Today I am (finally!) finished with my holiday shopping and vendor/client Christmas parties, I can finally turn my attention to writing predictions for the new year! As technology advances and online user behavior changes, the Hubnest team makes some bold guesses on how websites and applications will function in 2020.
New Buzzword – Extended Reality
We wrote a post 8 months ago on mixed reality when we worked on an automotive VR project for a client. We predict seeing more augmented reality and augmented reality in more tech than just headset and mobile devices, giving birth to extended reality. With hardware now being extremely accessible, the need for content is beginning to catch up whether it’s through shopping and retail, training, or experiential. Enabling a new platform opportunity to offer marketing services for businesses. Brands will be heavily adopting this as innovative marketing.
Websites will be intuitive
When we design a website, the receptiveness on the curated content the brand has put together is often a small percentage, and we accept those results as the bar. However, I believe the new way to design a web application will be to create multiple personas to cater each segment of our audience whether it’s regionally, linguistically, etc by tying into an account creation. Back in 2016, I wrote a post, Your Website is Your Best Sales Person. I suspect the direction of websites will require a sign in process to create ID’s that will serve unique content in every commonly visited website.
Step up your security
In 2019, Hubnest responded to 44 cyber security incidences due to defenseless servers, single factor authentication, local code to pipeline code, or BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) vulnerabilities. Thankfully none of our clients have been hit with something serious such as ransomware or chasing the human factor that is the weak link. We predict the future of all attacks will be more automated with the introduction of AI driven malware. As a result, I suspect the following will occur:
- Cyber security sector will grow exponentially and that a cyber security brand will be as big as the Facebook and Uber’s of the world;
- Every State and Province in North America will have its own Privacy Act as data transference between regions such as financial credit and government information
5G will change the stakes of who are the leaders in their industry
“5G will evolve rapidly throughout 2020 and beyond, with use cases skewing somewhat more towards enterprise applications vs. historical cycles. With the growing benefits of increased bandwidth and lower latency accelerating enterprise applications, investments in 5G technologies will rise and corporate venture capital firms will be an important mechanism to provide opportunities — beyond capital — for entrepreneurs to test, learn and succeed in the 5G ecosystem.”
–Chris Bartlett, SVP of corporate development and head of Verizon Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Verizon
Retail will be automated
You already see the automated checkout at McDonalds, Ikea, and Walmart. Get ready because I suspect in 2020 every major retail brand will adopt this technology. When we began working on retail platforms for luxury brands since 2018, I think we were a bit early in the game and it was considered something as “nice to have”. It will be mandatory with employed youth who are comfortable with automation technology and valuing the efficiency of speed and movement. Payment methods will be cashless and the data collected from automated platforms will allow brands to better answer to the more demanding consumers.
Image by John Rosa from Pixabay