Five User Experience Trends

Since my blog has been broken a lot recently I missed this excellent overview of Five User Experience trends by Gene Smith.

I can’t help but agree with all of them:

1. Services as Software – Gene is one of the first people in the UX industry to admit that good enough, fast and cheap tools like usertesting.com will have a real impact. While most people still feel the need to argue “User testing is important”…the market is moving past that. “How fast can you measure?” is as important as “Did we find everything?”
2. User Experience Analytics – Gene references a post I wrote called What Metric are you designing to improve today? and I think he’s absolutely right (obviously). This is where I’m focusing for the next year or more as I believe metrics-driven design is the future. I’ll be talking about this at UXLondon and am working hard on this at Performable.
3. Content Strategy – My friend Kristina Halvorson saw this coming…here is an excellent post in which she explains how content strategy is more than a bunch of tactics.
4. Return of the Mobile Web – Gene suggests that building apps using web standards is the eventual future of the mobile web, not getting locked into platforms like iPhone and Android. I would add to this by saying I actually think Apple would partially agree here…they are pushing HTML5 like gangbusters so that this can be a reality.
5. A Real Experience Economy – Are people moving away from a world of things to one that values experience more? I think Gene’s right on with this one.

Read the rest here: Five User Experience Trends I’ll be Watching in 2010.