The Future of UX jobs – What’s coming next?

For this question we have to define an UX Designer. I heard and read a lot of discussions about it, but in fact it is an interaction designer for different levels and touchpoints. We often think of a Screen Designer or a GUI Designer, but people in UX and UX consultancies provide user research, design the interaction and maybe also in addition create a GUI Design for a software, tools or service. In most of this cases a UX Designer is really a “Product or Service Driven” Designer. OK. Why should this change?

“Because the future changes, education changes”

Technology assimilates our life. It started with the digitalisation of services in the last years. This is why UX is much more important and the ecucation teaches different people the know-how in UX. Lean UX, scrum or the lean start up development teaches everyone to create user centred designs products and services.?Universities start teaching this way of thinking in their startup labs, innovation labs or FAB Labs.?UX design becomes a social skill.?So what happens with our UX designers in the future? There are different trends and developments where UX designers will be important in the future.

First of all we have to say, that UX design is still a growing area, and in fact, it needs much more years that UX will be seen as a common social skill. UX Designer can work in there job for the next years. Easy use cases will be done by innovation manager or product manager on their own. For complex solutions, UX designer are a must have, also for the next 10 to 15 years. But there will be a focus on different areas which will increase!

trends.uxdesign.com

This are the six new focus areas for UX designers.

1.) Seamless Interaction

We will interact with different input techniques with the same or different systems. It does not matter if you?talk?with a system, give him?a sign,?touch it, communicate in VR, use a?brain control?or use an old fashioned?mouse or keyboard. In the future every input system will have an intelligent “Input Router” who translates your message into the right technical message. It does not depend how to interact, the system will understand your information. A contextual information transfer will be available on every system we need or use in our life. Every device will be connected and will know our behaviour.

The challenge for UX Designers will be to create a?seamless interaction concept?through our life and through all customer interactions. Although you are working only on one of many systems. So this would be the typical future UX Designer.

This is also a really huge challenge in our daily life!

That's what we have to do now!

SEAMLESS “UX Designer”
        

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2.) Mixed or Virtual Reality

If you talk about the first try "second life" or now "Metaverse" there will be a huge business and need for it in the future. Much more hardware will be available to interact with the virtual reality. Maybe we wear a digital lens for augmented reality interactions the whole day. AR everywhere and everytime. Is this the future? This technology will change the human way of interaction in daily life. How does it look like if all people talk to their AI’s or use strange gestures on the street? Really unhuman…

We have to design interactions which fits into our daily life without disturbing it. What are the silent and invisible interactions?

The other way is to create standalone solutions which we know from different movies. This will be a use case for control rooms or typical business solutions. So for the future we need a lot of VR & AR UX Designers.

become the next

AR UX Designer
        

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3.) Teacher of AI

Artificial Intelligence is a huge topic. But of course it will be a bigger topic in UX. Our future job description will be an AI teacher. Learn them typical pattern, personalization or human interaction. We have to follow AI systems for a long time to teach them working with different scenarios or how to solve different use cases. It started with the chatbos. We personalize them. We teach them talking to us. We teach them answering stupid questions. And if a chatbot answering not in a human way, it is a bad chatbot. Mhmmm?Why do we want a technical system beeing human? Becasue we are human? This will be the third challenge for UX Designers. Be an AI Trainer.

NEXT JOB

UX AI TEACHER or UX AI ARCHITECT
        

4.) Designing a lifelong conversation

Business is like a relationships. If you don’t care about each other in a relationship you will go different ways. It’s like a lifelong conversation. Everything starts with the first impression. If you can’t convince your partner you will not start a conversation. It follows with a small talk and if you find the same interests you go deeper. If you have the same vision or the same thinking you start a relationship. And now you have to meet constantly to stay friends.

It will be the job as UX business designer to create the interaction between our relationships. In which mood is our conversation? Which content do I have to provide? Which kind of digital interaction do I have to start? It started with the?progressive persona mapping?which individualizes a business to business sales process.

In the future we will design the whole customer interactions in business to conusmer or business to business. So one job description will be a:

UX Life Cycle UX Designer
        

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5.) Focus on the Moments of Truth

User experience and customer experience will start merging to one job description. The lean start up movement teaches all firms and responsible to talk to their user and work in an agile user centred design process. So in the near future much more people will design and create awesome products because UX is part of every product management job. We as UX designer are responsible for the moments of truth. All essential touch points from “On boarding” to “Off boarding“, from first?use handbooks?to?after sales key interactions?are in the responisbility of an UX designer, because these interactions has to be awesome. This are the essential moment in every business.?We will evaluate and optimize the key performance interaction design.

To measure them and optimize them in an ongoing process is one of the most important and essential jobs in the future. Would you like to be a:

KPI - UX Designer.
        

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6.) Slow UX

To Make Fast Things Seem Slow. We are always talking about process optimization, contextual design and information focusation but UX could be also the difference. Similar to slow food also Slow UX will appear much more in the future. AI’s, more information and all fastening of information processes will overload human beings. In business it will be faster but in a private environment it will be slowly. Advertisement, private processes will deliver new designs which bring different context together. People have to focus on specific information. AI’s will create information that we have to understand to make decisions. So if the computer will be faster, he also has to deliver slow information. Less information in combination with different media interactions. A human don’t want to be efficient all the time. Slow UX will be a really special topic for storytelling, describing information and bringing different types together in visualizations. So who will be our first:

Slow UX Designer
        

I will be happy to hear your optinion about these trends. We are open minded. Visit us at the World Usability Congress or write me a small mail:?hannes.robier@youspi.com

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