Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Peter Riegersperger Source: NASA.

It’s the end of the year, and as always, many people think about how their field of expertise will evolve, and UX Design is no different.

While there are many people more qualified to talk about the future of UX Design, I took the liberty to boil down some particularly interesting perspectives into this short list, and offering some commentary to what I think will be shaping UX Design in 2018.

The general theme seems to be that of maturity — as practitioners are shaping the field of UX Design, its core as well as its boundaries, it struggles to find a fitting place in this world. It was to be expected, and has happened before with other professions.

As a result, the changes initiate by these underlying currents of uneasiness with the roles and responsibilities of UX Design will emerge on the surface and will impact theory and practice of UX alike.

Here are eight themes that will shape the UX design discussion in 2018:

Composition

Monocultures rarely breed good things. Diversity matters. Always.

When it comes to defining your customers or the composition of your team, to culture and structure of your organization.

And how we define ‚diversity‘ will be a cultural and political struggle.

Design as a core competency

More people will come to the understanding that UX Design is a core competency of businesses, not a separated department. Designers will have to be able to shape business decisions, not only pixels.

The flip side of this new and powerful opportunity is the danger of considering yourself too important, and putting decisions in the hand of designers that should be influenced by design, but not decided by it. Practitioners must be careful to not take on responsibilities they cannot handle.

Processes and Tooling

With a rising understanding of the importance of UX Design there will be more scrutiny put on the processes used to create digital products. Design practitioners must be open to changes in concepts, processes and workflows.

A lot of this pressure will come from inside the field, with rising frustration about the tooling available to the multidisciplinary teams of digital projects. There simply are too many tools, and many of them are not working the way they should. As design processes will change, so will the tools with which we work.

2018 will see the first hard consolidations of UX Design tools.

Social Responsibility

Digital design frequently uses techniques that consciously exploit weak spots of the human mind to manipulate users into actions. This is not limited to dark patterns, common designs like the infinite scroll employ that, too.

Designers will be forced to discuss what their skills are used for — and if it is advancing humankind in any desirable direction.

New interfaces

Non-graphical interfaces like audio, VR or conversational interfaces will find designers struggling to expand the brand narrative to new touchpoints.

This will be especially challenging because those interfaces are only slowly taking shape. Designing in an environment that expects nothing less than perfection, you’re trying to hit a target that is moving very fast, and in very unpredictable directions.

Webbing touchpoints into a consistent story

Multichannel Journeys and a myriad of touchpoints make storytelling even more important, and even harder to get right.

Tools like design systems are an important piece in this puzzle, organizational culture is another one.

The steam engine and the theatre

Brands need to stand out and distinguish themselves from others. Usability engineers need to follow tried and trusted design patterns of efficiency.

Between these two positions, UX Design will be strung out.

Computers are both steam engines and theaters. With them, we perform outcome-oriented, rational tasks, and seek entertainment and delight; Ideally, both at the same time.

Design will keep on struggling between these two positions and find a role in this area. Between a rock and a hard place.

Responsiveness upside down

The rise of mobile devices with their smaller screens and different input options had a huge impact on visual design, features and functions.

Designing for mobile is adapting the amount of information to the space available, in order to keep the information density consistent over all user devices.

With mobile traffic actually outperforming desktop traffic, mobile effectively is the New Normal. As a result, we will see more mobile design patterns arrive at the desktop, with a significant reduction in information density.

Source: unkown

Whatever will happen in 2018, it will happen on a continuum. UX Design is constantly shapeshifting and changing, because the things we design are changing all the time. This is a constant, and a reminder of how stable the field actually is.

These are the posts that inspired me to write this piece:

An abridged version of what 2018 will bring to UX Design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An abridged version of what 2018 will bring to UX Design

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