragraphs. Strive for headlines and lead paragraphs that are so powerful your target audience can’t afford to pass them by. 

Some programs may also pull from the meta descriptions, so you may also want to write descriptions that encourage click-through to the main article.

5. Maximize social media sharing

Many of the content curation platforms pull content directly from your Twitter and Facebook feeds. The more an item is shared, the better chance it has of being picked up by a program such as Flipboard.Work on growing a targeted following and use your social media streams to share content they will be interested in reading and likely to share. Social recognition will also help an article move to the top of the feeds. 

6. Publish and promote quality content

It may seem basic, but the better the content, the more likely it is to be shared. And the more it gets shared, the better chance it has of rising to the top of the Flipboard/Zite stream, being clipped to Pocket or Instapaper, etc. The more a blog or website is recognized by the reader apps, the better chance of future articles showing up again in the app.

Don’t be afraid to give your content a push, either. There is too much competition to hope your post gets discovered on its own. Share it with influential followers who may be likely to share it, and do everything you can to let the world know it’s there.

Although the platforms on which we view content may be going through a radical change, there is nothing radical or groundbreaking about optimizing for these platforms. If anything, these changes provide another opportunity to reach our target audience, as mobile devices free us from the traditional workspace and are helping more and more people rediscover the pleasure of reading a great article, blog post, or other content.

Content Strategy and Responsive Design

This type of thinking/methodology is going to be realllly important in order for Target to have real multichannel success...

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by Sean Tubridy on January 19th, 2012

Maybe you’ve heard the term “responsive design.” Maybe you haven’t. Many people think it solely refers to the technical aspects of design, but that’s not exactly the case.

Responsive design can have a major impact on your content. I’ll tell you how it works, how it can affect your content, and why you should—and need to—care.

What is responsive design?

Responsive design is the practice of having one website that adapts to the device it is being viewed upon. Or, more simply: one website for all screens.

So, why is it important? If you’ve ever been involved in the process of creating separate sites for desktop, mobile, tablet, iPhone, iPad, etc., you know why. It can be a nightmare to develop and keep up multiple websites that are essentially delivering the same content. If you only have to design and code for one site, things suddenly become a lot simpler.

Below is the Confab 2012 site I designed and developed as seen on a laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone. Notice that while the design and layout look different on each device, the URL and the content are the same.

How could it impact your content?

Right now, designers and developers are driving the conversations about responsive design. And those conversations are primarily about technical and esthetic matters. But, not surprisingly, it pertains to content, too. That’s the part I’d like to talk about.

The point of using a responsive approach is to allow the same content to work across multiple devices. This can make your job easier, because you don’t have to update content in multiple places.
So, what can happen to a site’s content as we go from a large desktop to a small device? Three things typically occur:

1. It shifts: This the most obvious change in content when we look at a responsive layout. As the screen gets smaller, columns become narrower, allowing text to become larger and more readable. Sidebars and other secondary content blocks move from the side to below the main column(s). Rows of six images become three, and then two, and then one, etc. All of this is done so you don’t have to pinch, expand, and move around a site on a smaller device. When it’s done properly, it can make the viewing experience much more enjoyable and efficient.
2.  
3. It gets hidden: Content that would otherwise take too long to skim by scrolling or just doesn’t fit well in the layout might get hidden. It's then revealed when a user performs an action like clicking a button or toggling a drop-down.
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5. It gets removed: Uh oh! Did an alarm just go off in your head? It should have, because this is the part of responsive design that no one likes to talk about. Even though the general consensus is that removing content is generally a no-no, it’s totally possible and oh-so-tempting in the name of esthetics, reduced scrolling, lowered page load time, etc.

Why should a content strategist care?

As I was developing the Confab 2012 site and creating different layouts for different screen sizes, I found that I needed to make a lot of decisions about what should happen to the content across different screen sizes. Should this piece of content shift? Become hidden? Disappear altogether? What’s more important—this piece or that piece? Should this go above or below that? It became clear very quickly that I shouldn’t be the only one making these decisions.

Don’t leave these decisions solely up to designers and developers. Chances are, we’re too concerned about things like browser compatibility and page-load time to give much thought to them. I happen to be a designer who believes that people visit websites for the content, not the design—but that doesn’t mean I want to be making decisions about content priority myself.

Responsive design. Mobile first. Progressive enhancement. These, and any other technical approaches where your content can take different forms across channels and platforms, present a challenge to content strategists. The content you create needs to be flexible.

To achieve this, you may need to enhance and adapt some of your traditional deliverables, or set them aside in favor of conversations and collaborations, which is always a good thing.

The Web will continue to evolve, and the more content strategists and designers can work together to adapt to these changes, the better off our content—and users—will be.

p.s. Yes, we know our site isn’t responsive. But we’re working on it. Just you wait!

Responsive design is a term and a technique coined by Ethan Marcotte in his groundbreaking article in A List Apart, “Responsive Web Design.” If you are interested in learning the technology behind it, there are many more articles to explore.

Top Trends of 2011: Content Shifting

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By Jon Mitchell / December 22, 2011 12:00 PM /

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We wind down the top trends of 2011 with one that's perfect for the holidays. Just as the frantic, real-time nature of the social Web hit fever pitch, the market trends this year made way for "content shifting." It's the simple idea of saving your articles, videos and podcasts for later.
With the rise of the smartphone and tablet, all kinds of content can be saved until after work or school. Content shifting helps us concentrate on the tasks at hand. It also reformats it for more enjoyable experiences. Now that the Web is no longer limited to our desks, content shifting allows new media to take their rightful place on the couch.

The Rise of Leisure Devices
Podcasting has been the content-shifted future of radio since the early days of the iPod. But its growth was limited by the barriers of regularly syncing via USB. The era of the smartphone and tablet has freed users from that constraint.

The tablet in particular has made leisure reading and viewing of Web content a reality. Sales of the iPad have smashed expectations. Amazon's Kindle Fire, which is specialized for leisure content, has found mass appeal as well.

We've seen some great studies from Google and BBC.com this year showing that consumers love the tactile, personal tablet experience. They use tablets as leisure devices, allowing them to separate the fun stuff from the work stuff they do on their PCs.



Apple & Amazon's End-to-End Content
The big end-to-end consumer tech companies have tried to keep this all under their umbrellas. With iOS 5, Lion and iCloud, Apple proposes a vision of content shifting that happens unconsciously. Music, videos, documents and bookmarks are all just there when users look for them, no matter which device they're on.

Apple added a feature called Reading List to its Safari browser, which lets users create temporary bookmarks for Web articles. It also expanded Safari's Reader mode to the mobile versions. Safari Reader pops up a clean version of an article, without navigation or ads, to make reading on the Web more sane. The combination of Reading List and Reader mode makes for a basic but pleasant content-shifted reading experience.

None of it works perfectly, of course, but Apple would like it to.

iPad Is A Product, Kindle Is A Service
For Apple, content is more like a feature. Apple's in the device business, and it offers content to support users of its devices. The iPhone, the iPad, the iPod and the Mac are the products. Amazon does things the other way around. Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet rounds out its line of inexpensive, less powerful devices that give users access to Kindle content, which is where Amazon makes its money.

Kindle is a service, not a product. The devices are just windows into Amazon's store of content, which is streamed or whisper-synced down to them. Amazon uses its powerful cloud to keep the latest content on each Kindle device, and even on iOS and Android devices running the Kindle app. For Kindle books and magazines, content shifting is as simple as syncing your page number.


Content Shifting In the Consumer Cloud
There's still plenty of room for content shifting solutions from Web companies that aren't tied to particular platforms.

Evernote, a company working on many different problems in the consumer cloud, has built Clearly, an article-saving service. It's a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that creates a cleaned-up article view, similar to Safari Reader mode, but it also allows saving of the clean version to one's Evernote account with one click. The article can then be read later via the Evernote app on a tablet or smartphone, as well as on the desktop.



Instapaper has an established presence in the iTunes App Store as a dedicated read-later service. Using a browser bookmarklet or connecting to the many RSS readers and Twitter clients that allow fast link saving to Instapaper, readers can save clean versions of Web articles they want to read with just one click.

When you launch the Instapaper app, it caches the articles, so you can even read offline. This is a solution to the attention problems posed by the real-time Web. If you see an article you want to read, you don't have to be distracted. Just send to Instapaper and get back to work. Check out our interview with Instapaper creator Marco Arment for his perspective on how content shifting is changing reading.

There's also Read It Later, an Instapaper competitor that's going for cross-platform presence rather than focus on two devices. Its creator used Read It Later data to publish a fascinating blog post at the beginning of the year demonstrating the content shifting trend. It compared desktop, smartphone and tablet users' reading habits, and the iPad users are clearly shifting their content to the evening, with a little bit of reading over breakfast.


Content shifting of articles is happening, and it's getting started with Web-based video, too. The Internet TV service Boxee offers an iPad app and bookmarklet that allows saving of Web videos for later, whether on your TV or your iPad (if you've got the gadgets). It takes a bit of work to get it going, but Richard MacManus wrote a how-to guide for content-shifting video with Boxee.

Some of the sharpest minds in the industry are thinking about content shifting, and we had some great interviews about it from this year. Tech investor extraordinaire Fred Wilson talked about content shifting at our 2Way Summit this year. We discussed the iPad and the future of reading with Instapaper's Marco Arment. And we talked to Jori Lallo, creator of a link-saving service called Kippt, about the practice of saving Web links on your digital bookshelf.