The Profession of UX Won’t Disappear, but Adapt

Radically Rethink Data Models

We need to stop merely taking input from users and making designs that work just with a particular set of data. Instead, we need to focus on the intent of the user and design systems that support the user’s tasks much more proactively. We need to interactively provide just the data users need rather than giving them all the data they might ever need and trying to make it look good.

Continuing down a less helpful path only perpetuates bad habits and fails to take advantage of better ways to do things. Listening to a customer or user and trying to have empathy is one thing. However, we are not doing them—or ourselves—any favors if we fail to move people toward interacting with systems and data in new and different ways—better ways. If taking the human factor into account simply means ensuring a business group is comfortable with a system—instead of taking the opportunity to expose them to a different and quite possibly better way of doing their work—is a missed opportunity to show the value of what UX professionals can do.

As UX professionals, we must transcend the bad habit of believing we are doing right by our users just by listening to their needs and distilling them into a system that, in the end, does not fully realize the potential of what we could deliver. Doing less than our best undermines the strength of our profession and contributes to the notion that UX design can be commoditized—or, eventually, be done away with. We need to get better at seeing and demonstrating the business value of what we do by both influencing and shaping the systems for which we provide design solutions.

Break Down the CX/UX Barrier

We’ve heard a lot lately about Customer Experience (CX) and digital transformation. Too often, User Experience gets left out of this discussion. In many cases, this happens because of the bad UX habits I mentioned earlier. Plus, most UX professionals don’t focus nearly enough on marketing, NPS (Net Promoter Scores), customer loyalty and retention, or the actual business value of an investment in improving the user experience. Certainly, not enough to properly articulate the value of User Experience to executives and others who could give us the time and money that would enable us to do what we do best.

Some of this happens because of how our organizations are structured and where User Experience sits within them. A lot of this happens because of gaps in our skillset. There is a natural professional tension between User Experience and our CX colleagues—and, in some respects, that is okay. Tension is a good thing in the workplace if it fosters innovation and pushes people in new, challenging directions. However, if UX professionals follow the bad habit of just putting our heads down and doing what we’re asked to do, we will miss opportunities to create great experience outcomes. More importantly, we’ll also miss the tremendous opportunity to create a cohesive, end-to-end design culture within our organizations. Aligning with CX and learning more about their methods so we can blend User Experience and CX approaches would ultimately provide the most business value.

Conclusion

Of course, bad habits are hard to break. We all know this. Those articles that predict gloom and doom for User Experience also know and exploit that. However, the future of User Experience is very bright, and it will continue to be so—as long as we remain open and adapt to different approaches and embrace the coming technology challenges. In the end, the human factor remains the same.