By John Kelly, product manager, Contentstack

2020: The Year that Digital Experience Takes the Stage

This decade produced technology designed to bring us together - social media offered a peek into the ‘personal side' of brands and individuals alike; collaboration software connected us and enabled global work, and digital transformation ushered in a digital world.

But as we enter 2020, and the dawn of a new decade, businesses will be hyper-focused on improving the user experience. Every industry, from retail to financial services, will search for new methods to remove friction, create unique and memorable experiences and personalize each customer interaction.

How will that take shape? John Kelly, product manager at Contentstack, shares his four predictions for what to expect in the coming year, and beyond.

Retailers will be faced with balancing personalization with data privacy: Consumers have become accustomed and expectant of individualized experiences. However, the means and ease by which personal information is gathered will change. This process will become even more difficult as the importance of data privacy increases for individuals and lawmakers alike. If private browsers, search engines, and extensions become popular, like Firefox/Brave, Duck Duck Go, and Incognito mode, then gathering personally identifiable information (PII) for use in personalization and targeting will become nearly impossible. This will change personalization as we know it today, inspiring marketers to innovate and look for new ways to offer unified engagement across customers' journeys.

AR/VR tech will become much more commoditized: This means that businesses will have easy access to off-the-shelf tools, integrations, native app/website/device support, and even the ability to manage their own assets and AR/VR stacks with very little development effort. In turn, the tech will become much more approachable for consumers to enjoy. For example, many AR experiences today on mobile require users to download a dedicated native app--a huge friction point. Next year we'll see more brands offering augmented reality experiences supported from the browser, making the shopping/browsing experience more seamless.

Frontend development will become a marketing function: As the gap between marketing and I.T. continues to close, next year we will see developers being brought into the marketing function, beginning with the quest for better personalization and a better UX. Developers will become ever more involved with marketing tools, like content management systems (CMS), that enable web development efficiency. This will result in a more intuitive development process and a better user experience for the customer.

DXPs Evolve or Die: The enterprise software market will shift from digital experience platform (DXP) suites to digital experience (DX) technology stacks. Traditional content management systems (CMS) and DXPs will have to re-think their approach towards integrating with third party products, amid the best innovation being spread across many vendors in any given category. For example, how you get the latest AI-powered technology integrated from a technology perspective is only half the battle - equally as important is how it is surfaced to and experienced by the ultimate business user. Technical integration and user experience must go hand in hand. Companies sticking to legacy single-vendor DXP suites will further struggle to attract top talent because the best and brightest will always want to work with the latest tech.

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About the Author

John Kelly is a product manager at Contentstack, a headless CMS company. He's been in content management most of his career, building websites, editorial tools, asset managers and analytics solutions. And was involved in developing one of the first headless CMSs when the idea was still in its infancy.