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The four themes that defined UX Research in 2022

Thomas Stokes
UX Collective
Published in
7 min readJan 3, 2023

If you review the UX content and discourse from any year, you will find some consistent topics. Education about the value of good user experience, current best practices, methodological how-to guides, and reviews of software and tools are typical any year. Beyond this, every year has its defining movements and topics.

There were four themes that defined UX research discourse in 2022.

  1. Increased demand & scaling
  2. Emerging technologies
  3. Increased focus on historically underrepresented groups
  4. Changing trajectory
A word cloud displaying the most common words and phrases used in UX articles this past year.

Before diving in, I’ll give a brief overview of what went into determining these themes. Over the past month I…

  • Read every article or white paper I could find that made predictions, reported trends or commented on the state of the UX Research industry
  • Sampled the topics of the articles shared in popular UX newsletters
  • Developed a set of the most common topics and compared them to the topics from previous years to get a sense of what is quintessentially 2022 vs. an every year thing

From this process, I found four standout themes that were top of mind for the UX research field last year.

Increased demand &…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Thomas Stokes

UX Research & Digital Strategy Consulting | Co-Founder of Drill Bit Labs. Unlocking Business Success through UX and Digital Strategy. Top writer in Design.

Responses (2)

What are your thoughts?

Great insights!

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Hello Thomas Stokes,
I am a member of SFun-Share, who is a media, aiming to share good design & articles on Chinese social media. We are the partner media of Alibaba Design, the partner media of China Bridge, and East China Branch of Shenzhen…

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