February Meetup & the evolution of UX in Nigeria
I had the pleasure of hanging out with great folks of the Usable community last Thursday and it was an awesome experience. ‘Lade, Constance and Sprime made insightful presentations on UX Research, Information Architecture and Content Strategy respectively. I talked about UX BASICS with a specific focus on Lean UX. As usual, Kene was a great host.
The audience was really great and asked some nice pointed questions. I’ll talk a bit more on the panel topic about the future of UX design in Nigeria and expand on answers to two questions I couldn’t really do justice to
Let’s get started.
On the future of UX in Nigeria
More UX roles
I’m excited that we are actively having conversations about better experiences for customers and pushing for more engagement from businesses. I’ll like to think that these conversations will go mainstream, prompting customers to demand better service from businesses on one hand and pushing businesses to be more concerned about how they serve customers on the other hand.
Businesses will start to look for ways to solve the problem of meeting demands for better services from customers and as a result look for people equipped to help solve them. I am positive that in the near future, more individuals will be driven to take up careers in different UX specialities as more companies will be open to hiring them.
Businesses will take customer experience seriously
Constance alluded to this when he spoke about Service Design. I believe that as more people become more demanding of better services, companies will increase focus on how people interact with their products and services on all platforms. They’ll seek to provide a unified experience across touch points. For example, imagine speaking to a customer care agent and detecting the same tone of voice as that on the company’s website and billboard ads.
Personalisation will play a key part in this as more companies will seek to go beyond the basics of satisfying customers on a general platform to actually providing experiences tailored to one customer specifically. Consider the example of Facebook bringing ‘your’ news to you on your newsfeed as opposed to you having to google “Top news today.” Or to bring it closer home, you could see the joy on Sprime’s face when he spoke about his personalised experience on a GTBank ATM.
We will all be user experience designers
As we get more knowledgeable about the field and more businesses start applying UX design principles driven by data based evidence of its positive impact on their bottomline, we’d see a growth in interest from people in non-traditional UX roles. People — from operations to engineering — will start to gear their thoughts and actions towards how to please customers using some of the tools UX practitioners use.
More formal UX education
If there’s a demand for a certain kind of skilled people, then there’s going to be a need to train them. I imagine that with time we’ll begin to see institutions set up to give much needed education to people who want to get into the field. It’s not farfetched to see UNILAG and CChub coming together to create a certificate course for UX design.
On AI taking the job of designers
A member of the audience recently had an experience with a web service that automatically generated a logo for his business along with different applications of the logo within a couple of seconds. He was largely satisfied with the result and was pretty impressed by the fact that it got done at a fraction of the time and price he’d have spent if he had engaged a human designer.
My reply to this in the context of which the question was asked is pretty simple. AI won’t take the job of visual designers.
Constance made it quite clear in his response that the designer’s duty is to solve problems, no matter what those are. But we differ in that while he believes visual designers will become obsolete in a couple of decades as intelligent systems will be able to do most of what they currently do, I’m more of the opinion that it’s the tools visual designers use that will evolve and AI will play a huge part in optimizing their decision making process.
AI in its current state is best suited to replace tasks that are patterned and/or predictable. Though some processes in a designer’s workflow are predictable and can be automated, the work of designing in itself is not predictable. We tend to forget that as much as designers love to follow patterns to make their jobs easier or faster, a large part of the choices they make are based on intuition. It might not be perfect, but it has a key component — the human touch.
So how will AI come into a designer’s workflow? To go with yesterday’s theme of colour picking, instead of spending hours agonizing over what shade of blue to pick, which is probably as a result of not knowing enough about what my a large number of my audience will be comfortable with, an intelligent system will help me analyse research data it’s collected from my potential audience and show me the best shade of blue that will work. Another scenario could be presenting me with a range of page layouts my audience will most likely be comfortable viewing my content on and saving me a huge amount of time designing mockups and coding prototypes that end up wasted.
I’m no AI expert and could be very well wrong. Please make room for that. My thoughts on AI taking over our jobs are largely informed by a couple of articles I’ve read over the last few years, one of which is this McKinsey report from last year.
If I want you to take anything from what I’ve written, it’ll be this: roles will evolve, tools will change and titles will become irrelevant, but the core duty of a designer won’t change — solving problems. And the only way to avoid getting left behind is to never stop learning. Constance and I will definitely agree on this.
Why some products with poor UX still appeal to people
This comes up all the time, especially with regards to certain websites with high traffic that don’t seem to care about many of the UX principles we preach about. I’ll let the image below do the heavy lifting.
The image above is the user experience hierarchy of needs. It’s an adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a psychology theory suggesting that for a human to be satisfied, they must meet all their needs, but even though all these needs must be taken care of, some take prevalence over others. To put it simply, the need for a place to sleep at night comes before the need for one to sleep next to someone they love.
Now take the theory above and apply it to your product. Before anything else, your product must meet a basic need. That’s what makes it functional. If your product solves that basic need for a lot of people, you’ve already started providing some form of user experience no matter how primitive. As you go up the hierarchy, the experience becomes more polished and delightful. What you want to avoid is staying ‘just functional’ and risking the chance of a competing product coming along, going higher up the ladder and meeting your users’ need way better than you.
A case in point will be the preference for WhatsApp over Blackberry’s BBM. Both were functional, meeting people’s need for instant messaging. They were also both reliable and usable. But when it came to convenience, WhatsApp’s availability on multiple platforms made accessible to many more people and easily put above BBM when people considered which platform to use. It’s a very basic example that doesn’t take a huge amount of things into consideration, but I hope you understand my point.
Talking about building an appealing product is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s something I’ll love you to consider deeply and learn more about. Personally, I’ll recommend Nir Eyal’s Hooked as a good starting point.
So that’s it folks, thanks for your patience getting this far with me. I look forward to attending more of these meetups, meeting more enthusiasts and practitioners, and having engaging conversations about UX and product design in general.
