Where Will Product Design Be In 5 Years From Now?

I thought it would be refreshing to consider the last 10 years of consumer tech innovation and take a stab at where it’s heading from a product design perspective.

The big takeaway? 5 key areas of opportunity to poke holes in and aid in your conquest for exceptional design work.

Some of these may seem obvious or simple but stay with me; the key areas of opportunity will follow.

What can we take away from these breakthroughs and what do they tell us about the challenges and opportunities ahead?

I think of “conversation” in design as an exchange between people and products. It doesn’t have to be verbal or written — it can be much more immersive, which means going beyond the UI.

Our friends at Meta are already designing the Metaverse, which in addition to AR/VR, places a UI in Ray-Bans, and promises the ability to control our experiences using hand gestures through a no-touch interface. (Hey Google Glass, does this mean the market is finally ready?)

The majority of us in the design community will not focus solely on these experiences over the next few years. But that doesn’t mean we can’t adopt the mindset to bring it forward. For example:

Does managing treatment protocols for doctors mean scrolling through a tedious list of hundreds of medications?

Do I have to click through 8 different steps to get a phone call when shopping for car insurance?

How can we begin to shape today’s experiences into more fluid conversations between people and products?

As we get a taste of more immersive experiences like AR/VR, we will naturally desire more control over our real-life environments to increase our satisfaction and interest. “Detached” devices in hand with a “manual” UI will become increasingly lackluster.

Today, I can change the temperature of my home by 1 degree from my couch. Great.

But what other aspects in our natural environments will we want to enhance and control further? How will we control them? Could it be changing the distance between objects? Manipulating natural light, or our scenery? Further control over taste or touch? How will it all work together seamlessly?

Whether it’s a glance or a gesture of the hand, my guess is, it will get easier than “just the click of a button.”

I’ll never forget the first time I checked my online banking account from my Blackberry Pearl.

The puzzling thing is, most traditional financial institutions haven’t advanced in their models much further than that completely unusable mobile-web experience in the early 2000s.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency and all of the technology that powers it has exploded in recent years, allowing us to gain wealth and diversify our assets in previously unimaginable ways. Not to mention establish an entirely new currency.

These advancements include new banking models and a plethora of more attractive consumer-focused financial offerings.

But how will we boost the adoption curve by simplifying complex concepts? How will we depend less on traditional banking methods? And how will we help connect people to their diversifying assets in a rapidly evolving financial ecosystem?

Hard to believe that the iPad wasn’t a thing roughly ten years ago. Let alone the Apple Watch. From an experience design perspective, we have much work to do in this area.

The fundamental need isn’t changing: people need access to information and tools to manage it in countless contexts. Today we use screens to do this- primarily small displays in funny-looking cases that we carry around in our ill-fitted pockets.

In other instances, it’s a shoe that has aced tying itself (thank you, Nike).

Looking forward, how will we evolve to deepen access to information and improve the way we manage it in countless contexts throughout our everyday lives? Does this tie into immersive experience solutions like Meta’s Ray-Bans? Or will we tire of traditional screens and leverage advancements in flexible microchips to create a more organic experience? Something a little less creepy than a “skin-on Interface”- but we’re getting there!?

In closing, I thought I’d use transportation innovation (Uber, autonomous vehicles, etc) as an example of culminating product design opportunities.

Some folks have already shown up at Starbucks via their driverless Uber. What was their experience like, and how can it improve?

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