The Nitty-Gritty

Jan. 8, 2019

Looking Forward to a New Year!

Welcome to 2019! A new year is upon us and many new products and concepts are being showcased in the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). How might these new concepts affect our work in the future? What ideas can you take and integrate into your own work in some manner? What mental models will these new products create in the minds of our users that will shift how they want to interact with our services?

According to Jeremy Hull, Senior VP of Innovation at iProspect, the tech trends that will be most impactful during 2019 share a few key characteristics [1].

A focus on improving the well-being of the user.
Predictive abilities of AI - how can we take the data available and use it to make predictions on what the user may need or want.
Digital assistants will continue to be a focus, but to gain ground, the assistants must move beyond novel, one-time bits of functionality to providing services the user will integrate into their daily life.

As we look to create new services or improve our existing ones, Mr. Hull suggests asking ourselves these questions:

“How can we improve people’s physical and/or mental well-being in an authentic way?”
“Are we leveraging insights to predict the needs or our users?”
(If considering a digital assistant skill) “What role does my product or service play in a person’s daily routine, and how can a digital assistant integration support that routine?”

Taking time to look beyond our own set of services and explore the new and exciting trends in a variety of technologies can open doors to new ideas that will help us better meet our users needs.

For the majority of us that can’t make it out to Las Vegas to attend CES, CNBC provides a preview of a few new products and concepts [2] being showcased this week, from a suitcase that follows you around to a bracelet style device for alerting diabetics to blood sugar issues.

Resources:
[1] CES 2019: The marketers’ guide on tech trends to watch
[2] CES 2019 Preview

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