WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Design is about how it works. So with this year’s web design trends, we’re looking past the grids and gradients to focus on what really matters.

The availability of omnichannel opportunities, and so much demand has paved the way for companies to build their digital strategy on a multitude of websites.

How do the best performers increase their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts? The value of design comes from top management rigor, company-wide teamwork, rapid iteration, and relentless user-centricity.

Design Kit is IDEO.org's platform to learn human-centered design, a creative approach to solving the world's most difficult problems.

Coming up with an idea is easy. Coming up with the right one takes work. With design thinking, throwing out what you think you know and starting from scratch opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Analyzing data gleaned from 40,000 shoppers, the Retail CX Insights report (the companion publication to our Retail CX Rankings) helps you understand the most important customer experience trends in retail, including:

How top-scoring brands learn to calibrate with customers
What the new customer journey reveals about technology and personalization trends
How brands like Apple, Tractor Supply, and Williams Sonoma are winning on CX
Why flexible fulfillment is changing buyer expectations

Blade Runner 2049 misses modern strides in artificial intelligence, which is now capable of performing creative work alongside humans. The newly-emerging field known as “generative design” seeks to incorporate the computer more actively into the design process. In these kinds of computer applications, the designer uploads a “seed geometry” — akin to a keyframe reference drawing an animator might use — and then sets a series of requirements ranging from the aesthetic to the functional. The software then searches through a series of procedurally-generated designs based on the seed geometry and surfaces those that meet the requirements. The designer can select one of these “solutions” for production or to function as the next seed geometry and the process begins again.

If you’re a designer or engineer in the building, infrastructure, or manufacturing industries, you have probably heard about generative design, and maybe you’re excited—or skeptical. Or maybe you’re wondering, what is generative design? Will it pave the road for a new future of making things? Or will artificial intelligence usurp entire governments to become the overlords of 

What if a CAD system could generate thousands of design options that all meet your specified goals? It’s no longer what if: it’s Project Dreamcatcher, the next generation of CAD. Dreamcatcher is a generative design system that enables designers to craft a definition of their design problem through goals and constraints. This information is used to synthesize alternative design solutions that meet the objectives. Designers are able to explore trade-offs between many alternative approaches and select design solutions for manufacture.

I’ve been following the idea of algorithm-driven design for several years now and have collected some practical examples. The tools of the approach can help us to construct a UI, prepare assets and content, and personalize the user experience. The information, though, has always been scarce and hasn’t been systematic. However, in 2016, the technological foundations of these tools became easily accessible, and the design community got interested in algorithms, neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI). Now is the time to rethink the modern role of the designer.

Changing customer expectations open up new business model opportunities. Think how Uber and AirBnB have changed our personal experiences with respect to car transportation and house sharing, or how Amazon has changed our personal experiences with respect to product selection and delivery, or how Netflix has changed our personal experiences with respect to on-demand entertainment. These changing personal experiences are the source of business model disruption and customer disintermediation.

What does 2017 have in store for us? We asked the industry’s experts for their views on the future of web design trends.

1. Conversational interfaces
2. Machine learning
3. Emotionally intelligent design
4. Virtual reality
5. Location and context awareness
6. Micro-interactions
7. Colors
8. Cohesive experiences
9. Even more JavaScript!
10. Designed failure
11. Design sprints
12. Better collaboration across design and development
13. Merging of UX and service design
14. Facebook and Google as destinations for content
15. Credibility becomes king
16. Mass disruption to foundational Internet services
17. The rise of the diversity designer
18. Bonus: 2017 According to Jeffrey Zeldman

There's a powerful tool hiding in your browser: Inspect Element.
Right-click on any webpage, click Inspect, and you'll see the innards of that site: its source code, the images and CSS that form its design, the fonts and icons it uses, and the Javascript code that power

Design in Tech Report 2016

The mission was to gather together a lot of very smart people who don’t work in news — and ask them to design a new news homepage.

By news homepage, I mean any way for a user to first encounter content. 

SpaceX is exploring methods for engineers to accelerate their workflow by designing more directly in 3D. We are integrating breakthroughs in sensor and visua...