Date: February 9, 2023Author: Alicja Wojcik8 min read
Tradition must be followed. That’s why, like every year, we created a list of top trends for the fields we are most interested in as a software development company which builds products end-to-end. And as a company that has outstanding product design services in its portfolio, we could not miss the list of product design trends for 2023.
It’s hard to not write about using AI in design while in 2022 we got to know DALL E 2 – an AI system which can create images and pieces of art by using descriptions in natural language and which, according to the latest information from 3th November, is being used by 3 million people to create over 4 million images a day. Images from DALL E 2 flooded the internet in 2022, so it’s not surprising that we are excited about the future of this solution, and AI in Design opens the list of Product Design Trends for 2023.
Filip Styczyński, a Product Designer at Tooploox and the host of the Product Dissign Podcast, says that this trend is not only about AI-generated images though it might seem so. He draws attention to AI-generated texts and how they’ve impacted designers’ work. Designers use this kind of text on product prototypes in place of Lorem Ipsum, and this makes prototypes more real, live, and like the end product. This might seem like a trifle, but this trifle might be crucial when it comes to UX research or in presenting designs to clients.
How will the future of AI in product design look? In the future, Filip wants to see website and application audits supported by AI, intelligent browser product analysis, stylistic examples of applications generated by AI and maybe even flow based on analysis of already existing products. We can’t be sure of when things like that will come into use but we are for sure excited about all this technology news and how it passes between IT product services.
When we write about AI in Design we can’t omit the topics of Artificial Intelligence and Art and NFTs, especially when we have experts in these fields at Tooploox – Ivona Tautkute-Rustecka – the tech-lead in one of Tooploox’s AI projects is an AI artist.
Saying that we are excited as we watch this trend is not enough!
Ethics in AI – a designers perspective
With great power comes great responsibility and it’s obvious that AI possesses great power, so every time we create AI solutions we should take ethical aspects into consideration.
And you may ask “ok, so you wrote about AI ethics once, why do you repeat it now and what do designers have in common with it?” This is a very good question and Roksana Kobyłecka, a Product Designer at Tooploox, has an even better answer:
“We as designers are end-user advocates. Programmers are responsible for a very important technical part, but by working with designers, together we can add even more value – the greater our focus on the user, their habits, and the environment in which the user is located, the better our understanding of the context the solution’s use,” – says Roksana. “I think that designers, as user-oriented specialists, should attach great importance to the ethics of AI solutions and supervise it at every stage of AI product development. However, it all starts with the basics. From good teamwork, a common goal, understanding the context of use, and human behavior.”
According to Roksana, 2023 will see a breakthrough in this type of approach.
Design System
Design systems are not a new solution in the field of product design and development services, but we decided to put them on our list of the latest product design trends. Why? Because the trend is the fact that design systems have become an indispensable standard in the world of IT products and services. We can see it in the number of emerging solutions that have the goal to make work with design systems easier and more automated – as said by Konrad Kolasa, Principal Product Designer at Tooploox.
A design system is a set of standards and a way to have a library of components containing design, code, and the rules of how to use it for a brand to stay consistent all in one place. For us, the increasing interest in design systems is quite obvious because we see the advantages of using them in our daily work as a company that handles digital design services.
As Konrad says: “We think about design systems as a method to improve cooperation between design and development teams. We all see the advantages of this approach – we are more satisfied with projects because we work together on creating a “shared language” which supports our communication and joint work. We can also efficiently grow by upscaling the project and increasing the number of collaborating people without additional hassle.”
We are happy that more and more people understand how it can benefit their businesses, products and work. Different companies made experiments during which they measured how much time employees can save thanks to using design systems. The results speak for themselves – designers’ work was completed 34% faster and, in a different experiment, developers’ efficiency was increased by 47%!
Headless approach
In a world where we have more and more channels and devices it’s hard to still make use of the old solutions, which were invented when we used simple and similar applications and devices. We definitely need something more flexible, which can easily reconcile these devices and apps and make creating content for all of them easier.
The answer could be the headless architecture model, where the front-end presentation layer of a solution is decoupled from its back-end functionality. This means that created content (text or design) can be published in any channel, on any front-end layer. This can bring many advantages to a business and making work faster is only one of them.
It’s not surprising that the headless model has become more popular, and it appears in our list of design trends for 2023 as pointed out by Weronika Kołodziej-Teszbir – Product Designer at Tooploox. According to BusinessWire, the Headless CMS Software Market was valued at US$ 328.5 million in 2019 and is projected to reach US$ 1,628.6 million by 2027.
And what does the headless approach mean for designers? Weronika says: “It gives us more freedom while designing user experience – we can adapt better to users’ needs by applying the newest technological innovations and visual solutions. Thanks to the headless model, we can take a broader, more holistic look at the user experience we design.”
What’s more, besides the widely understood headless architecture model, headless design systems are also gaining popularity. Designers can take ready-made components from one central base and adapt them to their product’s requirements, which makes not only designing but also testing a lot faster.
Product-led Growth
“A good product sells itself” is not only a quote but something that we can call the motto of Product-led Growth strategy. And a good product is a product that delivers value to its customers while driving business goals.
It may seem obvious that good design is needed to create a good product, but in terms of Product-led Growth, this issue becomes far wider. In this strategy the product itself, not a sales team, is the main way to gain clients, engage them and monetize. So the goal of the product is to activate clients, to convince them to buy the full version, and to recommend the product to their friends, coworkers, and community. But how can we do it? To create a successful product we have to solve real problems and build the right solutions for a suitable target audience. This can all be achieved with the product discovery approach, which is currently becoming one of the foundations of modern product design.
In the Product-led Growth strategy, we aim to break down the silos that divide the product and the business teams in order to grow faster, more efficiently, and provide better value to the end users.
This strategy is becoming more and more popular. According to ProductLed, 58% of surveyed B2B SaaS companies have already deployed a product-led growth model and 91% had a plan for 2022 to increase their investments in it.
We see this approach in our daily work with clients. That’s why Katarzyna Szostak, Senior Product Designer at Tooploox, chose Product-led Growth as the next trend for our list of Product Design Trends for 2023.
Digital Ecology
In 2022 President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest piece of federal legislation ever to address climate change, with $369 billion in climate and clean energy investments. This shows the growing importance of taking action in terms of fighting climate change. And this is only one thing we mentioned.
Every day we hear about efforts in this field – from world leaders, through companies, to the regular everyday man. According to the Peoples’ Climate Vote created by the University of Oxford and UNDP, the largest survey of public opinion on climate change, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people in 50 countries believe that climate change is a global emergency.
And while most people see the advantages of recycling or using reusable materials, digital ecology is still quite a new term. And according to the BBC, the carbon footprint of technological devices, the internet, and IT systems account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions (similar to the airline industry) and is predicted to double by 2025, so we should definitely pay more attention to this issue.
Fortunately, we see that it is getting louder around Digital Ecology and many of Tooploox’s designers treat this topic very seriously and predict that it will be a trend in 2023. Tomasz Szeligowski, a UX Designer at Tooploox and lecturer at SWPS University, is one of them.
In 2021 we wrote about the trending idea of creating a design which looks more organic and natural, but digital ecology in design goes much further. Creating ecological IT products is, above all, about making them as light as possible. Tomasz said that weight comes from “effectiveness design” and he encourages us to measure the effects of our work and try to optimize where it is possible – for example, we can sometimes opt-out of a background video or give up on complicated animation or choose a lighter format.
We are quite proud that, according to WebsiteCarbon.com, our new website is cleaner than 75% of web pages tested, and only 0,24g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits it. And we are happy to see that Digital Ecology is a trending topic and more and more people and companies are aware of how technology can affect climate change. But seeing the increasing tempo of IT’s carbon footprint, our wish for 2023 is to see digital ecology awareness become even bigger.
As Tomasz says, “If we all think about it, and we are all aware that even though we can’t see internet and digital solutions with the naked eye, that the threat to the planet is real, then I hope we will slow down the greenhouse emissions from the IT industry.”
Wellbeing-centered design
When we asked Bartek Jagniątkowski, Senior Product Designer at Tooploox, about trends in IT product design for 2023, he answered, “I don’t know if it will be a trend, but I really wish it would. I’ve been thinking about it for years, but right now I’ve started to see that our clients and potential clients are bringing this to the table and they care about this issue.”
The topic Bartek wants to see trending this year is Wellbeing-centered design. We are closing our list of design trends for 2023 with it, and wishing, not only for Bartek but for all of us, that it will become a trend.
We’ve heard a lot about user-centered design or human-centered design, but what does this mean? We may ask what is the purpose of this approach because what does it mean to put the user or human in the center? Does being a user or a human have a one-and-only purpose?
Every day we all play different roles – employee, friend, parent, user, and customer. And the purposes of these roles are also different. What’s more, they can change over time and circumstances. And when we look more broadly and deeper, we can see that every human action has one common point – well-being.
To be wellbeing oriented in their work, designers, aside from thinking of well-being as a prime idea, can look deeper into every aspect of design every time they receive a task to “solve user needs.”
”It’s not only a matter of the solution being sustainable, easy or delightful to use. It involves thinking beyond the problem to be solved, and seeing if the solution we propose may have a negative impact on our users and in what manner,” Bartek says.
Summary
Looking at the above list of product design trends for 2023, we can say that it will not be about “how it looks” but about “how to create” and “what design can do.”
