 Hey, my name is Jonathan from AJ and Smart and I want to talk to you about three really big design trends for 2020. So what I'm trying to do in this video is prepare you for some trends and some things that are going to help you in your job if you're a product person, if you're a UX designer, if you're a UI designer. This might give you a bit of a head start, a few things you might want to learn, a few things you maybe have been ignoring because you maybe don't know the industry is going in that direction and a lot of these trends are based on products that we've been working on in 2019. It's not about visual design. It's not about, oh, this color is going to be popular this year. These are three big technologies that are going to completely affect all of the product industry, all of the UX industry, all of the UI industry. If you like this type of video, make sure you hit the like button, make sure you hit subscribe. We have videos constantly coming out and we'd love to hear your comments. I'd love to hear what you think about these three trends. All right, let's dive straight into number one and the first trend in 2020 that you're going to see a lot more of than you expect is VR. It doesn't matter if you don't care about games, the gaming industry often brings new technology to the mainstream market. Now, the VR industry has been super exciting in the last few years, but it's had its ups and downs. It really started up at the Oculus Rift, really being the first excellent VR experience. Then we had the HTC Vive, which was a collaboration between HTC and Valve. Valve, one of the most famous game-making companies in the world. Then we saw Sony come along with their own headset for the PS4. And that was the moment where I was thinking, now maybe, maybe people will start getting excited about VR. Maybe it has a chance to go mainstream. Still didn't happen. Then Facebook bought Oculus. I'm not sure exactly where that happened on the timeline. That was an interesting moment because I thought, okay, so maybe now Facebook is going to start integrating social media into it. Maybe they're going to try to go mainstream. They've been doing some great work with their headsets. We have something like the Oculus Quest. We have something like the Rift S right now. So you have the ability to put on a really high-quality headset without cables, completely wireless. We're really, really getting very far. Finally, really recently in the last few months, Valve released the Valve Index, which is the highest of the highest of the highest end VR experience you can buy. But there's never been a killer app for VR. Now, why is this going to change in 2020? Well, one big thing happened that's likely to have a cascading effect on the entire industry, although you might only start to see the effects in late 2020 when Sony and Microsoft released their new consoles to the market. So what happened? Well, what happened is Valve announced Half-Life Alyx. What is Half-Life Alyx? Well, it's essentially the first-ever attempt at making a triple-A gaming experience for VR. And it's also the first time that people have been genuinely, the mainstream gaming audience, have been genuinely excited about a VR release that could potentially be multi-platform. So in March 2020, it's going to come out on PC. Only people with super-expensive PCs can actually afford to get this, and this is definitely not a mainstream audience. But around November 2020, we're going to see the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft come out. Microsoft has already said they're out of VR, they're staying away from it, they're just going to stay out of it for now. Sony seems to be going all in. Now, if a triple-A title comes out, like Half-Life Alyx, if the reviews are great, if it wins a ton of awards, and then Sony comes along and brings it out on their PS5, and then bundles a VR headset with their PS5, you might start seeing mainstream VR have a much better chance of taking off. What that means for you as a designer is you may end up designing for a lot more VR platforms. You may end up being asked to design interfaces for VR. And where VR is going in terms of mainstream is more likely to be the enterprise environment initially, meaning that you're going to be designing meeting software. Imagine Skype or Zoom, except in VR, to increase the presence. And these are the things that you're likely going to see over the next two years. This is something that is definitely going to affect your career as a designer. It's an interesting thing to know that something as simple as a game coming out in March 2020 might have a cascading effect on the entire VR industry by early 2021 or late 2020. So whereas a lot of people might right now think VR is kind of fading out, it really hasn't gotten its start yet. It really hasn't had a fair start. And Valve, one of the most respected software companies in the world, really going all in and investing in VR could be the starting point. So that's my first prediction for 2020 is that VR might actually get its first chance. My second prediction for 2020 is we're actually going to see a reemergence of AR. Now, there's already a couple of players in the AR environment, some companies call it mixed reality, MR. These players, the big players right now are Microsoft, you know what the HoloLens, Apple is still probably the biggest player even though they, you know, Apple somehow always just ends up being the biggest player quietly. Because so they have AR kit and that's a really, really easy way to create AR programs and AR apps. And one of the big things that's going to happen in 2020, and it's already happened, but it's not going to get big till 2020, is Microsoft launched Minecraft Earth. Now, why is that even slightly significant? Well, the answer is Minecraft is one of the biggest, most successful digital products of all time. It's been around for almost a decade and it's just constantly stayed popular. Minecraft is one of these crazy things that just helps build other industries around it. YouTube, if you look at just the amount of channels that are purely dedicated to Minecraft, the amount of revenue and the amount of money that's created by the cottage industries building up around Minecraft is completely shocking. Minecraft Earth is out today. You essentially can consider that a beta version. It's going under the radar. People are not talking about it the whole time. But this time next year, I believe Microsoft knows what they're doing. This time next year, this thing is going to be huge. This thing is going to be a game changer, forgive the pun, for the AR industry. When a company can come along and create something that gathers this much attention and gathers this much users, other companies are going to come along and realize this is an interesting investment. Now, on top of that, Apple are investing extremely heavily in AR. And when Apple invests in something, even if it's slowly, even if it's quietly, you always need to be on the lookout. And what you can see here is a massive leak that just came out of Apple. And we've known they've been working on AR headsets for a long time, but Apple is going all in on AR and not on VR. So they're working on two AR products. One is a headset, headset being more like the HoloLens, something that's a bit chunkier, something that's a bit more powerful. And one is a pair of glasses. The idea here is that they're normal glasses. And I'm sure a lot of you will be thinking about the failed Google Glass. But just because a product failed in the past, doesn't necessarily mean another company can't come along and make it successful. And Apple rarely brings a product to the market without being sure that they can bring this to the mainstream. Think about the Apple Watch. There is really no other smartwatch on the market that's considered cool today. And it's also the biggest smartwatch on the market. Apple does these things slowly, carefully, and almost under the radar. When Apple goes for something, you really have to assume it might become a new industry. And now we're seeing 2022 and 2023 are the two years that Apple wanna release these products in. And when the industry knows that this is coming, then the industry takes it seriously. So what I think in 2020 is that AR is not gonna fade out. It's not gonna become one of these secondary things. It's actually gonna get a lot better with iOS's AR kit. We're gonna see a lot more use cases for it. Now we've already seen companies like IKEA really heavily invest in things like AR. But companies around the world are really going all in on this. The interesting thing about designing for AR and VR is that you often have to even learn how to use things like Unity, how to create 3D objects. I think you're gonna see a lot more job ads for UI and UX designers who specialize in designing objects for AR. And this is something that we're pretty excited about here at AJ and Smart is having to learn new tools to create new things for these new platforms. So my second prediction is that in 2020, we're gonna see a lot more AR and there's gonna be a lot more demand for designers and even 3D modelers to create things for AR products. All right, my final trend prediction for 2020 and this one is especially clear to me because the entire year 2019, we've been working on products with this element in almost every single one of them and it's that AI tools and machine learning are gonna be so good that a lot of these sort of blue sky ideas that designers and product people had over the last few years are now a reality. So my trend prediction is that AI is going to be integrated into almost every product you can imagine in 2020. Let's take a very simple example of how this looks in a standard UI that you see every day. Take a look at Apple photos or Google photos. So any photo app on any of the platforms that you're using, these apps used to be classic dumps of information until a few years ago when machine learning and facial recognition actually started to get good. So object recognition, not just facial recognition, allowed us to search for photos, allowed us to search for dog and you find a picture of a dog and all these things slowly, slowly but surely kind of faded their way into these products until this year when Apple kind of caught up with it and added it all into their photos app and you have now the really nice collections and monthly views and highlighting the best photos and collapsing all the photos that don't really matter in whatever. This is a really, really, really simple but very useful example of how AI and machine learning tools are being used, algorithms are being used to improve user interfaces, to improve the UX of a lot of different products but you're going to see this in 2020 as the standard. It's the standard way to design products in 2020. Almost every product, like I said, almost every product we've worked on in 2019 had an element of machine learning, had an element of artificial intelligence, boosted interface elements which made the user interface easier to use and the UX overall better. So what are the actual applications that you're going to be seeing? Well, personalization is just going to be one of the biggest things. So when a user uses your product, the product learns more about them and then the product becomes more personalized to them and this increases conversions for the clients. This just makes the overall experience much, much better. Two years ago, if you were designing a product and just saying, oh, maybe this is just going to be a curated collection here or maybe we'll put the recent here, whatever. Like you had to almost imagine, oh, okay, so we can't just let the computer figure this out because that's impossible. We have to think of everything. Whereas today, when we're designing a product, we can literally say, okay, well, this box here should display what we think are the best clothing items for this type of person. And once they've used the app for long enough, they don't even have to do an onboarding where they select their styles, which we always had to do. The products can learn very, very quickly what type of person this is based on their behaviors and bundles that up and basically present it back to them. What's the difference to 2018 and 2019? Well, in 2018 and 2019, we had to design these really specific onboarding flows to just get as much information out of people as we could so that we could present them back with information. Think about Apple Music or Spotify two years ago. You know, you had to tell, I like this, I don't like this, I like this, I don't like this. And then Spotify came along with Spotify Weekly, Apple came along with the For You tab, Netflix knows what you like. These things are now standard. It's no longer, oh my God, we could add AI or machine learning to this. It's as standard as, well, we need to have a navigation bar on the bottom. So my third prediction for 2020 is that pretty much every product that you're going to work on as a designer unless it's a straight up brochure website, you know, of like a, you know, just like static website, I'm talking more about the product industry, almost everything you're going to work on is going to have aspects of machine learning in it. And so my recommendation for you is to really try to understand what is possible with machine learning, but also even more simple, look out when you're using products on your phone or when you're using products, look out for the things that you haven't yet noticed are actually machine learning, right? Look out for the things that you've just taken for granted, but they're actually complex machine learning algorithms. Even pulling down on the iPhone and just seeing the recent apps used, these are not just simple, oh, that's the last thing you use. They're relatively complex algorithms behind these things to make these devices and to make these products smarter. So when you're designing products in 2020, you now have a massive toolkit. You have access to a world of things that can make the user experience better even without you having to think through every single step. What you don't wanna do though is go to a developer and say, hey, could you add some AI to this? You're gonna sound like one of those designers who heard the word AI and is just saying it. What you do need to do is just try to get up to speed on the types of things that machine learning and artificial intelligence can do for your product. Because there are products out there which seem like they're using machine learning algorithms, but they're all hard-coded, it's just good for you to know this. It's good for you to try to have an understanding of it. Now, I'm not talking about doing some massive machine learning course. I'm talking about going on YouTube and just searching around and just being interested in the topic. And those are my three big trend predictions for 2020. They're not very exciting. They're probably the same trends that I would have said for 2019. Again, they're just predictions. It could be that I'm three years out. It could be that they never happened. But these are the things that we've been working on this year at AJ and SMART that are gonna be releasing over the next few months. So we know for a fact that companies are investing heavily in these topics. VR, AR, Machine Learning AI. They've been talked about for years and years and years, but they're starting to mature in 2020, is what I would say. So thank you so much for watching this video. If you wanna learn more about UI, UX, product design, workshops, all this kind of stuff that we talk about at AJ and SMART, all you gotta do is subscribe to this channel. We've got videos almost every week of the entire year. We've got a massive backlog of videos that you can check out. Do leave a comment if you enjoyed this video. Do let me know what your trends for 2020 are. And one thing I do wanna know is if you already have some interesting resources for learning VR, AR, and maybe catching up on Machine Learning, let me know in the comments because I wanna know it and I wanna share it. Thanks so much for watching. Have a really, really great 2020. Cool, that plant which gets coming out of your head. Fuck it. Yeah, okay, go. Yeah, let's meet it. Okay, okay. Okay. Let's get excited. Okay. Hey, I'm Jonathan from AJ and SMART. Oh, maybe it doesn't matter that I'm Jonathan. I've got it, I've got it, okay. Hey, I'm Jonathan from AJ and SMART. I run a digital agency. Hey, my name is Jonathan. I run one of the most well-known, no, fuck. I'm looking shiny. No, it could be. Do you feel face? No, it's probably face cream. Yeah, you know what? You actually should. This is not a joke. You should, for also the other people, get a little kit for D, for D-shining people. Oh, a disaster. Yeah, it's actually handy. There's this, or what do you even call that? Fuck it, I don't know. There's this saying or phrase or whatever story about, you know, you can put a frog. If you throw a frog into boiling water, it's gonna jump out immediately. But if you put a frog into cold water and slowly boil that water, the frog will just die because they don't notice. This, I know it's horrible. I know it's horrible. But this is what Apple does.