The skills of a UX designer in 2088
Let’s talk about the future of design?
Not infrequently, in this or that debate or article, we have witnessed the exercise of trying to imagine what the digital industry will look like in the future and more specifically what should be the skills of designers, be it UX or any other discipline, in this industry of the future.
The recent past has shown that the future is a strange place, or rather, at least uncertain. No matter how much planning there may be, no matter how many trends can be identified, we realize that humanity is not free to face challenges only possible to imagine in a Hollywood production.
Even so, the exercise of imagining the digital industry of the future and the role that the discipline of design that we call today UX (but that tomorrow could be something else) will be an important and valuable challenge.
Trend towards specialization
Certainty and guesses aside and before we travel to the future, with one or the other name, in one or another more specific area of UX, we witness a clear and structured specialization of skills but also profiles. It is difficult to generalize with any degree of certainty, but with a quick search for the professional profiles that the UX job market is looking for today, we see a trend in teams to integrate specific people with certain skills.
Whether UX Researchers, UX Writers, Visual Designers, or many other profiles, it is easy to see that the unicorn designer is less and less valued and more and more transformed into several different profiles. Regarding the future and the specialization of skills, the question that needs to be asked at this point is: will we continue to see an ever-greater specialization of skills in different professionals? Or at some point, with so many different profiles, it becomes impossible to manage such a complex orchestra and the UX designer unicorn will become the standard again?
More skills and fewer titles
The answer to this question is not easy (as the future never is). Trying to guess the future, even for more of a design discipline as “recent” as the UX, can be a doomed exercise from the start. Still, imagining doesn’t cost.
We have thus far seen a definition of professionals essentially by their titles, knowing that each title has, as a rule, a series of competencies and responsibilities. It is these titles that mediate the industry’s expectation against what can be expected from each professional. Titles such as UX designer, UI designer, graphic designer, visual designer, UX writer, UX researcher, product designer are quite common in teams and job advertisements. As a rule, it is the attribution of each of these titles that says what we can expect from each of these people in the teams.
But, what if the future reserved an industry more organized by skills rather than titles? The professionals and their role in the teams could be mapped by their skills and not necessarily by the title they could wear. The truth is that design is itself a multidisciplinary discipline. We often see designers capable of using different skills with a very significant degree of excellence. The association of one or another title, more closed in its breadth, can put aside this versatility, tending that the teams format too much what are their talents.
In design, does it make sense to arrive at a Ford-style assembly line model, in which each participant has one and only very circumscribed responsibility?
Maybe not. I really hope not. The challenge for the industry, but mainly for the designer community itself, is to structure itself more around the skills of each professional rather than the titles. Why do words have the value they have and when we assume someone as a “designer”, regardless of their academic background and the medium for which they work, are we talking about professionals that are so different?
Let’s get into the time machine
We reached 2088. One hundred years after the launch of the first edition of Don Norman’s seminal work for UX discipline, “The design of everyday things”, the world, industry, and discipline are very different today. After the 2020 pandemic, the world was faced with a reality that proved, in a definitive way, three very simple but equally powerful ideas:
- Digital technology can be a good thing, capable of connecting people and facilitating many of the day-to-day tasks, when used thoughtfully;
- As much technology as we may have (and we have) nothing replaces empathetic and affective relationships between people;
- It makes little sense to speak of “new technologies” when we refer to things that are already a commodity for most of the planet’s population.
On the other hand, 2088 also brought with it an unexpected challenge. Today we have more information. The capacity for human processing and the fast pace of everyday life has created a widespread feeling that there is no harm in not being aware of everything that happens.
It doesn’t matter much to know everything that goes on with family, friends, colleagues at work, colleagues at the gym, in the city, in the country, or in the world, because all this information is impossible to assimilate. It doesn’t matter to know everything that happens. What matters is to be able to choose and understand the essential information, about people and the most relevant topics for each person’s daily life.
This out-of-date ceased to create anxiety in most people, to become a perfectly normal feeling and something to live with quite well in 2088.
Skills of a designer in 2088
When it comes to design in general and UX in particular, 2088 brought a slightly different context. Today design is assumed to be a more unified and cohesive discipline in itself. Compared to 2020, it is rare to hear design subdivided into areas such as graphic design, UX design or even service design.
With the complexity of the challenges of the relationship of brands and organizations with people and the profound need to design all aspects of the experiences (yes, in 2088 everything is an experience) it became impossible to compartmentalize the action of each designer, for example, according to media as concrete as on and offline (two other terms that don’t even exist in 2088).
The transformation of the industry has also brought with it a metamorphosis of the skills of essential designers to create experiences capable of involving people in the most sustainable and empathic way possible. It is true that in the 2088 market there is an endless number of necessary skills, but some have become fundamental in what are the projects to design the experiences of brands and organizations, in this post-massification of information and conscious outdated scenario.
Online research
Google alone is no longer a search engine. By increasing exponential information, searching for information online has become an art. On the other hand, the massive digitalization of information has also made the world wide web (still exists) a very valuable research space. Online research is the competence that you know and know how to use not only Google, but also many other specialized sources in search of information about people, their needs, difficulties, desires and dreams.
Mindmap
Incredibly, books still exist in 2088. Today they are more objects of pleasure than utilitarian information. The mindmap is not just the skill that knows how to make mindmaps, but above all, it is the one that can explain very complex information with a lot of relationships in a very simple way.
Code prototype
Prototyping is a fundamental competence of any designer in 2088. Doing it quickly and efficiently is not just an asset, it is a must. Programs like Sketch and Figma are part of the story. Vector design merged with the interface code to create a new generation of prototyping tools that program while designing and drawing while programming, helping designers to prototype absolutely interactive experiences in real time.
Storytelling
The trivialization of access to information brought with it infinite advantages, but also a danger. Patience has been lost due to vulgarity. With the sharing and sharing of information, copy and paste from this and that source, telling credible stories, but at the same time surprising, brought up a highly appreciated talent. Storytelling is the competence of knowing how to transmit information, even if technical, but wrapped in a story, capable of captivating those who see, hear, taste, smell or feel it.
Experience science
The efficiency of the discipline of design in its relationship with the businesses of brands and organizations is one of the essential premises of the role of the designer. Everything in the experience can be evaluated in real time, through metrics and measurement of quantitative but also qualitative goals. Experience science is the competence in design that can help to systematize data and facts that allow us to assess the quality of the experience that is offered to people and the impact of this on business.
Going back to the present…
All of these skills are a mere exercise in futurology. Still, it’s good to try to imagine the future. With all the degree of uncertainty that this entails, if we do not know where we are going, we will hardly reach any goal.
With regard to the skills associated with the discipline of design, there is an even greater challenge, which is perhaps not of the future, but of the present. Standardizing the designer’s profile has its advantages. Makes large-scale planning easier. However, standardizing too much what are the skills of a team’s designer profiles, also has the demerit of leaving aside the ability to exploit the unforeseen. Mixing talents, skills and concepts that may seem unusual at first, creating new and differentiating solutions along the way.
Not all professionals are the same and thankfully. It is this mixture, often chaotic, that gives design, whatever its aspect, now or in the future, the ability to add value, see beyond the evident and imagine a future that is yet to be created.
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