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Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

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Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#11
Great topic, but the article doesn't answer its own question.

Predictions:

- Microsoft will move the start menu to a different corner of the screen again.

- Some phones will have a dedicated hardware "dismiss popup" button.

- Neon colors with contrasting fringes will be used for visibility on AR displays.

- Alexa will start initiating conversations.

- Hyperreality.[1]

[1] https://vimeo.com/166807261

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#13
User interface design will always be about the experience of the person using the software. How well can you do the things you're trying to do with it? Trends like AI and voice interfaces are less important than the fundamentals -- clarity, consistency, efficiency, and so forth -- which most software still doesn't get right.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#14
post #7

I see a couple challenges with the future of UX design. One being that everyone has an opinion as to how something should work. Unless someone has years of widely-recognized, valid experience/expertise in design, who's to say if one person's instincts are better than another's? The other issue I see is process taking over creativity. Soundcloud's iconic design was driven largely by the intuition of the designers and…

I've seen the argument of creativity vs process before, and I think it comes from a lack of understanding in the design process.

Most design systems now use a 'double dimond' process. The first stage is researching the problem, and coming up with as many potential solutions as possible - no matter how crazy. That's the stage where creativity is part of the process.

The second diamond is refining a concept - this is what most people view as "UX design" - but it's actually the entire process. If you look at design studios such as IDEO or Emapthy Design, you'll see that conceiving new feature ideas is their specialty.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#15
If I could express a desire rather than a prediction, it's that "undiscoverable" UIs die. I hate having to swipe and tap and generally mess with the screen in the hope of triggering some secret feature. I don't know when it became trendy to get rid of UI chrome but I really wish it would come back.

(I wouldn't mind if the hamburger menu died either.)

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#16
post #11

Great topic, but the article doesn't answer its own question. Predictions: - Microsoft will move the start menu to a different corner of the screen again. - Some phones will have a dedicated hardware "dismiss popup" button. - Neon colors with contrasting fringes will be used for visibility on AR displays. - Alexa will start initiating conversations. - Hyperreality.[1] [1] https://vimeo.com/166807261

"Microsoft will move the start menu to a different corner of the screen again."

Aren't they transitioning to a new business model that doesn't incentivize marketing-driven design anymore?

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#18
post #8

To be honest UI dev tools just plain suck, making everything move more slowly that it needs to. If I'm on the web it's the HTML + CSS clusterfuck, If I'm in C# I'm writing color converters for WPF, if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing, if it's C++ it's QT which I need to doll out cash for. Additionally every smart phone OS has it's own groundbreaking GUI layout concepts and ideas too. Then you get th…

Sun NeWS should have been that GUI standard, thirty years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

There was a simplicity and purity in its approach to front-end interactivity and rendering that completely eludes the HTML+CSS+JS stack we're now stuck with. As the Wikipedia article states...

"NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming; used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering; used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation."

PostScript is basically a graphics-oriented Forth, so it's kind of a weird language to write directly... But it would have been great as a target for all sorts of interesting compilers and GUI tools.

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