Where is User Experience Design Going?
A lot of talk lately has been around the future of user experience and which direction it’s going. How new technologies will eventually change the face of user experience, and subsequently what it means to work as a user experience designer. Far more question arise as we dig into the complexity of culture, technology and human behavior, yet we don’t really have clear answers. Let’s start at what we know so far!
Firstly, we all might agree that user experience is not only about empathy and deep understanding of user needs, it’s not only about the user’s mental model and behavior, it’s not only about having a purposeful brand experience, it’s not only about design thinking, it’s not only about business strategy and objectives, it’s not only about ecosystems, it’s not only about AI, VR, AR, MR… It’s not only about disruption, it’s not only about behavior. It’s all of that.
Technology is the answer. But, what was the question?
From a creative point of view, though user experience seems technical and has a lot of jargong, it’s about listening, understanding and seeing ’eye-to-eye’. Listen. See. Feel. Then adapt to innovate. Therefore, it’s critical to centralize these three functions; insights, technology and creative. With insights come behavior. The pairing of technology and behavior is important. Because, culture creates technology and technology affects culture. It’s a symbiosis. So, what you should be doing is capitalizing on the disruption of technology by creating experiences that put people first. You see, designers not only solve problems. Designers discover problems. So anticipating the needs of the clients and what people might want is key. This is when design becomes a future facing value, and our job as designers becomes one that brings our clients into the future as quickly as possible.
Bill Gates once said: “content is king”. Well, I believe strategy and storytelling is everything. If you are not able to do strategy you’re not able to design your story or design a brand. You earn attention by listening to people first, then design things they really care about and love to use. Let’s be honest, you can’t always turn a story into behavior. But when you create a behavior, you can always tell a story about that, right? So by inverting the whole thing and start from the botton up with behavior, you can learn from user experience to create better storytelling.
So where is user experience going?
To me, user experience is about being transformational, understanding transparency and the propensity and ability to adjust and adapt along the business journey. User experience is not an isolated event or one or two mega actions, neither it’s a beautiful and pixel-perfect designs. If it’s one thing it’s about bringing everyone to the table and being transparent in order to innovate. It’s about leading for innovation, and getting ahead of the competition. Acquiring a competitive edge that separates you from the rest of the pack. Put simply, it’s the answer to the ultimate question: Why is this relevant? And ”Why would anyone give a shit about what we’re making?” Once in charge of that, the ride itself becomes the answer to where you want to take the user experience.
The questions to be asked
So having a clear user experience design strategy is obviously crucial to success. A roadmap will guide to get there, but you still need to question just about everything, see the forest for the trees and always asking the ’why’ to understand and later innovate. I’m sure you’ve heard of these before, but it’s worth sharing again because the why forces you to have a POV. Ask yourself:
Why are we doing this? (core, purpose). How are we doing this? (solution). When and where are we doing this? (context). What problems do we solve? (purposeful) Who has these problems? (need). What do we want to achieve? (goals).
The reality is that we need to connect emotionally, visually and semantically with the user and consumer to earn their attention to be engaged in the brand and feasibly trigger the desired call to action — and ultimately occupy a place in the top of their subconsciousness. It’s that balance of comfortably aligning business goals and user needs to achieve relevance in what we do, no matter if you’re at an agency side, a tiny startup, or a multinational corporation. Transformation has no origin, nor size or color. It’s a non-stop cycle and you better start to listen, see and feel.
Have a prosperous and purposeful user experience!
Namroud Gorguis, love creativity and design
