Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Johannes Arnkvist

2018, year of the dog, is upon us. With it comes new challenges, new opportunities, new failures and hopefully some great successes. And also new trend spottings within the design and development communities. A quick search online or on Medium for ‘UX trends’ gives loads of results. The hottest new take on the designer role, what skills companies are looking for these days, the new things we should learn or stop doing.

But here’s the thing, I believe trends are pretty unimportant, maybe even counter-productive, when it comes to experience design. Here’s why.

Design Thinking, the biggest (UX) design trend?

Today, everyone is boarding the UX train. Design-driven businesses have outperformed the stock market by 228% over the last 10 years, so naturally ‘everyone’ is doing it. And this is awesome! Design Thinking, as IDEO and others have popularized it, is at its core something great. It is evidently making a difference. In the early days of UX design, we had a hard time getting that all-important buy-in and support from c-level and top management. That is changing now, across industries. But it’s also one of the most clear design trends, if there ever was one. And Design Thinking is now turning into a commodity.

I remember being just mildly offended the first time I saw Natasha Jen’s liberating keynote ‘Design Thinking is Bullshit’. I think it’s because I full-heartedly believe in, practise and promote people-centric and emphatic design methodologies myself. (And there is plenty of room for design critique within Design Thinking, just saying!) I really love working with product and service design, and have after more than a decade had both some moderate success as well as some very valuable learnings when it comes to designing for user and customer experiences. And here was someone pretty much writing off Design Thinking as corporate jargon and bullcrap.

At the same time, I can relate to much of what she says. I am guilty of ‘selling’ many of those things myself! All the stock photos you see of people in front of white-boards full of 3M post-its, how everyone is disrupting their industry left and right and how many tech companies all of a sudden have design “in their DNA”, when just a few years back they didn’t know the word. All while I’m still searching for the results of all the ground-breaking, disruptive, loveable and design-driven work some of the enterprise giants have produced. After all, most of them talk about changing our world at its core!

Right now, in early 2018, Design Thinking really feels like equal parts 1) trending, corporate bullshit and 2) still, righteous and tested approach to coming up with new, valuable products and services. Essentially, Design Thinking is the design practice, neatly packaged up, marketed and sold to non-designers. So we should see it for what it is.

Design is something companies need to tick to be credible as service or technology-providers. Some do it well, but many still do it not so well. I think it shows when someone is doing it because everyone else is. And my advice is to look for the evidence, and you’ll see who is following trends. And for us advocating it; the more it seeks itself into the board rooms, the more vigilantly we need to make sure the people are front and center, not just the business!

Challenge the Status Quo

Recognize the phrase? According to many, this is what we as designers are doing; thinking new and challenging the status quo. There are many ways to put it; skating to where the puck is going. Not maximising locally. Thinking outside the box etc. And this is a very important aspect of experience design. But I believe it needs to be driven by qualitative research and real insights; actually meeting people, understanding them and their behaviours and needs. Typically, it also needs a dash of creativity, some design craft. Yes, this also goes for Service Design and CX work. Design Thinking becomes problematic when it’s dictated by or trapped within the confines of a certain, existing technology. And it can’t just be thought up in a facilitated room with executives. So, to me, there is something inherently contradictive in relying on UX trends and saying ‘everyone is a designer’ while at the same time wanting (or needing) to challenge the status quo.

UX trends are often just… trends

When you look at UX trends that have been posted and written about the last few years, they are far too often focused on new ways and techniques to solve problems rather than new and better ways of defining them. Machine learning, AR and conversational interfaces can hardly be seen as UX trends. Neither can new definitions of roles, such as “this year, UX designers also need to code, write awesome copy and juggle with their feet while hand-standing on a surf board”. Of course there are things constantly happening that will affect our daily work lives. Our clients and users will have new influences and perceptions of the world. The possibilities we have to come up with and realize new stuff will increase. Or we want to take our job roles in a new direction. But if we would all be following the latest trends, aren’t we giving up on the very thing that makes us relevant?

Example: most “UX trends for 2018” lists have voice control or conversational UIs on them. And yes, there are more voice controlled products and services out there now that a few years back, but not that many more! Also, the ones we have today still have many of the issues that Siri had when she came out. Either you have a limited set of commands and it works fairly well (but isn’t super conversational), or you open up the door to being shown pictures of spaghetti all the time. Main point; just because there is an increasing market for voice controlled products and services right now doesn’t mean we should use that for everything. It would be trying to fit a square in to a circle shaped hole. We are opening up the door to new, horrible frankenmonsters where new technology is put to bad use in the wrong place. Essentially creating a worse user experience by insisting on using some new tech.

Of course it is part of our job to also know what’s going on in the world; if nothing else it’s part of understanding other human beings and their needs. But in my mind it’s quite a bit smaller than some folks make it out to be.

Stop with the misconception that UX designers are all trend-sensitive, creative and whimsical hippies.

Patterns, not trends!

It feels important to note that UX patterns are very different from trends in my view. They are ideally sprung from a researched best practise for a certain setting/context, and as such should definately not be disregarded when you’re designing for that same context. At the same time, relying only on existing patterns and components will make it difficult to create something that has a strong voice of its own. And the risk we run is that it will feel very dated quickly. The same goes for UX trends. They could not only hamper creativity but, even worse, lead you on to a path towards something that ultimately won’t benefit the users as much as it could.

Lead, don’t follow

Context is king, even if we do find some UI or tech trends that seem useful or exciting from time to time. The only way to get to a truly valuable and relevant product/service is to always consider the context, the people, the needs and what we set out to achieve first! Not trends. We’ll have a higher success rate, and a greater chance to create something that holds over time. And of course, it always feels better to lead than to follow.

This is also why the lists of trends that have actual designers pitching in rightly tend to focus much more on areas of UX that are typically under-invested in, like accessibility or ethics in product and service design. Or advancing general approaches to how we work; that we should/can collaborate more, or how and how much we rely on design systems etc. All very important and interesting areas of course, but hardly UX trends for the new year? There have been strong advocates for most of these since the very start of UX as we know it. And remember, the field of User Experience has been around for some time.

And it will be around for a long time to come, too. So there are plenty of chances to create great, unique, valuable and compelling experiences ahead, in 2018 and beyond. Let’s collectively continue to champion the users and customers, and do our best to make them count!

What do you think? Please share how you use (or disregard) UX trends in the comments!

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“UX trends”. Don’t believe the hype. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“UX trends”. Don’t believe the hype.

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