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ARTICLE NO. 1332 OCTOBER 23, 2014

Quickpanel: More UX Futures

by Mary Jean Babic

UX Futures is a one-day virtual conference that will take place November 5.

Hosted by Rosenfeld Media and Environments for Humans, the event features
six inspiring speakersSteve Krug, Jesse James Garrett, Margot Bloomstein,
Andy Polaine, Nathan Shedroff and Abby Covertall focusing on whats next for
user experience.
To give you a taste of what to expect, weve asked three of themMargot, Andy,
and Jesseto answer a few questions on the future of UX. Be sure to use
discount code UXMAGAZINE for 20% off when registering.
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It's 2024. You've just finished your UX education and you're at the graduation
party your parents have thrown for you. An old friend of theirs tells you that he
has one word for you as you consider your future. What is it and why?
Andy Polaine: Relationships. This isnt a futuristic answer, but it is essential to remember as
technology continues to play a bigger part in our lives. All relationships are mediated in some form,
via language, culture, and technology. All activities involve tending to some kind of relationship,
even if it is just with ourselves. Understanding how people relate to technology and systems
including organizations and platformsis fundamental to UX at a broader level. It means designing
for more human and humane experiences as opposed to focusing on efficiencies, tasks, screens,
devices, and profit. The soft, messy, chaotic factors of all that are the things future graduates will
need to grapple with and bring into organizational environments that have been dominated by 150
years of industrial thinking.
Margot Bloomstein: Simplify. Well, maybe its simplify, simplify, simplify, but in this scenario
youre a recent college grad, so youre down with both Thoreau and skimming for the important
parts. Both the past and future of good UX are about simplifying things: whether to embrace
Loewys idea of most advanced yet acceptable or removing extraneous detail to focus the users
attention, our work isnt changing. We filter, focus, and teach by clarifying and sweeping away the
extraneous stuff. Thats just becoming more difficult with the increasing proliferation of information
and channels, seemingly without curation. Its our job to create experiences from all that and to
continue to make tough choices about whats important and whats not.
Jesse James Garrett: Science. There is so much science out there psychology , neurobiology,
anthropology, sociologythat we can leverage much more than we have historically. Weve gotten
comfortable with qualitative product testing, but each of these other fields has honed its own set of
tools, each optimized to answer a particular kind of question. But we place so much emphasis on
the creative, generative part of the design process, we neglect the ways in which we can enrich
that process with new kinds of insights.

It's 2029. Which design materials will UX folks be working with the most: macro
(i.e., organizations, institutions, and ecosystems), or micro (organisms, cells, and
thoughts)?
Andy: Macro and micro. In an ecosystem, all the parts are dependent on and react to one another.
Change the temperature of a rock pool by one degree and algae starts to dominate and some
creatures die out. Remove the algae and something else dies. The best UX in the world at the
micro or macro level doesnt help much if the organizational or institutional ecosystem is broken,
and changing the ecosystem does not work if you do not take care of the details, especially the
invisible links and connections of transitions over time and across channels.

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Image of algae courtesy Shutterstock.

Margot Bloomstein: Andy raises good points about the impact of our work: we have to address
the forest and the trees, or both the algae and the pool (or the fish) if we want it to be successful.
Of course, that means we have to explore the role of UX in the boardroom. We have to carve out a
place there to have an impact on the seemingly intractable issues of our time. Jonathon Colman
addresses these challenges in his excellent talk, "Wicked Ambiguity." While the devils in the
details, and much of the impact of UX is in execution, we wont have the opportunity to effect
change without evangelizing and securing budget at more macro and strategic levels. UX
practitioners need to be effective at both levels: we need to be able to manage the details as well
as the big-picture conversations that garner time and money to address those details.
Jesse: Okay, Ill pick a side: As UX becomes more macro, more systems-oriented, it becomes
more strategic and more valuable. As practiced at the micro end, UX is less a particular set of
practices than it is a way of thinking about performing a more tactical kind of design activity. So at
the micro end, you have people shaping experiences, but not necessarily spending all their time
thinking about these problems, so they may not even think of themselves as doing UX. But at the
macro end, dealing with organizations and systems, the experiential nature of the work is
inescapable.

What do you hope or imagine will have happened for UX by the year 2034?
Andy: I am fairly certain that there will have been some major UX wins in our work lives and our
personal lives, whether thats transportation, media consumption, or ways of collaborating with
others. Im almost certain that governments and public services , monopolies, and established
giants will still be struggling to get their heads around why they should think about any of this, all
while alternative models are starting to infiltrate the cracks those lumbering dinosaurs have left in
their broken systems.
Margot: UX wins will come when we serve a broader group of users by working with and learning
from a broader group of practitioners. Right now, its still the purview of a largely white, Western
group of designers, many of whom offer similar worldviews and life experiences. We admonish
each other to remember that we are not the user, which is an important step in designing for
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othersbut it pales in comparison to a future when there is no other. Well get to that point when
design education and agencies cultivate students and practitioners with more diverse
backgrounds and mentor them to bring their voices to the publishers, stages, and audiences that
need to hear from them.
Jesse: I think the real high-water marks for UX are when we create experiences that get
consumersnot just internal stakeholdersto think about the product category or offering in a
fundamentally new way. When we are able to put forward a better, alternative model for an
experience, and have that model embraced and adopted by a large audience, were really making
the kind of change in the world that were capable of.

Thanks for your thoughts, all!

Want more UX Futures? You got itthe virtual conference takes place
November 5, 2014, and discount code UXMAGAZINE is good for 20% off when
registering.
Lead image originally appeared in Galaxy magazine, December, 1961
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Mary Jean Babic
Mary Jean really enjoys drawing on her journalism and writing background to
help tell the Rosenfeld Media story. After graduating from Northwestern
University, she was a daily newspaper reporter in Michigan for six years. After
that, she embarked on a life of fiction and freelance writing, earning master's
degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Warren Wilson College. She's a
frequent contributor to university publications, counting Michigan, Columbia,
and Cornell among her clients. Her short fiction has appeared in the literary
journals The Missouri Review and The Iowa Review.

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