As a long-standing member of the MHCID Industry Advisory Board, I recently engaged in a great discussion with faculty leadership about the future of UX research and design – and where the field is heading. 

Our goal was to reflect on the Department of Informatics’ Master’s program, while also looking ahead to consider how to future-proof it. We discussed current best-practices, methods, tools, as well as emerging needs.  

The prompts included: 

  • Industry trends, organizational needs, and growth opportunities

  • Core skills for today’s job market and emerging roles

  • Program adjustments so as to continue preparing graduates

Below is a brief summary of some of the themes that emerged – along with my color commentary. 

Spoiler Alert: The topic of AI was pretty pervasive, so you’ll see it weaved in throughout. The general consensus was that UX professionals should largely understand, embrace, and harness its capabilities to help create great product experiences. 

The Evolution of UX Practices, Methods & Tools

In order to map where we’re going, it’s important to understand where we’ve been📍.

Over the last decade+, the “Design Thinking” movement has certainly influenced how products are developed; not to mention also serving as shorthand for all things design to the business. This has largely been true across both tech companies, as well as those undergoing so-called digital transformations. 

As such, the following approaches and work systems have impacted the way we work. 

PRACTICES —

  • User-Centered Design: Emphasis on understanding and addressing user needs and behaviors before development begins with rapid iteration.

  • Inclusive Design: Prioritizing accessible and inclusive experiences for diverse user groups.

  • Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Increased collaboration between UX designers, developers, product managers, data scientists, and other stakeholders has only increased.

  • Design Systems: The development, adoption, and management of design systems (e.g., Google’s Material Design, IBM’s Carbon) to ensure consistency across products has gone mainstream. Not only do they help get products to market faster while being more on-brand, a DS is also often a pretty good indicator of how mature the design function is within a company. 

  • Design and Research Ops: Operations roles focused on design and research continue to be important in allowing designers and researchers to focus on the work; less so on the mechanics.

THEORIES —

This is an area I think our field will need to play a greater role in given its importance in the age of AI. (In other words, if not UX practitioners, then whom?! 🤷‍♂️)

At first, this body of work was primarily focused on things like efficiency, usability, and accessibility.

However, as our understanding of psychology and behavior continues to evolve – and we see the ramifications of technological missteps play out across society over time – we’ll need to advocate and steward for more humane products and services. 

  • Behavioral Psychology: Applying behavioral psychology principles to understand and influence user behavior, so as to respect human vulnerabilities rather than exploit them. 

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): This multidisciplinary approach design, evaluation, and implementation now needs to account for AI’s new interactivity paradigms.

  • Emotional Design: Designing products that elicit positive emotional responses without tapping into our most primal tendencies (i.e., the race to the bottom of the brain stem 🧠).  

Side Note – I’m currently working through the modules for the Center for Humane Technology’s Foundations in Humane Tech course. Will summarize my thoughts once I’ve wrapped-up the curriculum!

METHODS —

This one is fairly straight-forward. A lot of these methods have evolved with the way technology companies structure their work systems. The increase in remote collaboration is also an ongoing consideration.

There’s a rhythm to the work at high performing companies that UXers need to be familiar with. You don’t have to become a Certified ScrumMaster, but you do need to understand process fundamentals and how things get done.

  • Agile & Lean UX: Integration with Agile and Lean methodologies allows for more iterative design and development processes. The time horizon from waterfall to agile has been vastly narrowed. 

  • Design Sprints: Rapid problem-solving and innovation efforts through focused and cross-functional iteration sessions. 

  • Journey Mapping: Hands-on visualization and collaboration of the user’s end-to-end experience with key stakeholders/ business leaders.

  • Remote User Research & Testing: In a post-pandemic world, researchers have had to adapt mixed-method approaches to be more remote-friendly. It has also allowed for more diverse and geographically-dispersed samples thankfully. 

TOOLS —

Tools are just that; the means with which to achieve your goal. When it comes to digital product design, tools help us envision and share the experience with stakeholders and potential users for feedback. 

Whether your tool of choice is a Moleskine notebook, Microsoft Paint 🎨, or the latest diffusion model, the end goal remains the same. 

  • Design/Prototyping Tools: Tools like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD for rapid prototyping and collaboration. Figma in particular has helped to democratize design; especially in how cross-functional peers provide feedback. 

  • User Research Tools: Platforms like UserTesting, UserZoom, User Interviews, Qualtrics, and Optimal Workshop (to name a few) have aided Researchers greatly.

  • Analytics & Heatmaps: Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg for user behavior insights. However, quashing assumptions and knowing the why behind the data is still incredibly important. 

Looking Ahead: Essential Skills & Emerging Needs

Most of our discussion focused on what’s next for practitioners and what skills will be necessary in the future. 

The TL; DR is that the following soft skills ain’t going anywhere. If anything, they will be even more amplified among UX professionals — not to mention knowledge workers overall — moving forward. 

SOFT SKILLS —

  • Critical Thinking: The process of conceptualizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach a product direction or conclusion is essential. Our focus on users requires open-mindedness, disciplined thinking, and the ability to challenge biases and flawed reasoning. Without it, you can’t have problem-solving, decision-making, and effective communication.

  • Presentation Skills: I once heard the sound advice that it's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective. The ability to communicate well – whether its through the use of data or compelling storytelling to articulate an experience vision – to stakeholders will continue to be table-stakes.

  • Asynchronous Communication: In a world where teams are distributed across time zones, written words matter more than ever. (Emojis and memes are also important!) While AI can certainly help with clarity and editing, professional business writing is an important skill set.  

  • Empowered Team Structures: We touched on this earlier, but being able to work within cross-functional and empowered team structures is crucial. That begins with understanding their skills and unique value-adds (e.g., You should probably understand what the Growth Manager on your team is trying to accomplish with her KPIs).

  • AI Collaboration: Admittedly a bit of a catch-all, but integrating AI into product strategy, design, research, and implementation should shorten discovery, iteration, and development. Put another way, humans working with AI will outperform humans without AI. 

HARD SKILLS —

This realm is obviously a little harder to predict, but there are some tea leaves we can read given recent technological advancements. 

  • AI Policy & Ethics Research: Exploring the implications of AI in policy and ethics while working with AI researchers and scientists will be critical. The time is now.

  • Privacy, Safety, & Accessibility: Upholding ethical design standards, trust, and accessibility standards while working with legal peers is key. Understanding the different standards across the globe will become more complex as we become more connected.  

  • AI Prompting: New roles will potentially emerge as we craft intuitive AI prompts alongside Prompt Engineers, which is a role that has only recently emerged.

  • Conversational Design & Spatial Computing: It’s hard to imagine a world where we aren’t using voice or AR/VR 😎 more in the future. Skills in these areas should be increasingly valued.

  • Generative UI: UI generation that adapts to user needs could be quite compelling as will the appropriate personalization of those experiences. 

  • Wearables, Health, and Biometrics: Collaborating with industrial designers on wearables, access to health data, and unique biometric identifiers will continue to become more sophisticated.

  • Remote & Collaborative Work: Thriving in fluid remote and/or hybrid work environments will continue to be important. 

In the end, one of the things we kept coming back to was the core value proposition we bring to the table as UX professionals.

Being able to speak the language of business and engineering is great, but we need to be careful not to lose sight of the things that make our contributions truly unique.

And despite all the technological advancements in making it easier to interact with machines, we will need to continue designing for the wonderful messiness that is our Homo sapiens species – with all the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional complexities. 

The future is exciting. In many ways, our work has only just begun. 

Marc