Article: How do you see the future of UX?
Ligertwood, G. (2018). How Do You See The Future of UX Design?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://uxplanet.org/how-do-you-see-the-future-of-ux-design-8654c62c3279 [Accessed 30 Dec. 2019].
Below you can see examples from designers stating their opinions on what they think the future holds for UX Design.
Adham Dannaway — Senior UI/UX designer, Contract/Freelance, Sydney, Australia
Nationality:
Australian 🇦🇺
How do you see the future of UX design?
Even though UX Design has been around for a while now, I still think that we’re in the infancy stage of its development. It reminds me of when Photoshop was the prevalent tool of choice for designing websites. Designers would spend hours on end throwing hundreds of different visual effects at a design, just because we could. Nowadays, we’ve learned how to remove the unnecessary parts from our designs, making them simpler, more efficient and user friendly.
Just like back in those Photoshop days, I feel like UX designers now spend hours on end throwing hundreds of different UX techniques at relatively simple problems. Do we really need a competitor analysis, a contextual enquiry, a survey, user interviews, a heuristic review, a user journey diagram and a SWOT analysis just to change the colour of a button? We’re shooting flies with cannon balls and spending a lot of time and money doing so. I’m worried that UX design is getting a bit bloated and fluffy and hope that we can start working on removing unnecessary techniques from our UX process to become more lean, efficient, cost-effective problem solvers.
As for my future predictions, I think the demand for UX designers will continue to grow, not only in the tech industry, but also in other industries that are in great need of some UX love. I can’t see us moving away from mobile and computer screens in the near future, but I’m excited to see how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, voice commands, augmented reality and virtual reality develop. I think that the future holds exciting times for UX designers. We just need to remember to stay flexible and adaptable and enjoy the ride ahead.
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Ben Huggins — Sr Interaction Designer, YouTube, San Francisco, USA
Nationality:
American 🇺🇸
How do you see the future of UX design?
In short, new context.
Technology will blend more seamlessly into the environment. As our world grows more comfortable with AI, AR, voice and connected devices, we’ll design less for pixels or form factors and more for information — where, when and how to present it.
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Chirryl-Lee Ryan (aka Cheech) — Transdisciplinary Designer
Nationality:
Australian 🇦🇺
How do you see the future of UX design?
Once upon a time, the term ‘User Experience’ was used to describe the ‘design of everyday things’ — everything that makes up the experience with a product (digital or other). Today, as the realisation that we live in an increasingly complex world sinks in, the term ‘UX’ has come to represent the detailed design of digital products (in particular, websites, mobile apps and software applications).
With the onset of new(er) design disciplines like Service Design, System Design, Strategic Design, Critical Design and Speculative Design, as well as the rise of Design Thinking, UX has become old-hat. Complex problems require deeper solutions than a website ‘revamp’, and UX designers themselves are fleeing to other disciplines (one search of LinkedIn shows how many ex-UXers have become Service Designers).
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Nick Babich — Development Team Manager, Ring Central, Russia
How do you see the future of UX design?
I see a few significant changes.
Good usability will be the essential requirement for every product. Platform guidelines will mature. And following them will be basic requirements for good design.
Regarding design work, I think we’ll see a new role — DesignerOps — which will be responsible both for design and development of a solution. We already have a similar role in development and operations (called DevOps). DesignerOps will also fill gaps in design-developement collaboration.
AR and Voice interfaces will be two the most interesting (and hopefully profitable) field of design. For voice interface, we’ll see a demand for content writers and physiologist.
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Buzz Usborne — Product Designer at Help Scout, Sydney, Australia
How do you see the future of UX design?
My unpopular opinion is that the lines will continue to blur between UX, UI and prototyping.
As technology and user expectation continue to evolve, designers will need to adapt their way of working to be able to rapidly produce seamless, innovative and engaging user experiences.
Stopping at producing wireframes, or a nice-looking “design system” won’t be enough — instead a deep understanding of how to push design and tech to produce more appropriate solutions will become key.
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Kaiting Huang — Interaction Designer at Google, in Seattle, USA
How do you see the future of UX design?
UX design is becoming a widely accepted and understood concept that it can no longer be a sole differentiator of a product. Five years ago, an app with a decent look and sleek interaction could create overnight sensation even it offered limited extra utility (Remember all the cool alarm clock apps and calendar apps?) The same phenomena happens much less today due to fierce competition and the overall maturity of the UX industry. Right now UX is not only desired, but also required for a new product.
Similarly, the expectation of a UX designer gets higher than ever. A decade ago, having “wireframes” in your portfolio could make you stand out as an Information Architect / Interaction Designer. Today, literally everyone can create wireframes in minutes by a wide variety of simple tools. An UX designer as a role is expected to have the whole spectrum of knowledge and skills from research to conceptualization to visuals to production.
As a result, the future of UX design will not just be about design, but expanded into “design plus a domain”, weather it be AR, VR, speech interface, AI, machine learning, blockchain, content strategy, finance, transportation, healthcare, etc. Google’s “Design is […]” series includes several good examples of the spark that UX design and one specific domain ignite.
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