“A List Apart” (awful name, but good web publication) did a round up of lessons learned for 2012 in the broad category of technology and design. A few excerpts:
The most essential service of the next decade will be the one that keeps you the best informed in the least amount of time. There’s more to life than staring at screens all day.
—Mike Davidson, VP of design, Twitter, and founder, Newsvine
For me 2012 was a year of experimentation. I learned that the more certain you are about something, or the longer you’ve been doing things one way, the more important it is to abandon your assumptions and try the complete opposite. The more embedded your assumptions are, the less you notice them—so this is not easy. —Matt Mullenweg, founder, Automattic and WordPress
I think we’re going to see more cross-channel design thinking in 2013 to address simultaneous multi-device usage, and frequent device hopping in a single workflow. Continuity between platforms will be important, but we don’t need to make the experience the same between devices. The user experience will morph with each context. We’ll need to design systems, not screens, to solve cross-channel experience design problems.
—Aarron Walter, director of user experience at MailChimp
A Few Reasonable Words 