Pythia Trend Reports
A library of industry trend reports, Pythia streamlines the discovery and evaluation of trend reports. By offering data visualizations and trend evaluations, it enables users to move beyond predictions to identify meaningful trends and projections.
Addressing the Gap in Report Discovery and Evaluation
Annual trend and market reports, often created by firms and consultants, serve a dual purpose – showcasing industry expertise and attracting potential customers keen on exploring future trends. For researchers and designers, these reports are invaluable resources, aiding in future scoping, signal identification, strategy development, and product road mapping. Yet, surprisingly, in a landscape abundant with futurizing content, a dedicated service for discovering, evaluating, tracking, and fostering community discussions around trend reports is notably absent. This gap, as identified through interviews with professors and design strategists, underscores the reliance on industry knowledge and laborious searches to unearth valuable trend insights.
“Finding trend reports takes time, it can be like finding a needle in a haystack”
“As a researcher, I’m typically looking for primary source material, and doing my own kind of signal collection. So a trend report may be a signal, but again, it’s not typically something that has a lot of meat to it.”
A journey map created to help communicate the emotional and sensory reactions the user may have while interacting with the service, and to highlight where the user pain arises from, and how the project could provide solutions.
Diverse Paths to Gaining Trend Insights
“We share the report with clients, and what we think those trends have to do with their business, because if a business is not understanding the trends that are affecting their business, they will not evolve - they will be left behind, or disappear. So that is a moment of business evolution, of capitalizing on those trends, and adapting their business to the trends and personal work.”
While trend reports offer a vital window into future changes, designers and strategists face diverse avenues for accessing these insights. Some opt for consultancy firms, benefiting from comprehensive trend analysis and customized recommendations. Others may choose to purchase more detailed reports, seeking depth in understanding. Conversely, those in pursuit of freely available reports encounter a distinct challenge. These reports often lack specificity, necessitating designers and strategists to validate trends and piece together data from multiple sources. The absence of a streamlined service for locating, analyzing, and contextualizing these reports remains a prominent hurdle in this landscape.
Diverse Paths to Gaining Trend Insights
The market is currently saturated with both low-quality but free reports and bespoke but for-purchase reports. This oversaturation creates a niche market that remains underserved. To make sense of this landscape, I decided to adopt a business strategy approach to understand the distinct value propositions each report type offers its respective audience.
In evaluating these value propositions, we considered factors such as price, specificity, support services, time efficiency, convenience, credibility, and community engagement. Free trend reports, despite their lower specificity, can provide significant value when considered as individual data points. When aggregated, they offer a more comprehensive view of future trends, turning what might initially seem like a weakness into an opportunity.
Building upon this perspective, I envisioned creating an aggregated content library of trend reports with advanced data analytics capabilities. This platform would enhance user efficiency, convenience, credibility, and foster a sense of community engagement. Users could access meaningful and personalized perspectives by examining trends across various industries and identifying deviations within specific sectors.
To gain approval from firms for sharing their trend reports, a small subscription fee would be introduced, offering a highly competitive cost compared to bespoke reports or service fees. Users would find the time saved in finding and analyzing multiple reports well worth the investment. The community discourse and engagement aspect would incentivize companies to participate, as their involvement would enhance company exposure, customer engagement, community trust, report credibility, and future business prospects. This innovative approach aims to revolutionize report access, evaluation, and analysis, providing an affordable and accessible alternative to users seeking reliable trend insights.
Pythia Trend Reports
A content library that allows users to search for reports and trends based on their interests, see quality evaluation scores, read discourse from fellow users and professionals, and see data visualizations of trends and success rates in community belief, actualization, and quantity (amount it is shared across reports).
Unlocking Insights Through Trend Continuity Analysis
Pythia's impact extends to designers, researchers, strategists, and students engaged in future-proofing research. It addresses the budget and time constraints often faced by these professionals, enabling accurate, efficient, and personalized report synthesis. Beyond individual benefits, Pythia has the potential to revolutionize how firms are evaluated based on industry and technology research and reporting, serving as a marketing platform that attracts future customers.
Moreover, Pythia's analysis of predicted trends and their actualization rates across industries provides valuable insights into sensitivity to technological innovations and cultural shifts. Additionally, data visualizations emerge as a powerful storytelling tool to convey nuanced interpretations of trend data. In an era marked by subjectivity, fluidity, and uncertainty about the future, data visualization offers a fresh format for projecting envisioned futures, fueled by the collective input and industry expertise of designers, researchers, and strategists.
Independent Project
Aug. 2020 - May. 2021
Pythia's inception emerged from a realization during a business strategy project that the process of finding, vetting, and analyzing trend reports presented a significant challenge, even for industry professionals. Inspired by the potential of this concept, Pythia evolved further during the development phase in an interaction design context. Named after the Oracle of Delphi from Greek mythology, known for her foresight abilities, Pythia aims to provide a centralized platform for accessing publicly available, cross-industry trend reports. With its comprehensive repository, Pythia offers researchers, strategists, designers, entrepreneurs, and more a valuable resource for exploring professionally curated trend reports, offering insights into future trends across diverse industries and helping them envision what lies ahead.
Appendix
Digital prototyping
The wireflow and wireframes serve as the visual foundation for Pythia, illustrating the user journey and interface design. These critical components of the project help map out the user experience and interaction flow, ensuring that accessing and utilizing the extensive database of trend reports is intuitive and efficient.
In this screenshot, you can see the meticulous process of analyzing and tagging attributes to each trend report. These attributes enable precise categorization and organization of the reports within a centralized database. This strategic tagging system facilitates comprehensive insights and trend analysis across the entire collection of reports, empowering users to extract valuable information efficiently.
In this project, I leveraged Figma to swiftly prototype and communicate our design vision. The dynamic and interactive digital prototype created with Figma allowed for a rapid visualization of the user experience and functionality, enabling effective communication of our design concepts to stakeholders and facilitating efficient user testing and feedback collection.
