What will replace User Experience design in this ever-evolving environment of disruption?
Change is inevitable. The discipline once known as ‘Interaction Designer’ is morphing into roles such as ‘Immersive Technologies Designer’ or ‘Product Proposition Designer’. We are starting to see user experience evolve into something more niche and also more strategic. With new job prospects and business opportunities, we must continue to learn and adapt to our ever-changing environment so that we are not the next Kodak. So, what are the key challenges facing UX in this state of disruption and how might we better prepare for the future?
Some Key Challenges
Good UX is no longer a differentiator
Employing good UX design used to be a competitive advantage for companies that managed to do it well but today good UX is an expectation. In the past, when finding it challenging to navigate a website or mobile app, the user used to blame themselves. Now, they blame the company. This is supported by theories of Learned Helplessness where the individual, after repeated unsuccessful attempts to achieve a goal, gives up and often internally attributes the failure. Yet, as the design of technology has improved and more people were able to successfully accomplish their goal, the individual learned not to attribute the failure to themselves but rather to the company.
Companies must therefore not only meet customer expectations but continue to find new ways to offer value above and beyond their competitors. Additional value can come from looking ahead at the industry being played in to see where new opportunities to innovate may lie.
I work at Deloitte Digital and while we are extremely proficient at delivering large scale technical implementations for clients, we are always looking for new areas to innovate. We have acquired various companies such as Well Placed Cactus (a business that specialises in digital reality experiences) and Market Gravity (a business that specialises in proposition design consulting to produce innovative products) in order to be able to continuously cater towards the demands of our client’s customers.
UX itself is an integral part of many of our projects but slowly it appears that the UX design role is becoming entwined with other skillsets. As teams of developers, business analysts, service designers and creatives better understand what constitutes a good user experience, more hybrid roles develop and delivering a useful, memorable, engaging experience becomes, to an extent, everyone’s responsibility. In order to avoid diffusion of our profession, it appears that UXers will need to either become more specialised or more strategic, which I will discuss later on.
UX is becoming easier to do
Furthermore, there is a growing proliferation of toolkits and software that make it easier to deliver a satisfactory user experience. Now we can follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and download Sketch templates from numerous sources online to quickly create an interface that is ‘intuitive’; something that people easily recognise how to use.
Because people are so familiar with the interfaces created by such players as Apple, Google, Microsoft or Facebook due to regular usage, it is often these big players paving the way forward in terms of defining what intuitive interfaces look like. An easy (note not always best) option, especially for the amateur UXer, is to copy. After all, how many different ways can you design something such as a form? There’s a traditional form, a conversational form, or a natural language form, but beyond that the options for designing a form for a graphical user interface become few and far between.
What this means is that junior designers are able to become ‘good designers’ more quickly but still becoming a great designer is the challenge. The real skill is not in applying what has been done before but in thinking about how to design something new, better or different. It’s a scary realisation when your job role is the one becoming increasingly standardised or automated but this frees us up to focus on new areas such as designing conversations for voice or chatbots, further pushing design for immersive experiences, exploring new use cases for brain machine interfaces and creating data led visualisations through digital twins.
Traditional education is not always setting students up for success
Another challenge for the tech industry is hiring or, from an aspiring UXer point of view, is becoming employable. A study by Ernst & Young has revealed that students are increasingly graduating with high debts and poor job prospects. One reason for this is that traditional Universities are offering degrees that are becoming obsolete by the time the student graduates. The study of User Experience design has only gradually started to become integrated into degrees. Some universities offer courses in Human Computer Interaction, Information Architecture or Interactive Design, but each one of these disciplines only covers a subset of what UX does.
Nevertheless, according to the EY report, it’s not about studying the degree that will line you up perfectly for the industry (in fact the majority of UX designers don’t have a relevant degree), it’s about being taught ways of thinking that will enable students to learn on the job and adapt to a changing workplace. As the report suggest, more than ever it’s therefore important for university graduates to remain relevant within an industry of constant flux:
“Students need to be equipped with employability skills that are transferable across a broad range of job opportunities. In addition to hard technical skills, education curricular needs to be redesigned to polish individuals with thought leadership and complex problem-solving skills so they can modify their approaches as business dynamics transfigure”
In order to do this it’s suggested that the undergraduate degree may be disrupted by “stackable” education and less conventional learning. Flexible, short online learning courses are increasingly popular and should start to be regarded as legitimate education by companies looking to hire.
Not only are the findings important for students though, they’re important for professionals. Companies are increasingly partnering with education institutes to help their employees access relevant courses to address the need for reskilling and upskilling with flexible personalised course structures. This stackable informal education is increasingly popular as it allows lifelong learners multiple entry and exit options and allows people to continue to grow and learn throughout their career.
How to prepare
The rise of strategic UX design
With the UI design work becoming less time consuming to carry out, this means that UX designers are able to think more strategically. In the UX ‘golden age’, the user was all important and creating amazing design came from intimately understanding your design target. However, today if we only consider the user and neglect to understand the business and the industry that business plays in, it is likely that the design will not hold up.
The other risk factor is focusing only on production design. As a designer if you are, for instance, specialised in designing wireframes it is likely your job role is at greater risk of being replaced. Production roles are after all much easier to automate that strategic roles.
As such, strategic UX roles start seeming like a better realm to play in. What’s involved? Well these roles require more focus on the business such as how this product fits into the businesses marketing, commercial and overall technical strategy and experience. While still employing a human centred design lens, we can start to think more creatively and strategically about the overall value of this proposition, not only to the customer but also to the business.
The rise of specialist UX design
What happens if you’re not into strategy? Well another option is to become more specialised. With a growing proliferation of new technologies such as voice assistants, brain machine interfaces, immersive technologies, 3D printing, drones and more, it’s near impossible to be an expert across all areas. It therefore may be worthwhile in deciding on an area in which to become an expert designer. Or if you’re a consultant, like myself, you could also consider picking an industry such as Finance, Travel, Education etc.
There are great opportunities for designers who can position themselves well and be at the forefront of innovation in a new technological area. Consider becoming an expert in designing drones that you fly with your brain. You would need to understand the technology underpinning this such as the brain machine interface, likely an EEG headset, and how to make a person’s thoughts correspond with drone direction. When this becomes more accessible to the market, how do you create the onboarding process seamless for the user? How do you know what is intuitive for them if this is the first time they have used such technology? You could use similar design thinking principles and user testing techniques as you have always used but it will become important to be able to apply these skills to this new technology or situation.
To conclude, adaptability is key to coming out on top in our ever-changing tech driven environment. Upskilling and pivoting to stay ahead of the market will become increasingly important for UX. We’re seeing disruption in Education and Industry to the point that individuals must consider new, different or better ways to add value. Rather than relying on institutions to provide us with the skills and experience necessary to advance, we will need to take more ownership of our careers by making decisions that enable learning and growth in new ways. In doing this we can progress forward to more creative and interesting opportunities.