What are the most important emerging user experience themes right now?

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Skeuomorphism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ske…)
More interfaces are starting to integrate seemingly useless visual cues that we’re accustomed to seeing in real life. The iPhone, for example, is full of them. The “slide-to-unlock” behavior or “on/off switches” in iOS are examples of skeuomorphism.

Media-aware
More applications are being designed for use across different platforms and resolutions. Even staples like the 960 grid system are falling out of use as fluid width and browser-specific styling become more popular.

Shorter web forms
Thankfully, we’re finally graduating past forms with 20 required items. Designers are now picking up that asking for a lot of information up front is terrible for conversion rates and wastes a lot of time. We’re moving toward asking the bare minimum now (email) and slowly asking for more as the relationship grows stronger. Profile-completion sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are leading the charge here.

Everything is a link
I think we’re starting to see an increase in clickable content. On more developed websites, you can click on nearly everything to gain more information on that object. On Quora, for example, you can click on nearly any image or blue text to learn more about that underlying object. On news websites, you can double-click on a word to look up the definition. Information about nearly anything on the page will be readily available when you want it.

Guided tours
Seemingly complicated applications now come with sequential tooltips that serve as a step-by-step walkthrough. This, in my opinion, is the live, interactive version of the “setup wizard.” Rather than showing you a set of diagrams with some text, applications are now giving you the real application, annotated with overlays, tooltips and buttons to help you move through it. The new ux overhaul by Google has done a great job of this.

Psychology: Many of the themes that we have mentioned above rely on in-depth knowledge of user behavior, user motivations and what influences users. We can see the psychology and behavioral studies are popping up in blogs and books across UX, and that is because UX, as Ronnie mentioned, is at a critical point in our existence. We are looking to be more than just usability experts and are instead needing to be the user behavior experts. Understanding more about Psychology and how we can apply it to UX will help us get there. It is also involved in gamification (what motivates people to act), Data Visualization (how does the brain take in an view information) and many other points mentioned above.