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In the new year, I find it helpful to look back at some design trends I used in my work last year and research ways other designers will approach their work in 2016. I wanted to share this list of some trends in user experience (UX) design that defined the web in 2015 and how they will continue to evolve in 2016.

Delightful, Humanized Moments
Designers and storytellers need to continue to find new ways to inject personality and life into their sites. Without these special moments, the web can feel quite dry. I expect to see expanded use of passive video backgrounds and warm photography that feels real and not forced. Savvy users quickly decipher stock images as cheap. Also, I hope to see more use of subtle animation where appropriate. A tasteful trigger or hover animation can help keep users engaged and delighted as they browse your site.

Personalization
Remember those choose-your-own-adventure books you read as a kid? Think of the future of interactive personalization that way. We’ll continue to develop increasingly personalized experiences and platforms for users to experience a brand, serving them different pages and content based on past browsing or shopping history. This uniqueness will lead to more meaningful interactions with users as brands seek to create special moments. This focus will force marketers to start building content around the individual rather than the larger demographic.

Material Design
In 2015, Google sought to create a unified design language that combines classical design principles with the possibilities of technology and science. The key principles of this language are material serving as metaphor; bold, intentional, flat graphics; and motion that provides meaning. This philosophy is best exemplified in many of Google’s apps and operating systems. I expect to see these principles show up in more sites in 2016. You can read more about Material Design here.

Beyond Screen Design
With the influx of wearables, designers must push themselves to design for experiences past the screen. Interactive will become more ubiquitous in our daily routines. Startups are creating wearables that range from stick-on sensors that measure vital signs to measuring ephemeral factors like how much time you spend with the people you love. I’d expect to see more innovation in the smart home market as well. My wife and I made the jump to the Nest platform last year, so I can say that, once you can control your heating and air unit from the comfort of your bed, there’s really no going back!

These are just a few things to consider for your web presence in 2016. More than anything, I recommend always focusing on the user first. As long as a happy user is your number one goal, everything else should fall into place. Maybe, with this philosophy, you’ll create a new trend that will come to define 2016. Now, let’s go make a better web.

Be bold. Be unique. Be limitless. Be human.
Trend lists abound this time of year, showcasing not only what worked in 2015, but what made the biggest headlines, the biggest blunders and what could be the next marketing must-haves  in the New Year.

We’ve compiled our own trend list and we’ll get to that shortly, but one thing to consider is that many other marketers are going to be reading and acting on these and other forecasted trends. This is an opportunity to embrace the same trends other marketers will want to capitalize on  while still standing out.

Whatever you pursue within these trends or otherwise, we suggest you add a mantra to your marketing mix. Be bold. Be unique. Be limitless. Be human.

Be bold.
Marketing should never be passive, timid or just going with the flow. No matter if we’re talking about a visual identity or integrated marketing plan, be bold in your decisions and actions.

Be unique.
Nonconformity is a virtue for marketers wanting to stand out from the crowd. Corporate boards, committees and maybe even your own conscience may take creative to a conservative place, but there is always an opportunity to be unique in a way that elevates engagement.     

Be limitless.
Shift thinking from limited budgets and lack of time to ideas and actions that, regardless of dollars committed or hours invested, will advance your marketing goals.

Be human.
While every component of marketing and communication is inclusive of some type of technology, don’t let that technology blur the significance of being human. Hand-lettered typography, minimal retouching on photography and a person’s voice at the other end of a customer service call are just a few examples of embracing organic, emotive and human touches.

With this marketing mantra in mind, here’s our roundup of trends for 2016.

1. Activating Micro-Moments in Mobile: Google is now defining micro-moments within larger moments throughout our customer journey. This fleeting time can be pivotal during purchase decisions, and mobile devices play a crucial role. Google suggests considering four key moment types that represent a full range of user needs: I want to know moments; I want to go moments; I want to do moments; I want to buy moments. Find out more about micro-moments here.
    
2. Video Everywhere: eMarketer predicts investment in digital video ads will top TV ads in 2017. This means marketers need to consider digital ads, and how video will play a role, as well as the roles video will play in campaigns. Video as content can be edited and repurposed from a paid digital ad to a social post, to content on a website and a traditional TV spot. Contently shares other futurisms here.
    
3. Design for Employees: Fjord, the in-house design team for Accenture, reported that investing in the employee experience was the fastest growing category of work for its firm across many industries. We understand that customers and their commitments are vital to your success, but employees are just as significant. Communication tools are playing a larger role in fostering collaboration, accountability and connectivity. Here at Designsensory, we’re hoping to improve our internal process and client engagement through Mavenlink, a new collaboration platform, and we’ll have more to come on that later. Learn a bit more about this and other trends from Fjord here.
    
4. Add Layers of Realities: Both virtual reality, which is an immersive reality experienced through a headset, and augmented reality, which provides an added layer of information, visuals or other information, are becoming more mainstream and incorporated into branding. Some agencies even have in-house labs set up to test equipment and campaign components. Here’s more on this trend and others in a recent Forbes article.
    
5. Listen to the Value of Podcasts: Podcasts are huge—and because this platform is still relatively new—brands have opportunities to take the lead in sponsoring content through traditional advertising within podcasts or in creating owned content of whole shows or segments. Here’s more on podcasting from the NiemanLab.
    
6. Be Quiet . . . Sometimes: Getty Images shared that this quiet trend focuses on making space for consumers to breathe and reconnect in a cluttered marketplace, engaging our emotions and spirit with visual haikus. Here’s a commercial from Kit Kat that puts the spotlight on absolutely nothing. Check out more Getty predictions here.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or breathing new life into your old accounts, here are five things that will get you on the right track for social media according to our social media specialist.

1. Research your audience. If you’ve chosen to use Pinterest to target men, which, according to Pew Research Center, captured 13% of online men compared to 42% of online women in 2014, you’ve got an uphill battle on your hands. While this gender imbalance is no surprise and serves as a broad example of picking the right social media platforms, Pinterest can be a strong channel for your business to reach a subset or niche audience of men. For example, a high-end men’s clothing brand would likely perform better, since men use Pinterest as a visual bookmarking system with an intent to buy. It’s important to understand your business and audience in your selection process. Your audience will change over time, and realignment may be necessary.

2. Keep your brand consistent. Let’s say you’ve decided to go with Facebook and Instagram, currently ranked first and eighth respectively for social media platforms according to market share. Make sure your usernames, profile pictures and bios are the same or similar. After you’ve built a relationship with a follower on Facebook, make it as easy as possible for them to recognize you on Instagram. Consider it this way: You visit a new grocery store and look for your favorite cereal. When you find it, your cereal has a new logo, the box color has changed and its description isn’t in familiar language. It’s not bad, just different. Do you still buy the cereal?

3. Be tactical in your messaging. It’s a hard balance—the right amount of the right content at the right time. To add to the complexity, the solution is different for each social media platform. Consider the focus of content, the frequency of posting and the dead zone for each social platform. These numbers may vary across industries and organizations but should serve as benchmarks for successful posting.

4. Organize your content. The value of killer content is greatly reduced when it goes out a week late, and worthless if it never goes out at all. We recommend a content calendar to ensure you’re hitting your important dates, giving all of your accounts attention and aren’t repeatedly posting content that performs poorly. This is typically a simple spreadsheet that details what you will post, on what day and time, and to what platform each month, but can certainly be more in-depth.

5. Manage it all. After you’ve populated your content calendar, you’ve got to get it online. Take time to research a social media manager that will adequately meet all of your needs and is easy to use. Three primary functions you’ll want in any software are scheduling, monitoring and reporting. Respectively, these functions allow you to draft and schedule a post for later, keep track of multiple accounts simultaneously and access in-depth analytics.

“Out with the old, in with the new.” This attitude seems to be an overarching mentality in our society. Today’s ever-changing technology landscape posits people as quick to write off the “archaic” and eager to adopt the latest, greatest trend. However, an example of electronic communication with staying power—one that has proven its worth—is email. 

The e-newsletter is another form of communication that has maintained popularity since its inception. Readers’ appreciation for the e-newsletter format can be attributed, in part, to the format’s palatable “bites” of content. Due to an endless stream of information—readily available to anyone with an Internet connection—vying for our attention, we readers are becoming increasingly discriminating. Readers grow listless when searching for the exact content they want. We want curated content, summarized into a finite package from a credible source. 

While businesses continue to focus their efforts on social media and forgo email marketing, studies have shown that email is 40 times more successful in acquiring new clients than Facebook or Twitter.

Our goal at Designsensory is never to cloud our subscribers’ inboxes with unwanted mail, but for each individual to find value in our work and the case studies presented in our e-newsletter. With this in mind, here are few best practice tips to keep in mind for your e-newsletter.

E-Newsletter Best Practice Tips
A newsletter must be substantial in terms of length and content. There’s a delicate balance to keep it from being too short or too long.

A piece with a high word count, say 1,000 words, well-written and informative, can reveal the writer’s level of expertise on the subject. However, verbosity shows a lack of regard for the reader’s time. We recommend one article of 500 words, with succinct, informative pieces comprising the remainder of the newsletter.

Keep the format of your newsletter visually appealing, streamlined, focused and mobile-friendly. With the latter, bear in mind that 41 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device. We suggest using graphics when possible. Ensure that the ALT-text for your graphics is descriptive as well, for readers who have images disabled or for those using text-only browsers. You may want to read your webpage text aloud—including the ALT-text—to test how readers will comprehend the page information. 

Remember: Email-based marketing is permission-based marketing. Make it simple for potential subscribers to opt in and for current subscribers to unsubscribe whenever they choose. 

After hours of writing, editing and tinkering with your newsletter, the last place you want your great content to end up is in the spam folder. Avoid running into spam filter issues by following the tips of a tried-and-true email marketing service provider, such as MailChimp. And, ask your readers to add the email address tied to your newsletter to their contact list, assuring it hits the primary inbox every time.

Finally, while being on the recipients’ contact list will improve delivery rates, it is important that tone and delivery time—same time, same day, every time—stay consistent to properly meet readers’ expectations.

We, at Designsensory, continue to push ourselves to stay on top of best practices in all facets of our business and aim to share what we’ve learned with those invested in our work. 

This was a question Desginsensory was faced with recently. While working on an integrated project with UT Extension to enhance both communities and the lives of its members in four rural west Tennessee counties, we needed a better understanding of our audience and their lifestyles when it came to healthy living. 

We partnered with Lancaster Market Intelligence to facilitate an ethnographic study to better understand the consumers in each of the four counties. An ethnographic study is an approach to qualitative research, which puts emphasis on an entire culture.

According to a survey by Columbia University decision researcher, Sheena Iyengar, the average American makes approximately 70 conscious decisions every day. In addition, a study conducted by MDI showed the number of ads that adults are now exposed to across all five media (TV, radio, Internet, newspapers and magazines) is about 360 per day; of these, only 150-155 are even noted, and far fewer make a strong enough impact to be recalled, make an impression and, ultimately, make a sale.

So, how do we reach and resonate with consumers when they are faced with so many choices? Based on social behavior, it’s easy to make assumptions. However, we knew in order to create messaging, we really needed to dig deep with the use of an ethnography study to understand how the communities live and consume on a daily basis.

“As marketers, we are engaged in a relentless effort to best understand human behavior, opinions and paradigms so effective products, services and communication devices can be developed and employed,” comments Chris Wise, chief research strategist. “We find it advantageous to not only conduct traditional research but to actually study WHAT they do along with what they SAY they do and understand.”

The study conducted by Lancaster allowed them to be fully immersed in the lives of the participants by observing and recording their action for a period of time.

Sixty people within the select counties were recruited to participate in the qualitative study—agreeing to record their sleeping, eating and leisure activities in a written journal and photographically.

 “It is one of the most intimate research tools marketers can use to truly understand and empathize with the population they desire to serve. Additionally, it helps manage any preconceived opinions so as to be ‘spot on’ with marketing activities geared toward the audience,” notes Wise.

The results of the study have given us an in-depth, up-close and personal look at day-to-day activities and key motivators of each community that we otherwise would not have known.

We, at Designsensory, firmly believe in collaborating with our clients to determine the best type of research needed in order to be as strategic and targeted with our brand and messaging as possible.

Content marketing continues to dominate in 2015. It seems that lots of people missed that memo. In fact, issues we regularly face with clients indicate that few people outside the marketing world even know what content marketing is. And, content strategy? They’ve never heard of it. So, let’s take a look at some common client questions.

What is content, anyway?
Isn’t content just a few words on a few pages? Actually, “we’ll be providing our own content” may be the undoing of the thought and hard work you put into your shiny new website or your latest marketing brochure.

Prateek Sarkar, creative director for the Walt Disney Company, has said, “Content is story. And content strategy is storytelling.” So, listen up. After all, who knows how to tell a story better than Disney?  

What’s wrong with our old content?
Perhaps nothing. For example, evergreen content, such as great white papers, is content that stays relevant and can establish you as a thought leader in your field. However, the world changes fast. So does language and the way we use it. And, people don’t buy the same way they did five years ago. With millions of websites competing with yours, you need fresh content to capture and inspire your audience and a strong strategy to sustain audience interest. 

Where do I start?
To tell your story in a way that resonates with readers and pays off at the bank, you have to ask the right questions and set the right priorities.

Margot Bloomstein, in her book Content Strategy at Work, writes, “Prioritization means holding your work and efforts accountable to a bigger plan, a sort of raison d’etre: why this and why now?”

• Why are we doing this website/video/social media plan?
• Who are we trying to reach? (HINT: “Everybody” is not the correct answer.)
• What are we trying to communicate? What is the heart of our story?
• What do we want our intended audience to do?

How do I create good content? 
Paul Grice, a linguist known for studying how people communicate, developed four maxims for conversation—a good place to start when you evaluate current or new content. 

The short version: Give readers content that is appropriate in quality, quantity, relevance and clarity.

Know your audience’s needs and tell them what they need to know, not what you want them to know.  Speak to them in language and tone they understand. 

Although Paul Grice didn’t ask me—from an editor’s point of view—I would add consistency to the list. From staying on brand to correctly employing all those pesky commas and apostrophes, errors and inconsistencies can confuse readers and redirect their focus in a negative way.

Why isn’t our SEO better? Or “Shhh! Don’t tell anybody.”
Your Search Engine Optimization depends on good content, thoughtfully written, organized for ease of use, with appropriate links. Cram a lot of keywords into every paragraph, and Google will punish you. “Borrow” from other websites, and, yes, Google will punish you.

One of the most common, and most counterproductive, mistakes we see is burying information deep within the site. Again, Google will punish you. Some clients are strangely shy, even secretive, about what they do. “We sell widgets, but we don’t want those words on the main page. Let’s get people deeper in the site before we start selling them.”

The bad news is twofold: 

1. They won’t get deeper into the site if you don’t give them a reason to go there. 
2. It doesn’t matter if you sell the most righteous widgets on the planet, nobody will buy yours if you don’t talk about them. 

Give them information up front. If your FAQs page is one of your most frequently visited areas, chances are good that you aren’t giving readers adequate information when they first visit your website. 

Above all, make it easy for potential customers to know what you do and why they should give you their business and their money. To do that, you need a marriage of great design, great content and the right medium for the right audience.

When the weather outside is frightful, it’s a good time to daydream about vacations and warmer travel destinations. No matter the season, our team at Designsensory is creating and developing ways to enhance travel, tourism and destination marketing. While some of you reading this may not be in the tourism industry, we’re sure these trends and our best-in-category solutions are insightful for every marketer.

Designsensory knows tourism. It shows throughout our process. From the first concepts we bring to our experienced, collaborative approach, we know how to create a brand that will entice visitors to destinations, intriguing and delighting them once they connect with our content. We’re driven by focusing on results—the results you, as a client, want to see—no matter the size or location of the destination. We’ve designed productive campaigns at the state and regional level, as well as county, city, neighborhood and district initiatives.

We are more than merely part of a conversation with your team. To help get the destination story started, we’re comfortable guiding digital and integrated problem-solving, asking and answering questions, and engaging in a collaborative approach. Let’s look at five trends for destination marketing and what we’re doing to stay ahead of the curve. 

Expand Your Communication Goals
Shift all-important key performance indicators, KPIs, for your digital and integrated efforts from travel guides mailed, heads-in-beds or butts-in-seats to encompass more moments throughout a journey. We’ve helped spur success for destination clients by focusing on measurement categories of demand, engagement and conversion with separate KPIs for each.

Measuring Demand
KPIs: unique visits, inbound links, referrals, social shares, likes

Measuring Engagement
KPIs: time on site, page shares, video views, partner page views (value to partners)

Measuring Conversion
KPIs: vacation requests, itinerary planning, retrospective travel, click-through rates on partners 

Embrace Seamlessly Sharing Your Destination
We know sharing is fundamental to social media. Sharing your story in content and creativity with other Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) can also enhance your destination’s brand efforts. Rather than a singular focus on what your community has to offer, recognize that your location is one of many stops. Showcasing the destination connections helps visitors piece together their larger journey.

Designsensory partnered with the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development to create 16 apps for Tennessee’s Trails and Byways program. DMOs and CVBs across the state collaborated to enhance each trail app, bringing together a seamless, shared story. 

Integrate Communication Efforts
Whether your audience is a tour group, a business looking to relocate, weekend road trippers, conventioneers, locals, the travel press or others, developing an integrated campaign focused on each segment will allow your destination to create moments that connect on any device, from desktop to tablet to mobile and in the spaces and places that matter.

Among other initiatives, the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development motivates businesses, musicians, entertainers and filmmakers to live, work and perform in Tennessee. Our integrated campaign efforts to help achieve these goals included original photography, video and development of websites and print pieces.

Remember Residents
Destination marketers that stay focused on travelers and tourists may be missing out on one of their most important groups—residents of that community. Even if your website isn’t targeting tourists—rather, focused on the people who live and work in your area—a compelling digital presence can play a key role in community building, promotion and DMO performance.

Designsensory is working with the city of Milton, Georgia, to develop a new website that goes beyond the typical bureaucratic site and promises personalization, highlights the relationship between the city and its residents, and spotlights relevant and timely news.

Create Never-Ending Content Wells
Rarely does anyone want that perfect vacation or destination visit to end. Neither should your content. Social media and content calendars, public relations and other campaign efforts create strong connections. Travel happens in stages: daydreaming, researching, planning, visiting, sharing, decision-making, booking. And, if the experience is wonderful, often we make plans to revisit the destination. When a vacation comes to an end, engagement with that destination and your connection with the experiences can continue.

We’re always proud to celebrate this great state, and its new travel website—as well as producing and developing the state’s most impactful seasonal advertising campaign to date, with original photography and videos spotlighting regions. The experience was an amazing chance to showcase the Volunteer State and welcome everyone to Tennessee. 

Remember, there’s more to tourism marketing than just getting the information out there. Our campaigns work to move people from destination awareness to folks sharing stories, then all the way to planning a return trip. We’re excited to be your travel partner throughout the journey.

We embrace all of our client partnerships, from the well-established brands that have been around for decades to fresh-faced start-ups. Even though Designsensory is approaching 15 years, we believe an entrepreneurial culture is valuable at all stages of business.

The Lean Startup author Eric Ries defines “entrepreneurship” as “the management discipline that deals in a scientific way with situations of high uncertainty.” In a Huffington Post blog, “Lean Startup and Design Thinking,” author Cosmin Gheorghe shares “what Lean Startup and Design Thinking have in common is the focus on the customers and their actual needs.”

According to a Gallup study and associated article “highly successful entrepreneurs can creatively look beyond the present and imagine possible futures for their company. If you are a Creative Thinker, you are driven to steer your business in new directions.”  

The “Great Entrepreneurs Are Creative Thinkers” piece goes on to share seven ways to maximize your creative thinker talent:

1. Balance current and future customer needs. It is easy to be tied down with day-to-day business management and focused on delivering what your customers expect from you. Set aside time to disconnect from the present, and feed your creativity to imagine your customers’ future needs. This will help you dream and plan for the future and maintain your competitive advantage.

2. Use measurement to evaluate your ideas. When weighing which idea to implement, ask yourself, “How can we measure this?” Pick ideas apart to identify issues that could crop up during implementation. If the results show that a project isn’t viable, then modify or abandon the idea and move on to the next one.

3. Minimize potential pitfalls by releasing your new product or service incrementally. Implementing new ideas is risky. Iteration is key. Launch the prototype, gather feedback from customers, make necessary changes, and test again. Using this low-cost approach, you can turn your novel and creative ideas into products or services without much potential downside.

4. Maintain a simple organizational structure. Fewer layers of hierarchy will enable easier information flow between you and your team. A simple organizational structure will also increase employee involvement in implementing ideas, encourage employees’ creativity, and lead to quicker execution and understanding of new ideas.

5. Balance efficiency with creativity. Process management techniques, such as total quality management or Six Sigma, which can increase your growing company’s efficiency and productivity, are also likely to decrease your ability to innovate. Don’t let efficiency-enhancing practices act as barriers to exploring new ideas. Nurture your natural creativity. Continue to invest in new ideas as you increase operational efficiency.

6. Mobilize resources to fuel your innovation process. You need two things for successful innovation: diverse experiences that spark your creativity and resources to drive the innovation process. Tap in to your existing network or build new alliances internally and externally to stimulate your creativity and access shared resources.

7. Learn from your failures. When carefully planned new initiatives fail, the potential to learn from them is immense. Don’t let this learning opportunity go to waste. Conduct a post-mortem, make sense of what happened, and add what you have learned to your knowledge base. Fostering intelligent failures will help you learn what not to do as you dream about the future.

Innovation and entrepreneurship often go hand in hand. James Dyson, founder of Dyson, has shared, “We are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.”

How are you celebrating an entrepreneurial culture and creative thinking in your business?