Keep an eye out for these things in the upcoming year.

2020 turned everything upside down - we saw companies slashing budgets, product managers pivoting their strategies, employees working with lower mental health, and more. Next year, we all aim to do better. 

Despite the crisis, there are some positive changes. 2020 was about accessibility and inclusivity, with a growing trend for realness and diversity. Below I've come up with a list of design trends- many of these trends are not new but grew into something bigger, and I expect them to develop further in 2021. 

Remote research and management (i.e. remote everything)

One of the most exciting things in my job is to get the chance to interview customers and conduct fieldwork in real life. It's impossible to implement product design to solve customers' problems when you don't know your users' habits, lifestyle, environment, interests, and emotions. This year designers had to switch entirely to virtual survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Zoom panel interviews.

Design should transmit a company's vision, and we need more people to share their concerns and opinions to infuse them into the culture. For as long as I can remember, I've been promoting agile collaboration where the team of developers is involved in the process. This year, we've been challenged to do everything at a distance - to collaborate through monitors and to communicate in various time zones without knowing any circumstances behind a video chat (Did they just calm down their restless kids? Is that dog begging for a walk? What are they really wearing?). 

We've appreciated regular milestone reviews with the team - the only way to show how work is evolving and to make sure other members understand it. Tools like Miro, Slack, and Figma have become crucial. That said, it's still tricky to navigate what other teams are doing when you never have a random chat near a coffee machine or have lunch together in the office. 

Accessible and Inclusive web design 

In 2020, designers massively implemented accessibility features based on the WCAG's standards. Interfaces now use plain, simple language and short sentences plus images, drawings, and icons in addition to text.

Next year, designers are going to look for accessibility flaws on their websites to improve them. For example, Facebook designers recently found out that CamelCase hashtags (#blacklivesmatter vs. CamelCase #BlackLivesMatter) are crucial because hashtags in all uppercase and all lowercase are difficult for people with cognitive and learning disabilities to understand.

If I wanted to point out one major trend this year, I would say it's the impact of accessibility and diversity on design. According to an Inside Design survey, 62.3% of designers had a team conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion at work-and 26.4% said it was

the first time they had it. All visual pictures and emojis now should represent the diversity of people's abilities or disabilities and their race, gender, and culture. 

It's become a mission to integrate inclusive design and accessibility into a company's culture to influence the whole design practice and product development systems.

Even more important is that the trend went far beyond web design and into the products. For example, Airbnb created a section on accessibility features for hosts to answer questions about hosting people with disabilities.

AI and big data

Machine learning has been used to create targeted campaigns that increase sales for a long time. In e-commerce, marketers collect and analyze large amounts of data to provide online customers with an experience similar to what they would have in store. From customer preferences to the price of competing products, companies collect and seek to use increasing amounts of data. 

At Scentbird, we show recommendations based on the perfumes users viewed, liked, or ordered before. Our feature Scent Profile asks questions to figure out what perfumes fit best for each customer. 

It is only a matter of time until customers won't need to interact with an interface at all.They will simply receive personalized offers based on clicks through banners and other interactions. Companies will know when someone runs out of toilet paper and can deliver it right away.

Chatbots and GPT-3 

GPT3, a neural network-powered language model that takes a load of text and then guesses what the next word is a huge leap for AI development. For a little while this year, designers thought they had been replaced by a Figma plugin - one that utilized AI to auto-generate screens based on a text entry from the user. It also means websites can be created from scratch - after you teach the GPT-3 engine to figure out what you want, it can create a typical website in seconds. 

The New York Times editors enjoy playing with GPT-3 too. They recently asked the robot to write a love piece for their Modern Love section. If you can evaluate the words and use them for training and tuning the AI, it can create future text predictions on the unlabeled data. You repeat the process until predictions start to converge. "Like all romances, some turned out better than others,"- their human editor Cade Metz summed up the writing. 

Another trend based on neural networks is a variety of chatbots. They help users navigate sites to choose products, and in the case of Scentbird, they also significantly reduce the load on support.

This year, chatbots have completely hit the mainstream. H&M, for example, uses bots to help visitors on their website find what they're looking for. They also make suggestions to the customer on what they might want to try based on their preferences. The beauty store, Sephora, lets visitors try lipsticks and eyeshadows on a photo of themselves that they share with the bot. The bot's AI technology identifies the user's facial features and uses augmented reality to apply these makeup tests.

As they replace humans, these chatbots have already saved companies millions of dollars in salaries and immensely improved the customer experience. 

Mobile-first and touch gestures

Ninety percent of our traffic at Scentbird comes from mobile. The trend of mobile-first has continued, and now we mostly consume content through our phones. 

Animation in mobile design has had a rebirth thanks to gestures that give users more control over their device actions. Ten years ago, there were only a few basic movements. Now, iOS and Android designers have a wide range of mobile gestures to play with. Users' fingers perform the majority (tap, swipe, drag, slide, etc.), but it can also involve hand movements (shaking, tilting, moving, and rotating the device). This adds to voice interaction and even further - gadgets outside of mobile. For example, this year, we implemented a tracking order feature through Alexa.

Gestures free up screen space that would otherwise host clickable buttons. They are intuitive, so once users learn how to use them, they become an important part of their mobile user experience.

Content is written by Anna Voshkarina, Digital Product Designer at Scentbird