Day 107: UX & Design Trends in 2020 — Part 7: Key Takeaways
First day back to work, first design effort in the new decade, what would you like to do, to make a change?
To create the key takeaways for you about the 2020 UX & Design Trends series, I’m summarizing the 3 main themes here:
- Design for Better Future
- Design Management
- Design with Agility AND Quality
If you haven’t planned your UX strategy for 2020 and would like to get some inspiration, please read on!
Design for Better Future
TL;DR.: More and more effort will be put in building trust-worthy relationship with our users, and create diverse and inclusive product design.
Whether it’s the emphasis on ethical design decision, or tackling the post-truth era through rigorous user research, design thinking, or visual representation, lots of designer are contributing effort to build a better future through our special power — design. We’re seeing the trends around the following areas:
Regain the Trust
Through the collective effort of the past couple years, we’re now better informed about what dark patterns are, and how to avoid them. The great work done on the UI component level helps us choose the right interaction that is ethical and beneficial for both sides (users and business) in the long run, with a healthier relationship.
The next big thing in building trust is in the hunt of meaningful interactions, which translate into greater scale of design collaboration than just UI component and interaction design. We’ll need to work on the communication strategy through better research around users’ experience goal and life goal. Then, we iterate on the visual representation, and test it to understand if we actually deliver the meaning that users are searching for; we want to validate if we choose the way they’d prefer, so that we can avoid ego-driven design decisions,
Diversity & Inclusion beyond Accessibility
WCAG, ADA, and all sorts of standardized efforts have been seen implemented successfully across many areas; There are even specialized roles such as accessibility designer or SME established in design teams. However, there’s still required effort to raise awareness and incorporate design effort for better diversity & inclusion in UX Design field.
Not just language in content (e.g. folks vs. guys, them vs. he), the observed gender bias, ethnicity bias, and more are still prevalent in all kinds of products that can use our help. We, as designers, who specialize in creating interface between users and system/company, can definitely make a change by not assuming design direction based on stereotypes (e.g. certain colors for certain gender). What we can do is to have more meaningful conversations with target users, and use the insights in our design to be more inclusive.
Design Management: Form, Storm, Norm, Perform
TL;DR.: With large amount of designers in teams (especially in-house environment), UX Playbook and DesignOps are required in order to scale up the solutioning process; while design teams will have a new understanding of what Design System really is and how to get it right.
To many of us, the insatiable needs of UX talents in the market help building career and the general awareness of how and when to collaborate with UX talents. However, we are witnessing that corresponding needs of design management process, framework, and training in order to escalate UX maturity in various industries.
DesignOps
The trends of building in-house design team is not stopping. However, with the growing talent pool in UX, it doesn’t seem that we have enough support in design operation and management training. Whether we call it UX Strategy, UX playbook, or DesignOps, the growing need of specialized talents in different areas of the design team requires solution in order to allow UX talents optimize their workflow by focusing on what they’re good at.
Design System
After a wave of experiments on building design systems, we’ve reached the awakening moment, we’re now at the stage of having better awareness of what works and what not. It’s clear that it should be treated as a real product, careful product planning, instead of creative director’s pipe dream. We’re predicting that there will be more discussion and proposed framework around using UCD approach to design the design system right.
Design with Agility AND Quality
TL;DR.: Move fast sometimes break things; Some are remediate-able, some are not; In the post-Agile era, we’re seeing more teams adopting Wagile types of framework: Dual Track, Tri Track, Functional Design, etc.
New Ways of Designing
Agile framework is quite mature in many industries, and people started thinking about the post mortem and the best practices to customize these framework to suit their needs. As we discussed before, Agile started as principles to follow instead of specific frameworks. However, people like tangible things and clear rules to follow, so they brought Scrum, Kanban, XP and other framework under this big Agile umbrella. As a result, people get frustrated because sometimes these framework just don’t fit their specific needs. Therefore, more and more teams realized that a lot of times when you have better cost-efficient way to get insights from users and market, simply optimizing for speed isn’t the most sustainable solution.
On the other hand, even though the word Wagile (Waterfall + Agile) started as a sarcasm, referred to teams who claim to be Agile while still running Waterfall, we are seeing mature product team adopt the hybrid of decent upfront analysis and speed of delivery. Frameworks like functional design, dual track or tri track, allow team to categorize tasks into [need quick feedback] bucket and also [need further analysis] bucket. With a smart way to determine the risk factor and the ROI factors, these “Wagile” framework are more flexible and smart to tackle different types of requests.
Emerging Tech Design
Lots of manual workflow are gradually being replaced by AI. Lots of human labor about data validation will be replaced by blockchain. As we’re embracing emerging these technologies, the required understanding for designers are crucial in order to finesse the nuances when designing for solutions leveraging these new tech driven projects.
Conclusion
What 2020 means to me is the great opportunity and new hope in the new decade; There’s a ton we can do as designers to help shape a better culture and a better world. Whether you’re involved with local communities, or active on professional social media, your design matters, your voice matters, and we’ll need your help to create delightful experience meaningful dialog with the greater communities. Let’s do it together in 2020!
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Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts around UX & Design Trends? I’d like to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
