The COVID 19 pandemic was a game-changer for technology innovation. It accelerated digital transformation at a pace that was never witnessed before. Huge paradigm shifts that would normally take years to come about happened in a matter of days. The shift to remote working in the workforce culture coupled with the rising demand for digital services by consumers in almost all sectors will ultimately change the way product and app developers build software for years to come. From crunching massive amounts of data for recommendations to enabling even clocks and heaters to communicate with smartphones, 2021 will witness new dimensions of connected environments.

Let us take a sneak peek into the top 4 technology trends that every product or app development leaders need to consider in 2021:

1. Naturalization of AI:

Nearly 80% of all emerging technologies are expected to have AI foundations by 2021. Since most apps and products are built to integrate with emerging tech innovations, AI will transition from being an optional enhancement for a product to a key enabler of capabilities that modern consumers demand. There will be widespread demands for the consumer as well as enterprise apps to be seamlessly integrated with popular virtual assistants and perform autonomous services ranging from setting home alarms to scheduling machinery shut-down times in industrial establishments.

While building digital products and apps for the market, leaders must take the extra effort to recognize areas where AI can deliver value better than their normal workflows and engineer it into the core foundations of their apps during the design stage itself.

2. Blockchain becoming the Foundation of Transparency:

As more sensitive business processes and consumer services turn into app-driven experiences, there is a huge need for businesses to be seen as transparent to their end-users. Only if they provide a high degree of transparency, will users be confident of entrusting their confidential data for better digital services. To enable this transparency, product development engineers need to turn their attention to blockchain technology as it has now been proven to be one of the most transparent modes of information management with no loopholes to affect the integrity of data.
By using smart contracts, several business workflows can be programmed for automated collection, processing, and management of data. Every step of the journey in a digital application can be made traceable with blockchain thereby reducing chances of manipulation to Zero levels. The growing affinity for blockchain from the enterprise world is evident from studies that predict a CAGR of 69.4% for the technology through to 2025.

3. Minimalism in Design:

The pandemic of 2020 resulted in a massive number of consumers shifting a majority of their daily routines like shopping, dining, work, and entertainment to digital only services. This was also true of enterprise tools, technologies, and products. As users became remote, they struggled with lower bandwidth connections, device non-standardization, and throttled access to helpdesks. With most folks, the biggest demand while moving to a digital platform for any of their needs previously accessed from the enterprise, was for the platform to be simple in design. Users want tools that allow them to get what they want in the least time and with minimum fuss.

App leaders need to recognize that to allow simplicity, they need to foster the principles of minimalist designs that take away the unnecessary UI clutter in apps and digital products and lays out a clean interface that focuses more on intuitive workflows that drive productive usage of the app. Excess content, intrusive monitoring, unnecessary pop-ups, and cluttered notifications will all have to make way for a sleek interface that promotes a more human-centric experience rather than a machine-centric one.

4. Navigating the Connected World:

In 2021, it is estimated that the global market size for IoT will exceed USD 520 Billion. This is a revelation for businesses that want to offer connected experiences to consumers by integrating hardware and software across different lifestyle and workplace experiences. By allowing more capabilities to connect to a wide number of public or private networks of sensors and computing services, apps and digital products can elevate the connected experience. By leveraging innovative technology such as edge computing, businesses can build apps or products that will deliver more powerful services more accessibly at a pace faster than ever before. With more consumers rapidly investing in smart devices ranging from home security to healthcare, there is a huge market for businesses to build apps with services that monetize the data generated by these intelligent devices.

Conclusion

As the world collectively continues to manage life in the new normal, digital services will gradually become an irreplaceable part of our lives. From schooling to work and shopping, a majority of consumers will retain these behavioral shifts even after we have left the pandemic behind us. This will be a golden opportunity for businesses to enable more mainstream services and enterprise tools to be transitioned and delivered through digital products or apps and realize value faster than with physical experiences.