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UX people will soon have to collaborate with new professions
A future outlook of how the stakeholder map is going to get more interesting for UX professionals
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
—Wiliam Gibson, American-Canadian fiction writer
If you work in any discipline related to UX design (e.g. interaction design, content, UX research, etc.) your current list of stakeholders is probably not big. For many UX people, the main stakeholders are product managers, business managers, and maybe some engineering people.
Most of us work in agile environments where we need to deliver solutions that can then be coded. Therefore, delivery teams (e.g. squads, pods, etc.) are where we interact with different disciplines such as product owners, business analysts, and developers.
Due to the new developments of the past few years, we are all likely going to have new collaborators. Some might be in places that might seem a bit less obvious right now. In this article, I’m going to take a “futures thinking” approach and explore what that could look like in the future based on some current signals of change that I spotted.
Some of these potential future collaborations could even lead to new UX-related specializations that do not exist just yet.
In the spirit of studying the future, I’ll look at the current situation, signals of change, and potential future developments.
The aim of this article is to explore different futures for UX people and understand how we can better prepare ourselves to collaborate with new people and think differently in a future that looks more interdisciplinary than now.
The areas of collaboration I’ll explore in this article are:
- Collaborating with analytics people on data products
- Collaborating with lawyers and ethicists on data-sharing mechanisms and privacy protection
- Collaborating with architects on the merge of physical and digital design
Feel free to skip to the area(s) that interest you the most if you don’t feel like reading…
