2018 UX Trends
A new generation of collaboration tools
It has never been so easy and accessible to create prototypes. But it’s never been so critical to find better ways of collaborating beyond them.
Prototyping is the most tangible way to share an idea with the team, to gather feedback from users, and to raise new questions or solutions for the problem you are trying to solve.
Every week in our newsletter we feature many new tools and plugins that make prototyping easier for designers. Just pick your flavor; there’s a tool for every type of project and every type of designer.
However, design is a collaborative process that starts way before prototyping and continues way beyond it. In 2017 we saw a shift from an extreme focus and interest in prototyping tools, to a new set of tools that consider the design process more holistically:
Real-time collaboration
Rather than passively watching someone sharing their screen, live tools allow everyone to take a turn sketching and participating in the discussion. Real-time collaboration removes time-consuming barriers that came with formalities and closed iteration cycles. This is especially valuable for remote teams. Google Docs was the first remarkable one, Freehand by Invision and Figma are well-known by the designers, but there are other players like Mural.co, Stickies.io, Pixelboard, and even Slack with its new screen share features.
Version control
As we learned from our dev friends, git can be a great system to keep our work open to ideas and explorations at the same time we track changes and don’t have to figure out what the heck is in final_alt_v02_04.sketch. Folio, Abstract, and Plant are leading this front, but we expect to see more tools solving this problem next year.
Knowledge transfer
Collaboration goes beyond live sketching and file management. The most significant opportunity is in sharing knowledge and results from research, discovery, and workshops. We collect so many insights from users that we can’t let them die in a Google Doc somewhere. Creating a repository with the learnings from a project and making it accessible to all is a big challenge and opportunity in 2018. WeWork is sharing research data internally with Polaris; Milanote lets you create boards to organize anything; but a robust research tool to collect and share data among the team is still needed, more than a yet another Sketch plugin.
These are just some of the tools that have been growing in popularity recently — but there are tons of opportunities in that space. If you are looking for a side project in 2018, what about exploring new ways to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing, and communication within your team?
