Tag: human-centered design

Andrew Gold December 9, 2024

How to Embrace Design in 2025: UX Trends You Need To Know

A new year is around the corner, and with it comes a wave of new opportunities for organizations to step up their game in digital strategy and product design. Whether it’s delivering unforgettable user experiences, empowering employees with better tools, balancing needs across omnichannel experiences, or ensuring accessibility for everyone, the trends shaping the future of design and UX are all about creating meaningful, impactful solutions.

If you’re looking to design products that truly resonate—whether for your customers, employees, or the world at large—these are five big trends to keep on your radar. Let’s explore how each can make a difference and what you can start doing to stay ahead.

1. Personalizing user experiences with AI

Let’s be honest—personalization is no longer a luxury. People now expect apps, tools, and services to know what they need and deliver it before they even ask. AI is the engine behind all of this magic, enabling products to tailor experiences based on user preferences, behaviors, and goals.

Why it matters in 2025
The evolution of generative AI models, such as ChatGPT and Bard, has transitioned from experimental phases to now practical applications. AI-powered personalization makes users feel understood and valued, which builds trust and loyalty. Whether it’s a business tool that learns a user’s workflows or an app that suggests relevant next steps, personalized experiences are becoming a baseline expectation. In 2025, expect enterprises to integrate these AI-driven personalization tools into large-scale platforms, like CRMs and ERP systems—moving beyond pilot projects into full-scale deployment.

How to get started

  • Be transparent about data: users are more likely to embrace AI-driven personalization if they trust you. Be clear about what data you collect, how you use it, and how you’re keeping it safe.
  • Think multi-channel: users interact across multiple devices and platforms, so make sure your AI systems provide consistent experiences everywhere.
  • Start small, but think big: begin with focused personalization features that add clear value, then expand as your systems and data capabilities grow.

By leaning into AI-driven personalization, you’ll not only meet user expectations but also create a smoother, more intuitive experience that keeps them coming back.

2. Turning data into action with analytics

Data has been a buzzword for years, but in 2025, it’s all about what you do with it. Advanced analytics tools are giving enterprises the power to understand users better, predict behaviors, and make decisions faster. It’s like having a crystal ball for UX.

Why it matters in 2025
Customers and employees expect seamless, problem-free interactions. Advanced analytics can spot issues before they happen, helping you design systems that are proactive, not reactive. Imagine catching a bottleneck in your user journey before anyone complains—that’s a sign of better control over your systems. The introduction of new tools and APIs in late 2024 has made real-time analytics more accessible. This development enables organizations to implement predictive analytics practically, thereby facilitating better proactive decision-making.

In addition, the growing adoption of AI in analytics provides businesses with prescriptive guidance, not just raw data. In 2025, enterprises will leverage AI to receive more actionable recommendations, a capability that was still somewhat emerging in 2024.

How to get started

  • Focus on meaningful metrics: don’t just track everything—identify the user behaviors that matter most and use analytics to monitor and improve them.
  • Bring everyone on board: make analytics insights accessible to all your teams—designers, developers, and decision-makers. This way, everyone can act on the data.
  • Embrace iteration: use analytics to test, learn, and tweak your designs. The best products are always improving.

When you use analytics to guide your decisions, you can create experiences that feel smooth, intuitive, and perfectly in tune with what your users need.

3. Digging deeper with digital ethnography

If you want to design products people truly love, you need to understand not just what they do but why they do it. That’s where digital ethnography comes in. This method lets you study how users interact with your product in real-life situations, giving you insights that surveys and focus groups simply can’t.

Why it matters in 2025
User behaviors are more complex than ever, and traditional research methods often miss the nuances. Digital ethnography lets you see your product through the user’s eyes—literally, if you’re using tools like video diaries or screen recordings. Post-pandemic, remote and hybrid work models have mostly stabilized, allowing researchers to fully embrace digital ethnography. In addition, the development of new mobile and wearable technology in 2024 has enhanced the ability to collect rich, context-aware user data in real time. By 2025, these tools will become widely available, making digital ethnography scalable for enterprises.

How to get started

  • Make it easy for users to share: use tools that let participants capture their experiences naturally, like mobile apps for documenting tasks or workflows.
  • Act on what you learn: turn insights into actions—whether that’s simplifying a confusing workflow or addressing an unmet need.
  • Keep listening: user needs evolve over time, so make digital ethnography an ongoing part of your design process.

By truly understanding your users, you’ll be able to create products that not only meet their needs but feel tailor-made for their lives.

4. Building better tools for employees

Let’s not forget—employees are users, too! They need tools that are as seamless and intuitive as the customer-facing products you create. Unfortunately, enterprise tools often lag behind in user experience, which can lead to frustration and inefficiency. At this point in 2024 there is now a heightened recognition and acknowledgment that applying consumer-grade design principles to employee tools directly impacts productivity, retention, and business outcomes. We expect this investment in employee tools to continue on into 2025.

Why it matters in 2025
In a hybrid work world, employees rely on technology more than ever to stay connected and productive. In 2025, refined solutions will integrate productivity, collaboration, and well-being features into cohesive ecosystems, addressing the evolving needs of the workforce. By investing in tools that prioritize ease of use, collaboration, and well-being, you’ll not only boost productivity but also show your employees they’re valued.

How to get started

  • Ask employees what they need: don’t guess—conduct quant and qual research to understand workflows, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.
  • Blend function with delight: employees are used to slick consumer apps. Bring that same level of polish to your internal tools.
  • Measure and refine: use analytics to track how employees engage with tools and refine the experience to better meet their needs.

Great and easy-to-use tools lead to happier employees—and happier employees create better outcomes for your customers and business.

5. Designing for accessibility and inclusion

Accessibility isn’t just about ticking a box—it’s about making sure everyone can use and enjoy your product. From people with disabilities to those in different cultural or linguistic contexts, designing for inclusivity creates better experiences for all users. Designers have been voicing the importance of this for years and now we are at the point where it is becoming more of the norm inside design processes to consider a wider variety of user types. 

Why it matters in 2025
Accessibility is no longer optional. Updates to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and European accessibility regulations in late 2024 have certainly brought accessibility to the forefront. It’s a legal requirement in many places, but beyond that, it’s simply good business. When you design with inclusivity in mind, you expand your audience, build goodwill, and create more equitable experiences.

How to get started

  • Test early and often: don’t wait until the end of the design process. Test for accessibility at every stage to catch and fix issues before they become major problems.
  • Think beyond compliance: standards like WCAG are a starting point, but true accessibility means creating delightful, intuitive experiences for all users.
  • Educate your teams: make sure everyone involved in product development understands the principles of accessible and inclusive design.

Furthermore, AI-driven accessibility solutions have become more viable, enabling companies to detect and address accessibility issues in real time during product development—a capability that was not reliably available in 2024. Accessibility isn’t just the right thing to do—it’s an opportunity to innovate and create products that work better for everyone.

Looking ahead to 2025

These trends—AI-driven personalization, advanced analytics, digital ethnography, employee experience tools, and greater focus on accessibility—are reshaping the way organizations think about user experience. By embracing these ideas now, you’ll be ready to build smarter, more inclusive products that delight your users and drive your business forward.

At Grand Studio, we’re here to help you navigate these trends and design solutions that make a difference. Let’s make 2025 the year you transform the way your users experience your products.

Diana Deibel December 5, 2023

The 2024 Design Forecast

We did it, everyone. We made it through another year. To be perfectly frank, this year was a bit of a weird one, mainly due to a few key elements:

  • A real will they, won’t they dance with a potential recession that constrained the budgets and resources of many organizations this year
  • Generative AI coming front and center and taking over everyone’s conversations and questions about the future in product and business
  • More layoffs across industries, impacting the design & product communities as well as what the remaining team members can accomplish

So let’s look ahead to next year, shake our magic 8 ball, and make our predictions about what trends we’ll see in 2024.

Generative AI Implementation Begins 

2023 many folks spent learning and hiring for generative AI leadership in their organizations. Certainly both these things will continue into the new year, but orgs are starting to feel ready to “try something” in generative AI and set up their first initiatives and pilots to test out what AI can do for them. 

One unsolicited piece of advice we’ll give from our previous experience: take your time to really define and scope the problem you’re solving, make sure AI is the right solution for your user group, and start small. It’s easy to skip past these steps but most everyone is in a test-and-learn moment right now, so if ever there was a time to understand before blasting a technology everywhere, this is the time.

The Return of Innovation

Businesses at large took a collective pause from innovating to focus on optimizing what already exists. Part of this is burnout from the last few years, part of it was budget slashing and belt-tightening. And to be honest, this will likely continue into the first half of 2024, especially given the geopolitical and economic tensions currently simmering. 

However, our bet is that the second half of 2024 will begin to see a return to pushing innovation, particularly for incumbents who may have newcomers nipping at their heels. It’s always nerve-wracking to feel like you’re losing momentum in the market, and innovation is the way to stay ahead of the pack.

Consumer-Focused Mixed Reality Hits the Shelves

In a prediction that merges both innovation and emerging tech, we’re seeing a trend towards more mainstream utilization of mixed reality and spatial UI design (things like Vision Pro and Quest3), particularly in the enterprise side of things on tasks like training and digital twinning. 

This trend is still looking for its footing on the consumer side, which leaves 2024 wide open to folks looking to lead in that space. We foresee the emergence of tools involving B2C applications in this realm, though it won’t yet be a saturation of the market. Frankly, if the economy continues in an up and down pattern, it will likely remain a luxury novelty in the consumer space until people have the money – or a reason – to invest in it. Likely 2024 will be a learning year for all of us watching this space to see what plays out with consumers.

Research Execution Will Extend Beyond Researchers

While many design and product teams were hit hard with layoffs in late 2022 and throughout 2023, it’s worth noting that research teams seem to have taken the hardest hits. Because of this, needed research is going undone and we’re seeing product managers and UX designers taking up the mantle of executing research – in particular, evaluative research that is necessary for the optimization work that’s been on the forefront this year. 

We see 2024 being a year where research continues to be a deficit and many organizations will look to contractors and agencies to fill the gap – but also to their internal folks with less of a background in how to execute. For this reason, we may also see an uptick in attendance for research conferences, books (we love Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users and Caroline Jarrett’s Surveys That Work), online courses, and trainings to help support these additional asks on folks. 

Want to talk about your design & research support needs for 2024? Reach out to us!