Transforming Technology and Business: The next step in the Evolution of the User Experience (UX) Designer

Jack of all Tech, master of one UI

Technology advancement is hurtling at a rate that has become impossible to measure and the role of the user experience (UX) designer needs to adapt at a similar rate. We can expect to see designers taking on more diverse and complex assignments, playing a more pivotal role in shaping not only the end-user experiences of tomorrow, but the tactics companies follow to achieve them.

Personally, I am a little overawed by the increased amount of - primarily - AI tools out there, what they can do, and what these mean for our future ways of work. I am also conscious of the rate of adoption, inclusion, and decreasing loyalty associated to technology, and service providers. My five and seven year olds, tech-savvy friends, plus the TikTok generation remind me of this daily.

It doesn't feel that long ago we we were discussing the "Uberisation" of everything. The impact a seamless mobile app had on user experience and expectations. It influenced how we expected digital applications to work. Geo-located, cashless, instant, helpful, quick. The interface set the standard for any leading service, from commerce, to banking, to fitness. It feels as if we are at the next step of the evolution, brought about by AI.

The trend is moving towards the need for UX designers to be able to articulate and combine the benefits offered from multiple technologies into a cohesive, intuitive user interface (UI), that in-turn, forms a modern customer value proposition. This skill is critical as it ensures that technology and the user remain at the forefront of business transformation. Where organised and contextual information and services will steer the next generation of clutter-less experiences, leveraging AI to remember, contextualise, and help the user. It's the need for, and definition of a creative technologist in its truest form.

Previously, the task of identifying technological solutions for problems was synonymous with tech-architects and to an extent - product owners, under a single product vision. Given the prevalence, and "plug -and-play-ability" of modern AI tools and integrated development environments, plus increasingly tech-savvy consumers across age bands, and shifting demands, this is less the case. The UX designer will be the customer touchpoint, translator, and key influencer of what technology needs to achieve - as it always was, but not what it always is - and how it must achieve it.

The "So what..." for the UXer, and why this chapter is critical

As with all career paths, UXers need to consistently develop and hone a broad(er) range of hard and soft skills. They need to stay close to the design systems, tools and resources of today, while identifying the next wave of user wants and needs, interpreting these for their business in a way that resonates with target customer audiences, their expectations and their organisation's capacity to deliver and support the best experiences possible.

Doubling up on traditional capabilities such as user research, wireframing, testing and prototyping, designers will need to be proficient in understanding how emerging technologies influence existing products and service and bundle that with the new offerings customers will come to expect. How various user-ground anticipate to utilise technology, what their expectations are, and will be, and where these influences are coming from given the rate of disruption and displacement of products and service providers as we know them.

This might be understanding if and when to design AR shopping experiences powered by AI prompts and nudges, integrating virtual assistants into planning and productivity tools, enabling smart homes and workspaces with supportive alerts and instructions, and short-circuiting existing product interfaces based on a more conversational type experience (think Alexa style UI, but everywhere, aligned to your mission). It involves awareness of what is possible based on the capabilities tech such brings.

They will need to be able to design for a variety of interfaces and platforms, not only desktop and mobile, but wearables, smart home devices, digital twins, VR, AR, as these products become more contextual, platform oriented, integrated, and cloud adoption continues. They will need to ensure what they design for takes into consideration the biggest leaps in tech, factored with their usability and ability to transform their business and product value proposition. Not all of these have design systems, rules and standards.

What underlies this shift is that sentiment on the humanisation of technology seems to have finally come to roost. AI will remove the unnecessary. It will spur the evolution on the ever simpler and frictionless experiences we constantly seek to deliver and 'feel' as participants of the digital economy. We are a step further to giving more to the internet, in order to get more back, purely because the quality of the experience is worth it. What this means is having our data connected, shared, and distributed to entities that offer life-changing solutions, will move ahead. The implication is that gaining trust needs to be designed for, and in part, trust will define loyalty given the commoditisation of these products and services.

Failure to look ahead and adapt is an always-on risk. This time the change is going to be more abrupt and arguably brutal due to the 'human-likeness' and power of new tools and services that emerge, and the speed to develop with or on top of them. This, compounded by how various technologies are merging into single product offers. Jobs and tasks are going to be affected. Many will be replaced. Most will be redefined.

This chapter is the most critical because...

UX research and design functions are commonplace in most medium to large businesses. Consumer demand for digital services has matured, and with that - customer asks are more complex and nuanced. They are also more ambiguous. No one really knows what the right questions are if we begin to factor in how we will live with very smart virtual assistants, nevermind robots, autonomous cars, etc. To meet these evolving needs, businesses must continuously consider factors such as scale, cost, technology adoption, and digital strategy while running business as usual activity.

Digital services and products have become more independent from larger, dominant platform players, and 'as a service' architectures and service arrangements are integral to new product design and delivery. Open-ecosystems mean more data, more feedback, and thereby the expectation for more advanced products. In this increasingly decentralized world of applications and technology service providers, together with the integration of tech-agnostic services, it is critical for organisations to have the ability to conceptualise, deliver and lead relevant and modern digital customer value propositions in a world that is becoming increasingly ambiguous and digitised.

The Future UX Designer IS the Change Agent for Product Adoption

The UX designer of the future will be a highly skilled and versatile professional, capable of merging multiple technologies into a single UI that offers the least friction humanly possible - aided by machines. They will need to have a combination of creative problem-solving skills, technical ability, rooted in the basics of UX research and design. This applies as much to typical B2C, and B2B type plays. Their business acumen will need to extend to selling the proposition of adopting new tech, not just doing the best with what exists.

I find it difficult to predict exactly what the future UI for common product channels such as apps and websites will look like, as it is likely to be influenced by a wide range of factors, including technological advancements, user preferences, tech innovations, specific user trends, audience adoption, business needs, and business resources.

Your app won't look like my app. My data is my data. My experience differs from yours. We will all do increasingly less, to get a lot more from products. Products will be more subtle, more intuitive, and more powerful.

Perhaps the most unavoidable phenomena that has now fully gained traction is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in UI design. We knew it was coming. We kept reading about data being the new oil. That time is now. This technology can be used to create intelligent systems that can learn and adapt to user behaviour and can be used to enhance the user experience by enabling personalized recommendations, automating tasks, and more. This ultimately means less cognitive load on the user, working the machine, while leveraging data, hence a different approach to design.

This goes deeper than sending promotions, suggesting movies, personalising content, giving motivational advice, and affordability scores. In a business sense, advising what tasks must be done, what happened, what is happening, and what might happen. The shift will be on how to do things. What to do next. What might happen, and how you can do it, with the most viable option and use of resources. ChatGPT is a good example of consulting the AI prior to executing. This type of quality feedback will only permeate into our daily lives. It will also be about telling machines, robots, 3D printers and third parties to do things, and giving us only the essential info required as a feedback loop.

The machines are learning at a greater speed than us, and they're getting better at talking to us. This means more autonomous homes, workspaces, and built environments. A major impact on UX demands, and further downsteam impact on the technology and capabilities businesses will need to spend on to create this effect. This means a significant shift to how businesses will need to validate and direct their customer value proposition. The UX designer of the future is a key proponent here.

Considerations for Design and Product Teams

Designers need to factor various, conflicting customer demands in light of technology, particularly in organisations not braced for innovation, as the latest tech is not something IT would typically have in their "run" streams. The rate at which fresh solutions will be put out and openly adopted is only going to accelerate (check the rate of ChatGPT vs. Uber or Netflix adoption as an example). The debate of demand vs. viability vs. feasibility will only become more challenging as more new entrants emerge.

Scarily, most of the advanced services I'm seeing can be purchased by credit card, without large sales teams and implementation times. They are well documented with open APIs that plug into most mainstream corporate solutions. Product led growth strategies will become a core proponent of driving sales and to get this right, design needs to feature.

Let's go back to the basics of UX. As things change, the core of UX Design will remain. Here is a twist on some of the common areas a tech and customer-centric designer will have to consider:

• User experience (UX): Experiences need to be more than visually appealing. They need to be easy to access, use and provide a seamless, intuitive experience for the user. The key success criteria will be functionality and ease of use in ways that have not yet been designed or benchmarked by other 'killer apps'. This requires a deep understanding of current and shifting user needs and behaviours, and the ability to design for usability, accessibility, and user-centred design, in context of direct and indirect competing, accessible and pioneering technologies, products and services. Scanning the market, understanding consumer needs, interpreting how these are influencing user demand per unique audience is critical from a design viability and feasibility perspective. This will be less about empathy and more about outcomes. It will be about further pushing the innovation risk / appetite of incumbent service providers.
• Functionality: In addition to being visually appealing, UIs need to be functional and dependable. They also need to be accessible with close to no ramp up time. This means that they should be able to perform the tasks they were designed for and should have close to no time in helping users achieve their goals. The commoditisation of digital services is increasing. There will be dedicated and highly complex solutions to do specific things and specific things only. It also means that the UI is where the user will want it, in a format that they will want to use it. Barriers such as language, sizing, iconography, layout, heuristics will matter less. It will be how to enhance the experience with the available technologies at hand at a faster rate than competing services. It will be about creating accessible, simple to understand onramp of products, with the right level of contextual support. Most of which is being experienced in new-born Product Led Growth businesses.
• Product Adaptability: In a changing digital environment, experiences as we know them need to be adaptable and able to evolve over time. This means that they should be able to integrate new features and technologies and should be able to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of users. A key (and killer skill in my view) is knowing what extent to push for the inclusion of modern technology, or the enhancement of existing and accessible tools and services, and creating close to no friction as new features are introduced or optimised. Managing the trade-off of emerging and legacy tech with Product Engineering, IT Services, Data owners, and Business are elements the Product and UX needs to tackle through the customer and end-user lens. Equating return on investment for user experience will be a key skill for UXers to push.
• Business goals. User goals. New Business Models.: User interfaces need to support the business goals of the organisation, along with the organisation in the eye of the user. This may include driving revenue, smarter ways to monetise offerings, increasing customer engagement, or improving operational efficiency together with the product being relevant enough to achieve user objectives. To achieve these goals, apps and websites need to be more than just the above - they need to be designed and built with a clear strategy and purpose in mind. The UX function is a key proponent in defining company strategy. One that is customer centric and supported by the technical foundations that will drive the business forward. It requires the C-Suite to pay close attention to customer feedback, wants and needs. It needs to be relevant to how users wish to acquire, use and pay for services.

Being mindful of technology and charting course is the new battle

There are multiple emerging technologies that UX designers should be aware of to effectively integrate them into user interface (UI) design. The tech UX designers should be familiar with include (and is not limited to):

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning: These technologies allow for the creation of intelligent systems that can learn and adapt to user behaviour and can be used to enhance the user experience by highlighting personalized recommendations, automating processes, aiding jobs, translating and assigning tasks, and more. The learning models will be supported by human feedback, and real world outcomes. This will also need to be baked into the design as the ability to evolve the AI becomes a differentiator. Note: The influence of NLP (Natural Language Processing) will become a major factor when designing new, outcome oriented products - this falls under AI.
• Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR): VR and AR technologies allow users to interact with immersive, 3D environments and can be used to create engaging and interactive UIs. Given the progress of 5G, high-powered graphics cards, batteries, etc., the inclusion of virtual and augmented reality type experience through a live digital twin style interface will become more commonplace.
• Internet of Things (IoT): The IoT refers to the interconnected network of physical devices, such as smart home appliances and wearable devices, which are connected to the internet and can communicate with each other. UX designers will need to consider how to design user interfaces for these devices that are intuitive and easy to use. The implication is that decisions will be made with the latest data available. That business operations will become more connected, and smarter. Workers and consumer will have the most up to date and instantaneous services possible, as everything becomes smarter.
• Biometric interfaces: The debatable popularity of voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant, and prevalence of video analytics and biometric enabled gestures means that UX designers will need to consider how to design for such interfaces. This will require a distinct set of design principles and user flows than traditional graphical user interfaces, where the user is not interacting directly with the interface, where the UI "thinks" and responds based on what it is sensing or interpreting.
• Wearables: The development of wearable devices, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, presents new opportunities and challenges for UX designers. They will need to consider how to design for small, often circular, screens, and how to create seamless experiences that flow between different devices.

UX designers need to work closely with Product Owners who will weigh strategy, budget, user-demand, and the product vision, and in-turn, the associated teams to bring these technologies to light, through the product. These teams will need to influence Product Led Growth (PLG) strategies in the market, and within their own organisations as the ability for smaller companies to develop powerful products and replacement services will only rise.

Design in the C-Suite - a catalyst for a future-fit strategy

Design therefore has a considerable, if not critical influence on corporate strategy and will be infused in the tactical approach any digitally influenced business would follow. The voice of the customer therefore needs a seat at the table. Failing to include this means that exponential technology will surpass the business at a pace never seen before.

These elements include:

• Setting the direction for product and service development: UX design can help to inform the direction of product development by finding user needs and preferences, and by prototyping and testing unique design solutions. By taking a user-centred approach, UX design can help to ensure that products and services align with the needs and expectations of the target users.
• Driving customer loyalty and retention through products: Highly desirable UX will help create a loyal customer base by enabling a seamless and enjoyable experience. By making lives easier and saving people time. This will lead to increased customer retention and repeat business, which can drive revenue and profitability. The value of UX as a company differentiator and asset will become exponentially more important as digitisation and intelligence of product and service progresses.
• Differentiating your business: A strong UX can help to differentiate a company's products and services in the market and can be a key competitive advantage. By creating a unique and intuitive user experience, a company can stand out from its competitors and attract new customers. The impact and manner in which Product Led Growth strategies will become more synonymous to large, more traditional enterprises.
• Improving operational efficiency while evolving ways of work: UX design can also influence corporate strategy by finding opportunities to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs. For example, UX design can help to streamline processes and reduce the number of steps needed to complete tasks, which can save time and resources. It should also influence how current jobs are being described, measured and performed. AI will reduce mundane or repetitive tasks down to 0, and will augment high-value, knowledge-worker, supervision and advisory roles. The concept of decentralised applications will be commonplace. The challenge, and value will be in uniting all of these priorities into that single UI.

Incorporating modern technology into design can significantly influence corporate strategy and drive bottom-line results. By including customer needs, differentiating the company in the market through a unique, relevant, and intuitive user experiences - design will help attract new customers and increase market share, and drive more efficient internal functions.

Process steps will be eliminated, support platforms will evolve to become fit for purpose, and client engagement will be at the forefront of driving business priorities. Same same, but different. The best UX designers will be those who can use their creative skills to prepare a compelling picture of the future, illustrate the need to change, and chart the path there... while not losing sight of what people want most.

**Views my own.