What are the hot growth areas in application and user interface design
Posted on May 19, 2010 by Paul Giurata
This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in areas of practice and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, in particular, our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts area reflective a larger move in the industry itself.
Compared to the last several years we have seen dramatic growth in the demand for application design services in sustainability and health care. There has also been continued growth in specific delivery styles of applications, such as SaaS and RIAs. Desktop apps growth is relatively stable and flat, except in the area of health care, where this is an uptick in growth. None of this is too surprising.
More interesting has been a rapid surge in interest for mobile application and gesture based interface design, as well as an increase in the requests for instrument control interfaces (perhaps reflecting the growth in embedded processors and remote monitoring).
For my own conceptual understanding of these trends I created color-coded matrix that shows the high growth areas relative to the lower growth areas. It presents a heatmap-style view of application design trends with red representing hot areas and blue representing cool areas.
