Surviving the AI Apocalypse: Products, Systems Thinking & Skills That Don’t Expire
New Methods of Interaction
Recently, I was asked to speak on a panel at a local AIGA event on the future of the design industry and the skills needed to thrive in it. As I began to form my thoughts around what technologies would have the biggest impact and their relevant prerequisite skills, my first inclination was to focus on a few obvious touchpoints that are changing the way users and customers interact with digital products and services.
One area that immediately came to mind was voice apps and devices. Alexa, Siri, Google Home. They’re all fairly prolific at this point, even if there isn’t a killer app as of yet. And we’re beginning to see this mode of interaction bleed into other areas outside of the IoT space, including the browser.
The second category I thought of was interface-less devices. Fitbit’s, Garmin’s, and other sensor based clients that have flooded the market over the last few years. These devices change the way people interact with data by collecting and monitoring it without the need for any conscious input on the user’s part. The advances in this area and their possible applications were even called out by Bill Gates and MIT Technology Review as one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2019. And they without a doubt bring us one step closer to #noui.
And of course, the final category I thought of was an interaction mode at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from no interface: AR & VR. Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality are all the rage and consistently hailed as nothing short of the second coming. From ARKit and ARCore on the native end, to WebXR on the browser side, to large investments by tech heavyweights into platforms such as Oculus and HoloLens there’s been no shortage of technical innovation in this space over the last few years.
The Real Impact
But when it comes down to it, the biggest source of technical disruption in our industry isn’t a touchpoint, type of interface, or interaction mode. It is of course, A.I. and Automation.
This disruption undoubtedly means change. Whether that change is good or bad obviously depends on who you are. Neural Networks and Machine Learning and tools like Tensorflow and facial recognition open up a whole new world of possibilities in the digital space. But these same technologies also mean undoubted automation of the low-end. Good from a business perspective, but not necessarily from the perspective of an individuals career.
Going down this thought path of low-end market disruption also led me to the other area where the market is currently being disrupted: companies productizing areas that once required custom design and development. I’m of course referring mainly to Squarespace and Shopify, but they’re far from the only one’s upending things.
Combined, Squarespace and Shopify are cannibalizing the low-end of the market faster than anyone ever anticipated. At first this was only an issue on the development end, as both of these platforms have removed the need for heavy lifting on the part of developers when it comes to down market content or commerce sites. For a while this seemed like a good thing for design, as it pushed that skillset to the forefront and empowered design in ways like never before.
When technology matures, design moves to the foreground because the underlying machinery has been commoditized. — John Maeda
But as the platforms mature further they are beginning to remove the need for designers as well. And when the increasing forces and maturation of these product companies are combined with the technological forces of automation we can all take a pretty good guess as to where this all ends.
So, are we all screwed? Or does this mean something different for the future of work within UX, UI, and software development? And what about the skills needed to thrive within those spaces going forward?
Finding The Work
Not to fear…too much. For the time being, there is still work and plenty of it! The work itself and the skills required have just become a little more complex as they have necessarily moved up market. (As a side note, I believe the current front-end identity crisis is partially a side-effect of this increased complexity and shift upwards while that area figures itself out.)
As I see it, there are two areas that will continue to be prominent into the future:
- Working on products
- Agencies able to move up market
What do these two areas have in common?
Designing systems, not touchpoints. On both ends, this takes the shape of designing and building varied interconnected interfaces that play nice with each other.
Web, commerce, native apps, voice, augmented reality, experiential, email, IoT, etc, etc— How do all of these various touchpoints work together? How do we define the often invisible relationships between them? How do we design and build them all in the most seamless manner with a similar aesthetic and voice, both from an experience and a technical standpoint, especially when some don’t even have a traditional interface to speak of? These are the questions that designers and developers now need to be able to answer, and they aren’t questions that can be answered by addressing each in a silo or by pushing each down into the constraints of a single platform or interaction mode.
The highest value is currently derived from one’s ability to design and build interconnected systems that are able to play nice together. — Me
To survive and thrive in this new world, designers and developers must focus on their abilities in systems thinking and systems design.
Top Of Your Game
But that is only half the answer. The real answer goes far beyond systems thinking.
Why? Because the cannibalization of the low-end and the shift up market to products and systems does mean that the problems that need solving are more complex. And while knowing how to design systems instead of just touchpoints is the single most important design skill today; in this new world, it’s just table stakes. It’s not enough to set a designer or developer apart from the crowd in the demand for this new work. For that, they need to be at the top of the game.
To paraphrase Cal Newport, from Deep Work, “Those at the top of the game will get all of the rewards. There is after all a premium to being the best.”
Methodologies and technologies will always change and they tend to do so at a rapid rate. And that pace of change will only continue to accelerate as commoditization and automation take further hold. The skills that will keep people ahead of both curves are the one’s that don’t expire, or at the very least have a long half-life.
So, what skills have a long half-life or rarely if ever expire? This obviously isn’t a comprehensive list, but includes four that I believe are vitally important in UX, interaction design, and software development (and probably just life) today:
- Work Deeply & Ask Big Questions — Designers and developers alike need to develop the ability to go beyond the surface level and push themselves to the limits of their mental abilities. This requires the development of focus and the ability to remove the distractions around them to get into a state of flow that is only possible through long blocks of work uninterrupted by push notifications and the outside world.
- Embrace Business — There’s a never ending debate around whether or not designers should learn to code. The best response to this that i’ve seen is an article by Joshua Taylor where he lays out the case, that it’s much more vital for them to learn about business. As companies are increasingly giving design a seat at the table, or even being “design-led”, it’s vital that individuals understand business models, management principles, and the overall metrics and KPIs that digital experiences are chasing after.
- Treat Work As Craft — At the same time, not everything can be boiled down to single metrics or KPIs. The work within UX, UI, and interaction design isn’t synonymous with manufacturing or cranking out widgets. The knowledge work that is done in these spaces needs to be treated like the craft that it is in order to produce to the level of the now requisite quality standards.
- Learning To Learn And Adapt Quickly—No matter how many non-expiring skills can be named, the truth is, most of what is required from working in this industry, and in the modern world in general, are skills that are constantly shifting, changing, and evolving. Designers and developers need to not only develop the ability to learn complex topics quickly, but to embrace that change and learn to love it. It’s the only way to truly make themself future proof and anti-fragile. To quote Taylor from Billions quoting Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “make yourself anti-fragile or die”.
Putting It All Together
So how do designers and developers not only survive but truly thrive in the new world they inhabit? At the end of the day it’s a combination of learning to design complex systems, working deeply and pushing themselves to their mental limits, and embracing and learning business while at the same time treating what they do as a craft.
But above all, it’s having curiosity, developing the ability to learn a variety of complex skills quickly, and not only dealing with, but embracing the need to constantly change and evolve. Because in the end:
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. — Eric Shinseki
