Over the last decade, technology has progressed in every field imaginable. Not only that it really has expanded and changed at a rate faster than ever. And there will be even faster technology advancement in upcoming years.

So, How software is evolving or going to evolve?

As per my conviction, these are the five major pillars on which next generation Softwares will stand tall and strong. Many of these are already happening.

UI/UX Mobile Web Intelligence & Making Sense of Data Customizability Ability to Talk to Different Products(API)

UI/UX -

Believe me, this is going to be the key difference maker, or even deciding factor for most of the customers to use one product over the other. User experience, or UX, must be a huge component of your product. It not only contributes to a customer’s overall impression of your product but also to your brand. And great UI is the nuts and bolts of great UX.

Since the amount of Data being generated/collected are growing exponentially, UI/UX will be even more important, as customers must be able to consume those data meaningfully and without much effort across platforms.

Mobile Web -

You read it right, I have written Mobile Web, not Mobile App. In the future, Apps won’t be designed and developed for a single platform, and you won’t need to download them from a special store.

Most importantly, adding a web app to your home or launch screen will be a simple process that will go well beyond its current functionality of just bookmarking or providing a shortcut to the website. Recently Housing.com has launched the Mobile Web Application with the similar pattern.

Some of the worrying facts about Mobile Apps-

Intelligence & Making Sense of Data -

Intelligence and Making more sense of data is going to be another key driving factor.

Your product may record different data points, sometimes it is great if those data points can be grouped or logically connected to derive/infer some insights or facts. When you are able to derive some facts from the data, you will be able to make your product intelligent/smarter to deal with future records/entities/data in a better way(predict). You will be able to empower your product user with the smarter handling of new records. When your product has got some data, make it Searchable, Actionable, Insightful. If your product is not able to do that, I believe there is no use of collecting those data points.

Customizability -

One product does not solve all the customer’s need, Your product must be customizable to customer’s specific need.

I mean develop a Platform, not a Product.

Sometimes the product will have fixed fields in forms, even if the customer does not use some of the fields, they will still be present. Customers must be able to remove those distractions from the Application.

Ability to Talk to Different Products(API) -

As the number of Application grows, so does the need to have a communication end point for Applications/Products to talk to your product.

This is the reason there has been a proliferation of third-party API companies like Zapier, Anypoint, Workato, IFTTT, Apigee etc., which is fundamentally changing the dynamics of how software is created(API Driven) and brought to market.

Rise of Microservices will even increase the need for a better, faster and easily consumable APIs.

Thanks for taking your valuable time to read this post. If you wish to, You can also read my other posts Here at LinkedIn. I occasionally write about my own learning from work & experimentations. Also feel free share your own thoughts or learnings about the same.

Hemant Kumar Singh

Originally Posted on Medium - Five major pillars of future products

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