This was our first week of the module professional practice. We covered employment and what type of design work we would like to do in the industry.
To look further into the industry I started to look at the website UX trends to choose points over the years to review how the field of UX has changed over the years.
In 2018 the headlines revolving around UX were saying that it was dead because of designers moving to different fields of the design sector. Some of the points in the article say that designers were trying different technologies like VR and voice interfaces, another reason was that some were focusing on more specific areas of design like: UX writing, prototyping and motion design.
The next point I decided to look into was about how designers were being encouraged by companies to design the product and also the process and their work environment. It continues to state that in the next decade UX designers will have more of a secondary role due to AI, VR, chatbots and other technologies, visual interfaces will no longer be the main focus as businesses want to see the process of work to create healthy narratives and ecosystems.
One of the points in the 2019 state of UX review is should designers learn to code? one of the replies to this question I think I agree with which is: “the more a designer can speak the language of their developer peers, the better they can collaborate to get a stronger final product”. During 2018 companies like Airbnb have developed internal workflows which allow the designers sketch a user interface and replicate it in code in a matter of seconds.
The next point im looking at is about the obsession with design methods, the article states that research is the step of the process that has suffered the most from canned methodologies. “By being inflexible in our process, we lose our teams trust and make day-to-day a burden rather than a collaborative learning experience”. Joe Munko who is the User Research director at Microsoft states that: “Timeless research is really about building long-term organizational knowledge and curating what you've already learned”. I think these points on research are still relevant and useful as we should continue to analyse and critically think about our work.