Here at Adobe, this is the time of year when we reflect back on how our customers have used our creative tools to bring their ideas to life. Today I’d like to share some of those observations with you as it relates to the web and user experience design space, with the hope that our insights might trigger some inspirational ideas for you, the creative community who continue to amaze us with the compelling experiences you deliver with our technology.
As you know, Behance is an online platform where millions of Creatives upload and showcase their work and projects every day for exposure to visitors who search the site to discover creative work. In 2015, Behance had more than six million members around the world uploading thousands of projects every day, so it’s an excellent barometer of what the leading trends are within the global creative community. In fact after reading this post, you should also check out the Behance “Year in Review” that was posted earlier this week.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Behance revealed that Interaction Design was the creative field with the most growth in 2015, with a 52 percent growth rate! Here are some other interesting observations about the Web, UX and UI Design categories:
- The most common age of people in this creative field uploading their work to Behance for exposure was 25-29;
- The country with the most appreciated projects in Web and UX/UI was the U.S., followed by Poland; and
- Adobe Photoshop was the tool used most in Web and UX Design projects, followed by Adobe Illustrator.
The other indicator we use to reflect on key industry trends is real-time customer feedback. We make it a point to visit with our diverse group of customers to understand firsthand what their needs are. Our customers work in small and large creative agencies all around the world. Some are freelancers, some are savvy students and some are designers working in enterprise organizations ranging from retail to pharmaceuticals, nonprofits, governments and financial institutions. We have an incredibly diverse customer base but they all have things in common and here’s what they told us in 2015.
- Everyone needs more help than ever creating responsive websites. Whether they are a designer that chooses to code or they prefer to leverage tools like Adobe Muse that do the coding for you, they are all faced with a growing need to design web sites that are custom-built, for different devices and screen sizes.
- Not surprisingly, there was a bigger need than ever for creating comps and mockups that work across multiple screens.
- We saw high use of Adobe Photoshop to create beautiful, visual images as well as many UX designers turning to Adobe Illustrator for screen design and vector asset creation.
- Cobbling together multiple tools to create high fidelity interactive prototypes was a growing trend, as was the need for a comprehensive solution that is laser focused on going from design to prototype. You can learn more about our efforts in this space by reading our latest post on Project Comet.
We’re four years into the Creative Cloud journey and we’ve been amazed by what our customers have done with it. We love the way it gives us the ability get innovations out on an ongoing basis and how that has resulted in giving us deeper insight into our customers’ needs which has led to more satisfied customers.
2015 was definitely a rewarding and motivating ride and we have some predictions of what we believe we’ll see in Web and UX design in 2016. It’s going to be an exciting year!
Happy Holidays!