10 digital design trends for better marketing strategy and more in 2016

In November last year Campaign Asia-Pacific spoke to Fjord, an Accenture Digital company, for the launch of its regional office in Hong Kong.

Fjord recently released its annual Trends report for 2016,  which aims to show “significant emerging digital developments and explore how they will transform design, organisations and society in the coming year”. These trends are global but also relevant to Asia-Pacific.

Below are highlights taken directly from the report, which can be viewed here.

1. The power of wearables and nearables to gather data on consumers

“Today, someone is always listening. We have listening devices strapped to our wrists that encourage us to run farther or put down that extra slice of cake. Devices in our homes listen, respond and reorder. These are new, everyday interactions that make it okay for us to share data previously kept private. Whether it’s literally listening to voice commands or the streams of data we create, devices are learning from our micromoments. “

2. Services with manners and big-data etiquette

“Smart technology is offering unprecedented views into who we are and what’s happening in our homes, our cars, our bodies and our loved ones’ bodies. Living Services positively impact healthcare, city planning, environmental footprints and more. But with this surge of opportunity comes an extraordinary level of responsibility, and the ability for organisations to leverage these vast data sets in an ethical manner is more important than ever.”

3. The rise of employee experience (EX)

“Successful organisations will invest in the employee experience. As demand grows for best-in-class experiences in our private lives, the same level of service can be expected in the workplace. Simply put, employees now expect tailored experiences, fast evolution and personal connection in their careers. As a result, the emergence of employee experience (EX) design, where workplace processes, structure and culture are all reimagined at an organisational level.”

4. Disappearing apps

“Apps have reached a tipping point, where they’ve shifted from being user-controlled to proactively powering a user’s life. Is the dominance of standard apps about to be broken? We are in the midst of the atomisation of apps. Atomised brands take a less rigid approach to their products and services, allowing them to be super distributed across various platforms and third-party services, while still retaining their brand identity. They operate in a world where the rules of branding and conventional business structures are fundamentally challenged and disrupted, where services appear to offer themselves intuitively to consumers according to their time, place or situation.”

5. The flattening of privilege

“Which is more impressive: old or new money? Technology is beginning to upend the notion of both, by opening up the luxury service market to the masses. In the past, highly tailored experiences were reserved for the very wealthy, with costs and scale being the main barrier to entry. But with digital technology enabling highly scalable yet personalised experiences, luxury is now available for the masses like never before.”

6. Designing for the people

“The entry of design into governments is coming about both as a generation of digital natives start to enter junior ministerial ranks, bringing their understanding of liquid expectations with them, and as a way of saving cost in an age (in many countries) of “austerity.” From connecting communities around a cause, addressing asymmetries of information and giving the underrepresented a voice, there has been a great leap forward in terms of how some governments are thinking about the citizen experience.”

7. Healthy is the new wealthy

“Measuring our wellness is opening a new stream of revenue for an unexpected beneficiary—individuals. We live in an era of flat incomes, uncertain job prospects and rising healthcare costs. The confluence of these factors is creating a new set of currencies that may actually be worth money: health data. There are a few key elements that caused the trend to emerge: Consumers are using health monitoring for both leisure and preventative care, technology innovation has decreased these former costs significantly, but conversely rising health costs overall have created a critical moment in the market.”

8. Virtual Reality’s dreams come true

“No longer a vision of the far-flung future, virtual reality will make its mainstream debut in 2016. Not too long ago, VR was a technology so bulky and expensive that it was relegated to military flight simulations. Fast forward to 2016, the “critical year for virtual reality,” as Sony, Oculus, and Samsung will release consumer versions of their products in the first half of the year.”

9. Taking things off the thinking list

“Thanks to the digitisation of everything, we now have the most hyperreactive markets in history. However, innovation at this speed comes with an unintended consequence – a never-ending glut of options. From more than a million apps in the Apple Store to your grocery’s milk aisle, every aspect of our lives now requires making a choice.”

10. Design from within

“The average lifespan of an S&P company has gone from 67 years in the 1920s today to just 15 years today. The pressure to innovate has never been stronger. In 2014, $1.6 trillion was spent in R&D globally. Yet, in consumer goods, for example, research shows that more than 85 percent of the products fail.”