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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?

#41
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web it's the HTML + CSS clusterfuck, If I'm in C# I'm writing color converters for WPF, if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing, if it's C++ it's QT which I need to doll out cash for.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…

I think the react-native style architecture is the way forward. Mainly, thinking of the UI as a state-machine, and managing that state from a cross-platform runtime.

The reality is every platform offers it's own encouraged design patterns and to create the best UX you need to maintain builds for each platform.

In the next 5 years I don't see JS being replaced as that cross-platform runtime, but maybe a transpiled strongly typed language could become defacto.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#42
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designs have to be implemented in something. Currently UX designers are often like chefs who work by drawing pictures of food and writing down conceptual recipes. When they've created a beautiful menu this way, they're surprised to find out that their recipes can't actually be made using the cooking equipment available, and some of the ingredients don't even exist. You're not going to run a Michelin-rated restaurant…

You really underestimate the amount of time it takes to practice and do adequate UX design; unless you spend 10,000 hours doing design, you are going to suck at it, and most of the jack of all trades designers devs I met have really been mediocre at both. "Designers should code" is as fallacious as "accountants should be lawyers". Specialization has been the direction of human civilization ever since the neolithic re…

Designers must understand the media they work in. Design involves tradeoffs and accommodations for practical limits. A designer who doesn't understand the capabilities of the systems they design for is destined to produce bad designs. You can't understand the limits of CSS unless you can work with it.

Imagine if Apple hardware designers depended on their manufacturers to tell them what's achievable with aluminum and glass. Instead Apple has a small manufacturing facility in their design studio so the designers can iterate rapidly and actually understand what is possible.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#44

UX design will start shifting toward taking human emotions into account. Our metrics will also start shifting toward reason-/need-oriented data.

Dark design will become much darker once we start designing for emotions with more intention. Emotionally manipulative UX will spread. It will be combated by UX designed to implicitly teach emotional responsibility, regulation, and resiliency.

I don't think the latter is the job of UX. I think it may be the job of AI.

I'm imagining that a few decades from now everyone will have a personal AI "guardian angel"/personal assistant, which filters and defangs online bullshit, distills the most useful/effective information using its own context aware initiative, and presents it in a form that's customised to be ideal for individuals, given a lifetime of knowledge of each user combined with broader deep insight modelling to maintain an evolving psych profile.

Of course this could go horribly wrong. But it's an interesting idea which could be the basis for a Next Generation AI OS - something that isn't just about maintaining files, running processes on threads, and managing a GUI, but is which is psychologically sophisticated and maybe even appears more mature and informed than its owner.

Humans are more similar than different, and so are human problems. In the same way that online text has replaced dead media text in a literal way, AI could replace the content and insight of both dead media text and social learning with dynamic evolving summary models.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#45
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…

> 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?

Test and measurement. The proof should be in the pudding. If one design converts better, signs up more customers, brings in more revenue, etc. than another, it should win. "Rely on designers' hunches" is not a repeatable process.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#46

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.)

While we're at it, can we kill the fixed headers that waste 10-20% of my screen space on every page?

I already know what website I'm on, thanks.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#47
Seems to me like a pretty severe underestimation of augmented reality. Even the most basic feature of simulating multiple, large monitors in one's visual field is enough to push it into the mainstream– at least among creative professionals like developers, engineers, and designers. The current technologies seem to be well within five years of doing that well, and we still haven't seen anything from Magic Leap or Apple. Based on the opinions expressed, I'd hazard to guess the author of this article hasn't even tried a hololens...

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#48

Disagree about VR. GPU power will finally reach the point where 3D is commonplace. 3D UI and 3D animations will be the biggest new trend.

I still haven't found a game which properly does a 3D UI, let alone a piece of productivity software. Even games which attempt 3D ultimately end up with 2.5D UIs.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#49
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…

Even worse, what if someone has years of widely recognized, valid experience and is also wrong? If that seems preposterous, I'd point to things like Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. Decades of dogmatic thinking.

> I'd point to things like Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. Decades of dogmatic thinking.

This is tangential, but huh? H. Pylori was never to my knowledge believed to be the only cause of gastric ulcers. It is definitely correlated and eradication resolves the disease for some patients. Eradication also reduces stomach cancer risk by about half.

Re: Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

#50
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse, what if someone has years of widely recognized, valid experience and is also wrong? If that seems preposterous, I'd point to things like Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. Decades of dogmatic thinking.

> I'd point to things like Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. Decades of dogmatic thinking. This is tangential, but huh? H. Pylori was never to my knowledge believed to be the only cause of gastric ulcers. It is definitely correlated and eradication resolves the disease for some patients. Eradication also reduces stomach cancer risk by about half.

It was the other way around. The dogma was that it was caused by excess acid and the revelation was that the bacteria were a major part of it. I was pointing to the story in general.
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