In recent weeks, so much has been said about what 2010 will bring to the tech landscape that one can’t help but reading with a pinch of salt. For someone that works with customer opinions and observes their behaviour for a living, it becomes apparent that some of the predicted products and services, if they do make it to market, are destined to remain within that niche group of technology enthusiasts that created them in the first place.

Many of course have potential, and if implemented and marketed correctly have high chances of making it to the wider masses. That is, if they were ever intended to do so.

So – what is going to really work?

The answer is, well.. simple. Or, rather: simplicity. If given a choice, customers will always choose and glorify products and services that will offer them “more” in less time and with fewer headaches, the tools that empower them to reach a given goal with the minimum of disruption.

Luckily, optimization and simplification are recurrent themes in some of the predictions we stumbled upon:

• “Third-party authentications will become the norm” (RWW). Trying to remember your password and login for the multitude of sites that request it will be a thing of the past – unless of course, you choose to be among the 46% of British internet users, 15.6 million that have the same password for most web-based accounts
• Google will launch an inexpensive netbook powered by their new Chrome OS, with one goal in mind: accessing the web (IB-Times). Chrome OS is not meant to replace any of the existing operating systems (Google), and neither is it trying to do too many things; quite simply it is aimed at accessing the web, easily, and fast;
• Others browsers will copy the simplified interface, the rapid development model, the lightweight extensions, sandboxing, compiling JavaScript code;
• “There are too many worthless apps and no adequate ways to find the good ones” (RWW) – this is certainly true of the i-Phone in particular, but also of the Android market. The count of apps is going up, but how do we spot the good ones?
• More consumers than ever will demand the ability to easily interact fully with the mobile web on their phones;
• Optimisation and stability, rather than raw speed, will acquire a position of relevance in computing. Examples have been set by Snow Leopard already. It will be a tough one as consumers will keep looking at the “higher number” (i.e. processor speed);
• There will be more attempts at groundbreaking interfaces, possibly still involving touch screen technology;

Innovation extends the number and type of goals that are possible; success is then dependent on these goals being relevant and simple to achieve.

Though functionality is of paramount importance, a non-intuitive user interface will by definition reduce the number of people that will go through the trouble of learning it and using the tool in the first place.

As technology progresses, the number of options increase. The difficulty lies in how companies use those new solutions and advancements. One may choose to allocate the additional processing power available via a faster processor to run more complex operating systems, more demanding applications and fancy transition graphics in their next generation product.  Another may instead choose to re-think, improve, un-clutter, optimise, speed-up.

One thing is certain: the customer will always win in the end, and they’ll win by choosing the “naturally best” fit with their way of thinking. So those innovators in the industry that really think like their customers are likely to be most successful.

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Tags: Consumer, Customer, Developments, Future, Handsets, iPad, Research, Simplicity, UCD, Usability, User Centric