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In 2020, the UX design trends that matter most are: prototyping to de-risk product development, building data interpretation systems that actually serve everyday users, and creating content that makes people feel something real about a product. Companies investing in all three will pull ahead. Here is what we are seeing and why it matters.
What Are the Biggest UX Design Predictions for 2020?
2019 was a genuinely exciting year for product innovation, design, and user experience. Microsoft leaned hard into cloud-based UX and continued its resurgence. Samsung's foldable phone and Tesla's Cybertruck stirred up plenty of controversy. Disney managed to salvage its Disney+ launch despite hammering its own servers on day one.
Regardless of whether a brand made a big splash or fell flat, the product hints are there: organizations are reaching new levels of UX maturity. Our 2020 predictions highlight a few of the ways companies are investing like never before to create meaningful experiences for their customers.
Prediction 1: Will Companies Use Prototyping to De-Risk Product Development?
Yes, and it is already happening at scale. The balance between speed of innovation and risk is not new. What is new is the number and size of organizations embracing design thinking as the solution to de-risk product design. Specifically, we are seeing prototyping and testing, two key phases of design thinking, become increasingly popular.
How Did Lean Startup Change Product Design?
In 2008, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, urging entrepreneurs to follow a stepwise approach to product development. Those business practices have since combined with Lean UX and are now being implemented at much larger organizations. Small companies and industrial design shops have been using prototyping for decades, but now design thinking is proliferating into other departments at large organizations. It is even beginning to influence C-suite decision making and resource allocation.
Enterprises that previously only built prototypes for physical or consumer-facing products are now building infrastructure to prototype digital products, employee-facing interfaces, and reporting tools, all in the interest of de-risking the innovation process.
How Does Facebook Use Prototyping to Move Fast?
Facebook's famous motto "Go Fast and Break Things" is rooted in the prototype-and-test methodology. Mark Zuckerberg has explained that Facebook's speed in the early days actually injected risk into their systems because they did not have the proper structure in place to execute.
Zuckerberg recognized early on that their innovation would be a function of their ability to test new UX and features in a stable environment. Today, "going fast" at Facebook is the result of a calculated approach to build stable testing infrastructure.
"We thought, 'OK, we need a new strategy to enable us to move fast.' And what we came up with was: We're going to do this by building the best infrastructure. So, an engineer who comes from any company is going to be able to ship their product faster here and test it better, and move faster, at Facebook than anywhere else in the world. So that's what we mean by 'Move fast with stable infrastructure.'" Mark Zuckerberg
The result? At any given time, there are more than 10,000 different live versions of Facebook. Each version is testing user experience, levels of engagement, and more. Facebook ships the best-performing UX instantly.
"Prototypes slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long." Tim Brown, Change by Design
What Is the GV Design Sprint and Why Does It Matter?
Not every team has access to Facebook-level development resources, and the prototyping process is usually simpler than building an entire engineering team. Google Ventures' (GV) Design Sprint process has mainstreamed the product design sprint, with an emphasis on ideation and learning within a sprint cycle. GV asserts that alignment within a sprint and a focus on low-fidelity prototyping can actually help organizations speed up their process.
The GV Sprint shortcut allows teams to learn faster by ideating on low-fidelity prototypes before committing to full builds.
How Does the Drawbackwards Approach Work?
Our approach mirrors multiple aspects of the GV process. Companies should focus on great upfront research, choose the correct fidelity of prototype, and have systems in place to interpret the results.
We find that many of our clients get stuck between the "Define" and "Ideate" steps. We help unblock the product design process by applying initial strategy to the ideation stage and developing structure in our partner's prototyping and testing methodology.
Prediction 2: Why Will Data Interpretation Systems Become a UX Priority in 2020?
Because "big data" without usability is just noise. In 2020, two words will get added to "big data": actionable and interpretable. The prevalence of digital business and the speed of computing have improved most organizations' abilities to leverage their data. That will place a premium on the UX professional's ability to build dashboards and systems that help users actually understand what they are looking at.
What Were the Big Data Dark Ages?
Big data was a buzzword for most of the last decade, but it was not accessible to average employees at most firms until relatively recently. Data was siloed, available only to those with specialized roles or skills to decode information via custom queries or data dumps. Large organizations collected and stored data that was reachable only by engineers, developers, or quants.
Finance and marketing leaders may have had access to simple reporting to support business decisions, but most rank-and-file employees were left in the dark. At best, a general user would gain access to information via custom queries built by analyst teams, output in an Excel dashboard. At worst, a user would know the data existed but have no way to reach it. Most companies' access to data was functional, but certainly did not reach the usable or comfortable level of the Experience Success Ladder.
How Is Enterprise Software Changing Data Access?
Although some readers will still relate to those dark ages, access to data and information at most organizations has improved over the past five years. The problem now is that users lose productivity hours in data synthesis versus data analysis. They spend more time searching and compiling data from disparate sources than they spend making decisions based on it.
Consolidation in the enterprise software space is allowing organizations to pull all of their business services into singular platforms that manage every aspect of their customer and business lifecycle. Organizations like SAP, Oracle, IBM, and Salesforce are giving users access to customer lifecycle information in real time. That access simply did not exist before.
ERP platforms are handling increasingly more business functions across the organization, and the amount of customization and complexity available in enterprise software creates a clear UX opportunity. Every organization has different business drivers, and each department within an organization may have different reporting and analysis needs.
UX professionals and engineers will come together to connect disparate systems and identify the right interfaces and data visualizations so that all users can actually interpret data outputs.
What Should Good Data Interpretation UX Include?
Data interpretation done well should:
- Keep proprietary data safe, including customer data
- Allow users to access data on the correct devices for their job function
- Allow users to use the data to affect or understand business outcomes
- Include visualization that creates environments where the user can drive business or customer-centric outcomes
Prediction 3: Will Content Strategy Become Central to UX in 2020?
Yes. Alignment between content and UX is a competitive advantage, and more organizations will improve in this regard in 2020. At Drawbackwards, our end goal is to help clients create meaningful experiences for their users. A meaningful experience is where five-star reviews and positive NPS scores come from.
How Does Spotify Wrapped Show Content and UX Working Together?
Spotify has their UX and content strategy nailed right now. Consider their end-of-year "Wrapped" campaign. It is a look back at a user's Year in Music, but the user experience and content come together in a way that is truly unique.
Wrapped includes animation, graphs, charts, and colours that stand out not only because they look appealing and are easy to share, but because of the underlying story of value they create. The design is interactive, and the mobile interface even feels like scrolling through a friend's story feed on Instagram. The UX mirrors the familiar format of Instagram and Snapchat, with each tile easy to share on those platforms. Spotify deliberately designed content that was compelling enough to share.
This alignment between content, design, and user experience enabled Spotify's customers to become brand evangelists.
Even more important, the content highlights the depth of the user's relationship with Spotify. It helps you see how much time you spend with the product and how much you are enjoying that. The content celebrates the top experiences you have had with the product and points out how meaningful it is.
The headline sums it up perfectly: "We've been so lucky to share this time with you."
What Can Brands Learn from Red Bull's Content Strategy?
Red Bull Media House launched in 2007 and has become a leader in the multi-device action sports content world. The brand has positioned its media arm right at the intersection of lifestyle, culture, and events where its core audiences are. At times it is genuinely difficult to tell whether Red Bull is a beverage company, a media company, an event operator, or just a major sponsor of action sports teams. In 2012, Digiday explained that Red Bull had become "a media company that happens to sell soft drinks."
More brands are focusing on building content strategies, but Red Bull was one of the first to market with a truly integrated approach. The strategy has paid off. Red Bull sits at #71 on Forbes' 2019 Most Valuable Brands list.
"We don't believe in traditional marketing; we don't do big television commercials, we've never done that. We believe that we can activate through events and great content, and that's where we'd rather spend our money. So doing that and
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my organization is ready to start prototyping digital products? A good starting signal is whether your team is making expensive build decisions without validating assumptions first. If you are skipping directly from an idea to a full development cycle, prototyping is worth introducing even at a basic, low-fidelity level. You do not need Facebook-scale infrastructure to get value from testing early.
What is the difference between data visualization and data interpretation UX? Data visualization is about how information looks, while data interpretation UX is about whether a user can actually act on what they see. A chart can be beautiful and still leave a non-technical employee unable to make a decision from it. Good interpretation UX connects the visual output to a specific business outcome the user already cares about.
How can smaller brands build a content strategy that creates meaningful user experiences without Red Bull's budget? Start by identifying the one or two moments in your product experience where a user feels the most value, then build content specifically around those moments. Spotify Wrapped works not because it is expensive to produce but because it reflects something personal back to the user. Specificity and relevance matter far more than production scale.
What is the biggest mistake companies make when rolling out enterprise data platforms like Salesforce or SAP? Most organizations focus almost entirely on implementation and data migration while treating the user interface as an afterthought. Without UX investment upfront, employees end up with powerful tools they do not know how to use, which means productivity losses offset the value of the platform itself.
How do prototyping and content strategy connect to each other in a product development process? Content is often treated as something that gets filled in after design decisions are made, but that approach creates friction between what a product looks like and what it actually says. Testing content assumptions inside prototypes early helps teams catch misalignment before it becomes expensive to fix.
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