10 UXDERS, 10 QUESTIONS, 10 WEEKS

Week 7, The future of UX: 10 UXDers, 10 questions, 10 weeks

How do our UX experts see user experience progressing over the coming years?

PatternFly Team

Published in

PatternFly

13 min readNov 17, 2021

How do you see the future of UX?

Wes: Research Operations Coordinator

It’s hard for me to really wrap my head around the future. I think the idea of inclusivity will be at the forefront. For all people, all functions, everything. There’s a large community of people out there that either want to use our products and they can’t or maybe aren’t aware, so having those individuals in mind and trying to move in that direction is really cool and important. With that comes the inclusivity of what UX does and what kind of impact we can have, too. “Inclusive” in the first sense, but also inclusive of all other functions that we work with.

This might be a little older perspective but years ago, good user experiences weren’t expected, regardless what kind of product you worked with. Sometimes you could expect something to be good, if you had previous experience with that product. Before the internet was so widespread, there was a lot of trial and error. You bought a computer, bought a car, and if it was terrible, you didn’t know until you used it. Since UX has grown in all aspects and industries, its influence has grown, and its importance has grown with it. Now, consumers and users have choices and they have an expectation of, ”If I buy this product, create and account, and get a license for this piece of software, it’s going to be usable.” Nowadays, people are expecting a good user experience at minimum; that’s where everyone has to be. Not every company and product is there yet. But that usability is a must, which I think is fantastic!

In terms of that emphasis on usability, the other functions that UX works with are also a little ahead, especially here at Red Hat. Product management and engineering understand that users want good user experiences, so they recognize that value. The more work we do, the better designs we have, the more improvements we make, the better insights we get from research, the more we include others and expand our influence. This whole experience-driven philosophy Red Hat is following makes a difference.

Beau: Principal UX Designer

I see UX getting more experience-focused, meaning not just about screen-level user interface design. Since I started in UX, the work has evolved from evangelizing the field and getting people to understand it, to designing for the screen in time with technology improvements and dynamic interaction, to creating design libraries and pattern libraries greated toward creating products. In the last few years, UX has been becoming bigger than just products and graphical user interfaces (GUIs), to include the touchpoints between the products.

At Red Hat, there’s a lot of tools that are on the command line, and those are still part of the user experience. I see that as a really cool progression. One thing I see progressing is the “stakeholdering,” but I don’t think that’s a real word. Basically, instead of aligning with your product manager and your engineering team, you’re now aligning with a team of product managers and a team of product engineers to create something. UX becomes the glue between the groups. So you work with four product managers across a user’s journey to get something done that requires four products. Here, UX is sometimes the common person on each team, so we stitch it all together and work to get alignment across those areas.

On our team, we’re tackling this problem now: How do we extend beyond product to design user journeys? Discover, try, use, day-to-day use, troubleshooting, support, all the different phases of the customer journey. Users might use one product or five products along that path. I hear about certain UX teams being a “squad,” so instead of being a designer for one specific product, you’re the UX designer for a specific part of the customer journey. Or you’re the UX designer for a particular persona in a journey. You can slice and dice it in different ways. We’re starting to think about UX not as something we do to support products, but something we do to support users throughout their journey.

I see Red Hat starting to approach UX in this way. We’re not just RHEL or OpenShift; we’re trying to define the customer experience whether it’s for a DevOps person or system administrator who works in this enterprise space. It’s kind of neat.

Roxanne: Associate Manager, User Experience Design

There seems to be a strong desire from businesses for UX design to take a more leading role in crafting entire ecosystems, not just specific workflows or UI’s in specific products. You start to see them asking more high level questions like, we have X persona, what’s their entire experience across all of our properties? And it’s a big, big question, one that we’re not always prepared to answer. Oftentimes you’re heads down looking at the wonderful product you designed, and it’s hard to come up and be like: “Wait, where does this fit in this bigger world?”. This is especially challenging in companies with expansive portfolios.

Considering designers are usually industry agnostic, training for non-technical people needs to be prioritized. Enabling designers through appropriate level based training in highly technical areas will allow us to better create cohesive, cross workstream experiences. Training in all products, and the purpose of why they were created, why they relate.

That can certainly be challenging with how teams are usually structured, with a specific designer assigned to a specific product(s). Eco-systems require high levels of collaboration and knowledge about “all the things” How does someone else’s workflow for a different product relate to yours and what are the sensical integration points?

I’m personally looking at getting more brainstorming sessions with product managers set up, so we can talk at that level — we need to be exposed to these technical conversations to learn from them.

Alan: Senior Director, User Experience Design

I’m really optimistic for the future of UX. One of the things I’ve always tried to consider is how UX can become a true partner of engineering and product management. To do that, obviously UX has to have some level of status and history. Over time, UX has been growing, so that growth and the knowledge UX has now just enables a strong future for us being equal partners with other groups.

So much of UX seems to be focused on web-based product sets and websites, and I think the future of UX will absolutely be more three-dimensional, whether it’s because of virtualized environments or whether people are working on tangible products alongside industrial designers in that space.

Design has a really important role to play in our future. I know I want to work with a product that’s well-designed, and a huge part of that is its UX. When I worked on keypads at Bose, those products had embedded keypads. You can specify the touch force, basically the feel of each press. So you can test multiple touch forces with real people and get preferences, so they can say, “That feels cheap,” or, “That feels right; I know that I touched it and it worked.” Those types of designs are really fun to work on. And I think the future of UX includes a lot of those three-dimensional concepts.

Matt: Principal Interaction Designer

I think we’ve gotten to the point where user experience is now established in our industry. It is a discipline, you can go to school, you can get a degree, you can say, “I’m a user experience designer,” and people will know what that means.

I was talking to Alan Schell last week about what we’re seeing in terms of UX designer compensation trends. User experience designers are now, in general, making more money than engineers, which is a big switch. UX design has arrived as a discipline, and I think it’ll be that way going forward, too. There’s a recognition now that software needs to be designed. I think that IT companies will at least try to be more design driven. Business leaders see the value of design and are willing to invest in UX because companies that value design are generally more successful.

What will be interesting in terms of the discipline going forward is to think about what we do, what user experience is, and what it will become in the future. For the better part of 40 years, it’s been about people interacting with a screen. Right? So we’re all trained on how to create effective visual interfaces by laying out elements in a two-dimensional space. Thinking ahead 10 to 20 years, will that still be largely the case? Many products are already leveraging voice as their primary mode of interaction. This is a different modality of interaction that will require designers to have different skills.

Over time, the UX discipline will start to branch out to include other modalities. If you call yourself a user experience designer today, people assume that you’re skilled at designing graphical user interfaces. You might be more skilled at web or mobile or desktop design, but those are subtle branches off the same tree. But if I said to you, “We’re going to create a voice-based system,” it might take learning a whole different language of interaction. In the future, we’ll probably have people that are interaction designers specialized in many different types of interaction, not just the interfaces we know today.

That includes realizing user experiences are about a lot more than screens. It’s about how customers experience the company from the point of purchase through to using a product. At Red Hat, user experience is starting to get more engaged with those types of processes, which again, requires different sets of skills.

Joe: Principal UX Developer

It’s all about robotics and AI. We won’t even be needed.

Today, when designing applications, a designer comes up with a design, then wants to test designs with real users when possible, and then developers implement the final design. There’s got to be some sort of tech that comes along, where a designer could take someone’s design, and start tweaking it. Maybe move this button over here, move that button over there, like a WYZYWG editor that can change the look and feel of an application in real time. But then again, looking forward even more, the user would be able to accomplish that to their own liking. It may be similar to what we do now with mockups, but instead of mocking it up, what if we could just create the app in real time? And then have someone come in and change things around? You know, it’s the future, and anything’s possible. Also, based on this theory, I’d better start looking into another career because I’ve just envisioned myself out of a job. :(

We’re going to need creative minds to design things. What we’re doing in the present day, is we have this complex system, in this case it’s an OpenShift cluster, or it could be a network storage device, or a router or hub. All of these devices have hundreds or thousands of settings, and can be very complicated. What we do now in UXD is bubble up all the settings of these complicated systems so that the user can understand how to manage them. You don’t do this by showing the user a flat list of every setting on the device, rather by designing a management application that presents data in a meaningful way.

In the future, the current ‘complex systems’ might look like children’s toys, right? Because they’re going to be even more complex than they used to be. Similar to what we’ve seen with phone technology, we’ll see something similar looking forward with all tech. Our job in UXD is going to be that much more important because we’re not just gonna have a cluster, or a hub to manage. We’re gonna have whatever a cluster becomes, and we’re gonna have even more information to bubble up to make it manageable because, even though our applications will be more complex, our brains are still going to be the same size (unless we get neural processor and memory upgrades). We don’t have infinite knowledge — we’ll need to group the most essential pieces of a super complex system so that human minds can understand and configure them in an intuitive manner, like we do today, but on an even greater scale.

Shiri: Senior User Experience Designer

I think companies realize now that UX isn’t something that you hire on at the end of the process. You need to hire a UX person at the beginning of the project. I think more and more companies realize that UX is a key value for any business. It saves money, saves time, and makes your products better. So I think that UX is only going to grow, and UX departments will become easier and easier to find.

For example, when I started working for a startup company, I was their fourth recruitment, and I was the first person on the team. It was the CEO, CTO, the product manager, and me. I didn’t realize how smart that was. Because we had time to plan everything, like two or three months before they hired people to develop it. I think this is how companies will work in future.

I think there will be tools that will have more artificial intelligence abilities, tools that will be very useful for UX designers. But I don’t think AI or other tools can replace the actual work that we’re doing.

Marie: Interaction Designer

My guess is that the UX will be more established than it is now. For example, when I tell someone I work in UX, and they typically ask, “Hey, what is that? I don’t know about it.” And it’s really difficult to explain it.

I think that we can also predict that UX will focus more on artificial intelligence or something like that. Maybe the interaction will be more interactive, motion storytelling instead of static storytelling.

Allie: Senior Interaction Designer

I think Red Hat is moving in the right direction. We can look at individual screens and make improvements here and there. But the biggest impact is if we look at the whole experience of how the customer initially finds out about a task or solution then navigates through it. There’s a lot of pieces to that: marketing, competitive research, branding, and so on. UX isn’t just, “I’ve opened the app, and I’m using it.” It starts way before that point. We need to think more about integrating with marketing teams so that we can cover the entire user experience.

Now, what can designers do better to initiate that process? I think it’s ridiculous how small our UX team is compared to how massive our company is. We need a content strategist on every product. We need a research team on every product. And we need teams that look cross-product across the whole portfolio. Individual UX designers can do little things to reach out to marketing, talk more with product managers, and find out more about each product’s vision. But at the end of the day, we still have our jobs to do and it shouldn’t be expected of us to overburden ourselves to get the experience right. I think Red Hat is starting to realize UX as the future — and hopefully there’s money in that.

There may be times where I could describe the desired outcome or provide a rough sketch and development teams could use PatternFly to execute it. I don’t know if automated tools or robots would be able to replace UX because our work involves a lot of nuance, like usability testing. There’s always going to be a need for an actual person to really get down into that page-level and component-level work.

Margot: Interaction Designer

I don’t know. I mean, what is UX right now? The future of UX is probably people using more design systems, which I feel like a lot of big companies are already doing. You could argue the field is already kind of booming, and more and more companies are seeing its value. So I think it’s going to continue moving up that trend of valuing giving customers a good user experience. It’s going to keep being important.

The user experience we think about is super screen-based, but at the end of the day, user experience is anything. There are so many experiences people go through everyday that we don’t even realize, because we’re not going through them ourselves. I think in the future, people are going to think more about different kinds of experiences and start opening their minds to experiences other than their own, especially in terms of accessibility.