• Minimalist designs will become (even) more popular this year. Simple, elegant, classy, fast page response times. Collage/handrawn design will calm down a bit
• Maybe some professional looking monotone stuff with colorful details
• Solid colors
• More HTML5 and CSS3 implementation instead of a trend like letterpress or glossy buttons (those were the days)
• A lot of rounded corners, RGBA transparency, and drop shadows using CSS3
• More JQuery and more integration of social media in design
• Massive typography
• Serif fonts will get more attention
• More people will use custom font embedding (e.g. FontSquirrel, OpenType, sIFR)
• Less ie6 support!
• The year of mobile design…With the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and other devices, how are we designers going to adopt Flash and other platforms to design for mobile devices?

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
- Charles Mingus

Yesterday I came across this interesting web accessibility article at CNN.com, talking about how big internet companies such as Yahoo and Google are embracing it.

We should all start an accessibility push in our organizations, here’s why:

• There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard.




• With a rapidly aging population in many parts of the world — notably the U.S. — accessibility requirements will become useful for today’s crop of baby boomers as they grow older




• In order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure.

Performance, internationalization, and accessibility are not a feature, they should all be standard.

There is a world of differences to consider when designing for web or designing for desktop applications:

From fundamental interactions to keyboard driven navigational paradigms to accessibility issues to screen layout to basic behavior and reaction of buttons, links, etc…we have to consider that a product with a rich client and a web client are two completely separate applications striving to assist the user in meeting the same goals. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that but perhaps it get us going in the right direction.

1. Build every feature any customer would ever want: Apparently, by having all the features anyone can ever imagine, “eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy a competitors’ product”. That’s a wrong conclusion and a really bad idea. Software that tries to be everything to everyone generally sucks. It becomes bloated, hard to use, and in need of big up-front training, which is probably a  good definition of enterprise software right there.




2. Become a sales force-driven company: Hire a bunch of sales people and make them convince people to buy your software. Side step the actual users, the developers, and go straight to management. The sales people will invariably promise more than you have and drive you even deeper into “build everything for everyone”.

A Good Experience blog post by Mark Hurst has an amusing and insightful post on strategy as opposed to tactics:

Why is finding direction (or strategy) so rare, so difficult? One reason is that creating the strategy is different from execution.

You have to stop and take time to find the direction. You can’t run while you’re reading the map.

And this is the potential problem with popular methods such as:

• iterative design
• rapid prototyping
• agile development

…which are great and all, except when there’s no well-thought-out direction to go in.

So be forewarned – it’s hard to be a strategist. People prefer action. “Ready-fire-aim” sounds so much more exciting and appealing. “Do something!” they say – and it can be hard to sit down and say hey, let’s take at least a couple of days to think about who our customers are and talk to them about what they need.

Speaking with the customers refines and narrows the direction. After all you are fulfilling their needs.

“Designing well is not easy. The manufacturer wants something that can be produced economically. The store wants something that will be attractive to its customers. The purchaser has several demands. In the store, the purchaser focuses on price and appearance, and perhaps on prestige value. At home, the same person will pay more attention to functionality and usability. The repair service cares about maintainability: How easy is the device to take apart, diagnose, and service:? The needs of those concerned are different and often conflict. Nonetheless, the designer may be able to
satisfy everyone.”

From the book The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

Inventor, entrepreneur and visionary Ray Kurzweil explains in abundant, grounded detail why, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the human brain and nanobots will be operating your consciousness. Filmed in 2005, this is a little dated (his 2010 predictions seem a little optimistic). But you still can’t help be blown away by the audacity of his vision. He believes we’re heading for a radical merging of humanity and technology. What do you think?

We try so hard to please our client(s) that we fail to do what would be truly pleasing. That includes also giving our client critical feedback.

The challenge is to be of service without becoming servile. We shouldn’t elevate any customer to the role of superior being, but treat each with human respect.

The key to becoming a stellar service provider lies in making only responsible commitments. This requires not simply being knowledgeable about what must be done but “no-legible” about how preferences resolve into satisfying results. We must know how and when to say, “No,” because no one can know what will finally emerge as best. Client and designer will have to discover what constitutes best, and this always means stumbling through some uncomfortable territory together.

It’s crazy how much more satisfying to it is when you are able to present an even better solution to the problem they were really hoping for when they were offering suggestions or ideas.

Of course you’ve heard this Henry Ford quote a hundred times:
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Or Tom Kelley’s (IDEO’s general manager) translation of that:
“Customers don’t envision the future, they inform the present.”

After reading the “Feedback. The creative killer” article I came to 4 conclusions:

1. When ignoring an experienced and talented designer, your organization will only waste more dollars “trying out” everyone’s ideas, testing what’s been tested, ad nauseum, etc. 
2. As far as handling feedback, I don’t think it’s the designer’s responsibility to manage feedback process. Typically, a designer is hit with competing and often conflicting feedback from every direction– an overwhelming experience that often includes a healthy dosage of office politicking. The design team manager (or any manager) should set rules for unsolicited feedback. I think designers should not be forced to balance conflicting executive feedback. 
3. Design input is always valuable and fresh eyes often can see overlooked design weaknesses, but a business/client should understand years of design experience is worth something. 
4. Being a good designer is not only a matter of creating great work, but being able to work with various stakeholders to successfully deliver the project.