Future of UX Design with Artificial Intelligence around?

Careers & Mentoring
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#1

Hello,

An opinion of a writer shown below is a bit worrying… I have been considering studying and getting into a UX Design career for some time now. I am wondering what insight you guys might have as UX professionals with experience. Any sources that you can provide would be useful.

How do you see the future of UX design?

It’s going to end… at least the way we do it now. Sorry ‘bout it.

The time for making money pushing pixels around is almost up, and we’ll lose our jobs much faster than we expect. Generative design and Ai will be such a game changer for planet scale products. Websites will stop existing as we know them today and question answering will be handled dynamically and in real time by bespoke Ai systems.

Designing one-size-fits-all interactions just won’t cut it in the future, and customers will demand interactions that are personal, unique, and immediate. Scrolling through apps and websites to get information into your brain? Aint no body got time for that!

UX designers as we know them today will go the way of the dodo (remember flash developers? yeah… just like them).

If you have the time and the energy for a strategic pivot, I’d be heading in the direction of some careers like these:

  • Avatar Designer — Suggested by Glen Murphy (Android/ Chrome)
  • Cybernetic Director — Suggested by Matias Duarte (Google)
  • Digital Conductor — Suggested by Bill Buxton (Microsoft)
  • Nanotech Designer — Suggested by Carl Bass (Autodesk)
  • Fusionist — Suggested by Asta Roseway (Microsoft)
  • Organ Designer — Suggested by Gadi Amit (New deal design)
  • Interventionist — Suggested by Ashlea Powell (IDEO)
  • Ethnographic Designer — Suggested by me.
  • Emotion Designer — Suggested by me.

Andrew Doherty — CEO, Another.ai] Berlin, Germany
Formerly Product Design Manager at Google, Mountain View
Source: https://uxplanet.org/how-do-you-see-the-future-of-ux-design-8654c62c3279

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#2

I’d be interested in hearing what the @Experienced-UXers think here but I’d like to see some evidence to back up his pretty sweeping statement!

#3

Honestly, the last 3 are definitely strongly within the wheelhouse of UX.

As someone who works in the AI space, its important to consider the reality of AI rather than the hype. What it is, so far and into the moderate future, is more advanced pattern recognition. We’re building more advanced statistical systems that can see (certain types of) problems better than we can. As usual, they’re heavily constrained by the way you ask them a question, so you have to be careful how you ask, and they’re very prone to the Garbage In / Garbage Out problem. So much of the heavy enthusiasm surrounding AI is based on people just fitting their models and failing to validate their designs via actual testing.

I think that the human elements of design and evaluation are going to grow in need, not shrink. There are too many different technical disciplines that take the role of physics and “assume spherical humans”.

The one area in which I see less opportunity, in general, is in generalized interface design. We’re building better tools and better frameworks for the rapid production and testing of prototypes, and the tools that we’ve seen over CMS’s and more standardized frameworks have definitely streamlined a lot of the process that was guess work before.

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#5

Also, for anyone who wants a good dive into the role of statistical models and problem solving, I highly recommend reading the first chapter of [Statistical Rethinking – Richard McElreath] (first chapter is free online). The ‘golem’ model is infinitely reusable for understanding how these tools generate insights.

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#6

I think the article contradicts itself a little because this sentence emphasizes the importance of creating user-centered experiences (which is what UX is all about).

As technology evolves, user needs change as well, so as UX designers our role is essential to continue creating products and interfaces that adapt to user needs. Will visual interfaces look the same as they do now? Probably not. But UX design isn’t just about interfaces or even a specific type of interface. So even if we wouldn’t be designing websites (quoting the article), we would still be designing something else.

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#7

One of the most helpful, human and humorous commentaries I’ve seen on this topic was given by Bill Derouchey at UX Australia 2018 in his Design Careers in the Science Fiction Future talk.

What I took away was a sense of generations of designers having specific contexts, skills and strengths, played out over life their stages. It was a thinking reset: grounding, affirming and made most people think positively about their potential into the future.

#8

Another well-considered commentary was at a Q&A evening with Elizabeth Churchill (Director of UX at Google and VP at ACM) hosted by OzCHI and UX Melbourne.

@shanemo was also there and very articulately asked this same, burning question about generative design and the future of designers.

In her response, Elizabeth suggests there are likely to be ‘screens’ and very specific requirements for interactions for a very long time to come, that expertise in information layout will still be critically needed, but that the current process and methods and tooling we use to achive that must transform (and that we as UXers should be leading the charge for that). She reminds us that we are so much more than just experts in the tools used to create interactions and experiences. See the question and Elizabeth’s answer in the video recording, starting from 9m50s.