Ways to Anticipate The Potential Extinction of UX Design
When I first arrived back in Jakarta from the UK in 2013, I was highly eager in seeking for a UX designer job in town — hailing from a country where UX design was already a renown and somewhat mature profession, I was expecting a similar maturity level of the profession in Jakarta. After several months of job hunting with the additional effort in trying to explain the role of UX at the companies I applied jobs at (back then it was classified as visual designer or UI), I assumed that UX was not EVEN at its infancy.
Apparently it has changed in 2016 — I came back from my one year work & holiday trip from Australia hoping to again, get my hands on UX design jobs in Jakarta and apparently it wasn’t as hard as in 2013. With the expansion of tech companies around the city, jobs which didn’t exist 3 years back suddenly became a huge demand and one of them is UX design. While in Indonesia UX is still categorised at its infancy, the role is rumoured to be extinct in the near future (the article could be viewed in this link). I believe UX is still far from extinction in Indonesia, however, preparation and anticipation is highly needed before it’s too late.
Based on the article, here are the breakdown of problems and partially self-proclaimed solutions regarding the extinction of UX:
Problems
UX designer’s golden age is rumoured to be over soon due to:
- High quality UX and UI design are becoming commodities.
- The fundamental design system (i.e. Google’s Material Design) that users are accustomed to and familiar with is highly accessible.
- The potential over supply of talents.
Solution
How to prepare for the worst? It seems product manager/ owner might be the alternative career to UX designer.
- Marry a CEO, CTO, or C-level individual (read: loaded).
- Understand product strategy (identify the ways to connect the product you are working on to other products within your company and ways to leverage your company’s assets to beat its competitors).
- Understand growth (which include sales, user-base growth and product’s engagement numbers).
- Understand marketing and awareness (which every designer despise).
Not only catering to the user’s needs, UX designer should also consider business requirements when designing a product. Therefore, start learning from product owners or managers to better understand the business aspect of the product — when both business and user are simultaneously taken into consideration in the design process, it is believed that an outstanding product quality is highly achievable.
UX design in Indonesia is still at its infancy and it is far from extinction, therefore contribution to the industry could definitely provide a positive outlook to the career. Indonesia is a tough market to crack due to the imbalance distribution of its population — inhabitants tend to disobey rules, therefore creating products that function impeccably here is definitely the biggest challenge that has ever existed in the history of product design. If problems in Indonesia (especially Jakarta) could be resolved in the utmost user-friendly manner, I believe resolving problems in developed countries is just a walk in the park.
