The 12 Trends That Will Rule Products In 2013

Think 2013 will spell the end of good old analog and human interaction? Eh, not so fast according to a group of agency experts.

Written by: Chris Butler

Near the end of 2012, a group of us at Ziba got together to review what we’d learned over the course of the year. Working with dozens of clients who serve customers around the world, we designers spend a lot of time observing people as they interact with technology, services, and experiences, noticing how they seek solutions to everyday problems and make decisions. In the process, certain patterns emerge so forcefully that they’re practically unavoidable.

Meeting over three sessions spread out over a week, 23 Zibites (designers, researchers, and creative directors) discussed the patterns we’d seen, and distilled them down to the 12 insights we thought were most current and useful, to us and to our clients. Each one is presented here, as a brief essay that suggests how it will affect business practices in 2013, and as an illustration created by one of Ziba’s designers.

Technology moves too fast to care about.

The 8 track, the CD, the Pentium chip, FireWire--people used to invest in products just to get their hands on these new technologies. They were a real differentiator, and a kind of magic. But it’s become too much, too fast. The Internet runs on an alphabet soup of languages and protocols, and only a slim population of early adopters counts pixels or processor speeds anymore. The rest of us just want to know what it’s like to use.

Talk about experiences, not features. Technology is there to enable an experience, and as long as it doesn’t get in the way, most consumers would rather not worry about it. The smartest brands in 2013 will follow suit, emphasizing the product or service, not the features that make it possible.