At Acquia, we’re continuously impressed by our customers and the digital experiences they’re creating on our Acquia platform. For instance, customers such as SABMiller, Warner Music Group, ADMA, and govCMS have all reinvented their digital experiences, making them more relevant to audiences, cost-effective, faster to develop, easier to maintain, and more secure and controlled.
Here are just a few of the digital trends we’ve spotted, inspired by our customers’ successes and their continued focus on creating exceptional digital experiences across their organizations.
Responsive Design for Digital Interactions
Digital interactions with customers are not device independent. In fact, in February 2015 the importance of delivering digital experiences across platforms took center stage as Google announced that they would rank search results by mobile friendliness in their blog.
Two years later and responsive design is practically a required capability when talking mobile versus web. The next generation of digital experiences will likely go beyond mobile and web, incorporating additional channels like wearables, voice assistants, and other IoT devices. If you’re using Drupal 8, you’re in luck because it puts responsive design first.
Micro-interactions
Micro-interactions will become the primary digital interactions. Digital experience performance will be measured by users’ ability to quickly find the relevant content, perform a desired action and move on.
Those that execute micro-interactions well will focus on providing a user experience that sets context and provides clear next steps. In an era where screens sizes vary and appear on a multiple devices, successful designs built for micro-interactions will enable users to easily follow their journey – regardless of how they interact.
Continuous Delivery
For digital experiences, DevOps will continue to mature. In order to meet objectives, digital experience app teams must accelerate their time to market with continuous delivery tools. Delivery tools need to drive efficiency with the ability to spin up or take down environments quickly, minimizing site downtime for patches and bug fixes. This means that developers will work increasingly in environments where code is built more frequently and simultaneously. The result is that consistency becomes a challenge when multiple areas of code are being updated at once.
Without tools to keep projects in sequence, it becomes difficult to integrate new code into existing environments without risking the introduction of bugs and downtime. Traditional workflows will have to change to provide easy differentiation between the production version of applications and those in development to manage changes in the correct sequence of versions.