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7 ways UX practitioners can remain relevant in a world of uncertainty
“Life moves on and so should we” ― Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?
Over the last decade, the activities and functions once associated with User Research and Design have morphed and permeated into countless other functions. These functions have faddish transient titles such as Product Owners, Marketing, Evangelist, Market Insights, Data Analytics — the latter more so of late, especially given the privileging of big data over small data. It is fair to say that Design Research and UX Design is going through something and that “something” is nothing new — there is a changing of the guards in terms of what constitutes User Experience Research and who practices UX; but, sadly many of my peers have not accepted this change and that is okay but at what cost? Like everything in life — seasons change and it is due time we all moved on to what’s next.
The glaring phenomenon of “UX guard changing” has left many longtime UX practitioners in a constant state of fearful catch-up and course correction just to adjust to the onslaught of a privileging of big data, AI and Machine Learning (ML). And this is even more complicated in a world of hyper-interactive digital moments that often de-privileges the slower cycled UX researcher feedback. The once manual labour of…
