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Designing Our Future:
Technologies and Behaviors that Impact Design
Made with love by | July 2013

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As our world becomes increasingly digital, experience design is
more important than ever.
And, as experience design gains importance, the discipline and its
tools are evolving. The very definition has broadened: rather than
considering point-and-click interfaces, experience design is about
the way that we engage with technology, the world, and
ourselves. As such, it’s no longer the domain of a single expert (a
UX designer, IA, or IxD); it’s a view of the broader world that
every role must consider.
At Little Arrows, we’re passionate about identifying places where
real behavior and technology intersect, and designing solutions to
take advantage of these opportunities. These technological
trends will transform the way we design in the future.
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Forward
“ Design is not just what it looks like
and feels like. Design is how it works.
- Steve Jobs
Little Arrows at work

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Surfacing Data
Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere
Friction-Free Commerce
Everything is an Interface
Better, Faster, Stronger
Physical / Digital
Trends in Experience Design

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Everything is an Interface

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Beyond the Mouse
We’ve already started to move from GUIs (graphic user
interfaces) to NUIs (natural user interfaces) with the
advent of touch and gesture based technology. But
what happens when our brains, our eyes, and our
everyday interactions become the interface?
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“A natural user interface (NUI) is a system for human-
computer interaction that the user operates through intuitive
actions related to natural, everyday human behavior.
- techtarget.com
Everything is an Interface

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Goodbye, Buttons!
The iPhone led the move to touch-screen interface,
allowing us to have more naturalistic interactions with
our technologies. This has lead to a major new trend in
UI design that takes full advantage of simple, easy to use
gestures that replace simple button clicking.
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Rise is an alarm clock
without buttons Clear is a to do list without buttons
Mailbox’s interface is driven
by swipes, not clicks
Everything is an Interface

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Real-World Gestures for Games & Entertainment
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Xbox One with built-in Kinect controller
Leap Motion controller for PCs
PS4 Playroom (Eye Camera)
Everything is an Interface

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Extending with Voice & Gesture
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WiSee recognizes gestures via a WiFi
network, allowing users to control
electronic devices from any room
Honda and other automakers are including
gesture recognition in their latest cars
Myo is a bracelet which tracks arm movements and
transmits them to digital devices - from computers to drones
Everything is an Interface

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Ambient Intelligence
The IceDot Crash Sensor helmet notifies
emergency contacts when its wearer crashes.
By creating user profiles based on interaction
patterns, BioCatch can identify intruders.
Many applications now support geo-fencing, which triggers events based
on the user’s location. Geoloqi allows users to set up alerts when they are
near locations with specific attributes (like a venue with a pinball machine).
Until recent years, most technology interactions had to be
triggered actively - the user has to request for something to
happen. Now, smart technology can respond intelligently to
ambient, real-world triggers, allowing technology to react to
passive actions like location and velocity.
Everything is an Interface

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Friction-Free Commerce

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Easy Come, Easy Go
The introduction of mobile payment technologies and
apps has the potential to completely change the way we
shop. Experiences created by this new era of mobile
payment will transform how we as consumers interact
with stores and the products inside them.
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“Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.
-Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia Founder
Homeplus Subway Virtual StoreFriction-Free Commerce

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Immediacy and the Era of Buy-It-Now
It’s no longer necessary to take out your wallet to make
a purchase. By removing payment obstacles, mobile
payment technology makes commerce even more
streamlined - and empower every craftsman and artist
to create their own store.
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Friction-Free Commerce
LevelUp rewards users who pay by
linking credit cards to their phone
With $15B in payment volume and 3x Y/Y
growth2, Square makes it increasing easy for
vendors to accept credit/debit payments
NFC services, like Google Wallet
and Isis, account for 2% of total
mobile-payment transactions1
1 Marguerite Reardon. “NFC mobile payments disappoint while money transfers boom”. CNET. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57587589-94/nfc-
mobile-payments-disappoint-while-money-transfers-boom/ 2 Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, KPCB, “Internet Trends D11 Conference”, slide 97.

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New Ways to Pay
Beyond new methods of physical payments, technology
is also creating new models of purchase and funding.
Crowdfunding, micropayments, and social currency
have the potential to displace cash as king.
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Friction-Free Commerce
Flattr enables social micro-
payments. Enjoyed a tweet? Tip $1.
Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter (which
has raised $600MM so far1) and IndieGoGo
make it easy to fund a dream project.
Klout offers real-life perks to
users with social influence.
1 Kickstarter Stats: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

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Loyalty 2.0
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Apple’s Passbook makes it easy for
customers to save multiple loyalty cards
Foursquare and Shopkick offer targeted
rewards to people who check in frequently
Belly allows retailers to create a virtual version of
the old-school punch card loyalty program.
Friction-Free Commerce

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Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere
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The World Through Screens
Mobile-first design is causing us to rethink the way we create
websites and real-world products. The average smartphone user
checks her phone over 100 times per day1 for everything from
content creation (we now share over 500 million photos per day)2,
communication, health research, and banking3. Mobile devices have
become our first digital touch point, and, in doing so, they are
changing the way that we engage with the world.
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1 Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, KPCB, “Internet Trends D11 Conference”, slide 52. 2 Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, KPCB, “Internet
Trends D11 Conference”, slide 14. 3 Pew Internet Research, “Cell Phone Activities 2012”.
“The mobile revolution is not happening; it’s happened.
- Mel Silva, Google
Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere

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Context-Sensitive Design
Because our mobile devices are nearly always with us,
they have the opportunity to react based to our
context - location, time of day, and other custom
events. When done properly, users won’t even notice
that the design is adapting.
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Foursquare prompts users to
check-in when they’re nearby
places they’ve visited before
MessageMe allows users to share their
context with their friends: the current song
that’s playing, location, and more.
Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere
When there is a URL copied
to the clipboard, Pocket
makes it easy to add the link.

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Simple and Streamlined
Effective mobile interfaces are uncluttered, simple, and
streamlined to the task at hand. With mobile web traffic
growing 1.5x per year1, responsive design is a
requirement for all interfaces, and mobile’s simplicity
has begun to migrate to the web.
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Facebook’s website has begun to
borrow overloaded elements from
its mobile navigation
Applications like Flipboard first verify their
viability in mobile, and then extend their
interface metaphors across devices.
Quartz is a newspaper
that interacts similarly
across all devices
1 Mary Meeker, Liang Wu, KPCB, “Internet Trends D11 Conference”, slide 32.
Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere

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PadRacer uses iPhones for controllers
and iPads for custom race tracks
Xbox Smartglass offers enhanced
content on mobile devices, synchronized
with what’s being watched.
Adobe Nav turns tablets and mobile devices into a
secondary input device for Adobe Photoshop.
The Remote Control for Our Lives
Mobile First, Mobile Everywhere

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Physical / Digital

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The Internet of Everything
The digital world is leaking into the physical - through
internet-enabled technology and new ways to create
real-world objects. Experience design needs to evolve
to make it easy for users to bridge these two worlds.
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“Computers will clearly handle the things we aren’t good at,
and we will handle the things computers clearly aren’t good
at...The Internet of things will augment your brain.
- Eric Schmidt, Google
Physical/Digital

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Hardware Gets Smarter
Lifx is a smart lightbulb that can be
programmed and controlled remotely
Nest is a digital thermostat that
helps conserve energy while
maintaining a perfect temperature
Tile is a small object that can be affixed to any
device, so you can always find its location.
Physical/Digital

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Build It Yourself
Twine makes it easy to create custom
actions based on real-world events.
The Makerbot and other 3D
printers allow consumers to create
physical devices in their homes
Quirky is a service that allows anyone to
invent a new product and bring it to market
Physical/Digital

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Manipulate the Real World
Lockitron allows users to unlock
their home with a remote app.
Uniqlo’s Magic Mirror allows
customers to change the color
of the clothing they’re trying on
Points, from Breakfast NY, is a digital sign
that points users to custom destinations.
Physical/Digital

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Surfacing Data

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Introduction
As a society now built on a vast infrastructure of data
driven technologies, we are accumulating more data in
one day than we did in a whole year two decades ago.
Because of this, we need to learn how to use this data
to design more enriched and intelligent experiences.
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“The goal is to transform data into information, and information
into insight
-Carly Fiorina
Surfacing Data
Visualization of tweets in NYC

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MSNBC’s Spectra provides a visual,
color coded approach to everyday news.
Google Trends provides realtime search
data in a beautiful, interactive way.
iOS7’s Photos app automatically organizes and
displays photo collections in a scalable way
New Ways to Visualize
Surfacing Data

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Highlight and Contextualize
All data is not created equally, and for years we’ve had to deal
with interfaces that displayed all data in the same way. Great
design highlights the data that is most important first and
explains it with visualizations that show it in context.
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Surfacing Data
Simple’s Safe to Spend metric
makes it easy to understand what
funds are immediately available
Information is Beautiful is a blog that explains
data and numbers in meaningful ways.
Google Now highlights the most
important information for your
day, based on time and location

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Better, Faster, Stronger

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The Digitization of Self
We all know that interfaces inform the way we make
decisions, so it stands to reason that they can help us make
better decisions about things of great importance: our life
choices, our fitness, and our overall health. Great user
experience allows subtle cues for behavior change to
explode the quantified self movement.
“Seven in ten U.S.adults say they track at least one health
indicator...[but only] 21% say they use some form of technology
to track their health data.
- Pew Internet Research
2012 Feltron Report
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Better, Faster, Stronger

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You Are What You Eat
The HAPIfork reminds
users to eat more slowly.
LoseIt is one of many options for tracking diets - it even
imports nutrition information by scanning a barcode.
Meal Snap makes calorie tracking easy
- it calculates calories using photos.
Better, Faster, Stronger

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Work It Out
Nike+ Kinect offers personal
training using the Kinect’s sensor.
The Nike Fuel Band, Jawbone UP and Fitbit apply gamification
principles to wearable fitness-tracking technology.
Strava encourages tracking and
competition among cyclists.
Better, Faster, Stronger

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Medical Breakthroughs
iBGStar plugs directly into iPhones,
allowing diabetics to track their
blood glucose levels on the go.
Patients Like Me tracks symptoms, medication, and other health
metrics across many disease states, offering support for patients and
contributing valuable research to the medical community.
23 and Me sequences an individual’s genomes through a spit sample, analyzing risk
factors for diseases and revealing information about the user’s genetic background.
Better, Faster, Stronger

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Changing Behavior
Everest (and its competitors, Lift and
HealthMonth) helps users track daily
behaviors that relate to their goals.
LumoBack is a wearable sensor
that alerts users to bad posture.
The Bandu watch monitors stress symptoms (such as perspiration,
respiration, and heart rate) and advises its wearer to take a break and relax.
With 40% of premature deaths in the United States caused by
behavioral patterns*, perhaps the most fascinating area in which
user experience can help us in alerting us to and helping us change
destructive or unhealthy habits.
* Source: “We Can Do Better - Improving the Health of the American People” - The New England Journal of Medicine, 2007.
Found via Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2013.
Better, Faster, Stronger

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Accelerated changes in technology over
the past 15 year’s have opened a wide new
world of experiences. The invention and
popularity of the internet, followed by
mobile and device proliferation, has
suddenly put technology in the hands of
the masses.
With so many people focusing on
technology, through both new hardware
and software startups, experience design
will begin to evolve even more quickly.
What was envisioned for ten years in the
future will be realized in five.
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Consumption of New Technologies Moves Faster Today
% of US households who adopted new technology over time. Via the New York Times, 2008
Looking Forward
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
- Alan Kay

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Little Arrows creates exceptional digital
experiences for disruptive businesses.
175 Varick Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10014
(347) 948-3891 hello@littlearrows.com
Get In Touch
linkedin.com/company/little-arrows
angel.co/little-arrows
behance.net/littlearrows
littlearrows.com
twitter.com/littlearrowsnyc
facebook.com/littlearrowsnyc
Our Founders
Throughout her career, Marci has helped advertising
agencies, Fortune 500 brands, and start-ups to
communicate online through engaging, effective, and
elegant digital experiences. Prior to founding Little
Arrows, she was the Director of Digital and Channel
Strategy at Grey, growing the department threefold in
under a year. Marci has been widely recognized as a
leading voice in digital strategy in the communications
industry, speaking at events such as SXSW and Cannes.
facebook.com/marciikeler
twitter.com/marciikeler
linkedin.com/in/marciikeler
Marci Ikeler
Aaron is a seasoned technically focused founder with
over 15 years experience in inventing, building and
scaling digital platforms for businesses of all sizes. He
started his career at Agency.com before co-founding
Inertia Beverage Group, the largest wine e-commerce
platform. In 2007 he co-founded the New York office of
POKE, leading creative technology projects for American
Express, Dell, Sephora, Johnson & Johnson, and more. In
2012, Aaron launched Valet.com, a luxury travel
destination, with partner Josh Spear.
facebook.com/neonarcade
twitter.com/neonarcade
linkedin.com/in/aaronrutledge
Aaron Rutledge

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Thank You!