- During our July virtual UX conference,
Jakob Nielsen held a Q and A session.
He was asked to describe his hopes and concerns for the
field of UX, as we all adjust to a post-pandemic reality.
- I think mainly I do have a lot of hopes because I think
that the need for our work is even more so the case now
that more things are virtual, more things are computerized.
And also as new processes have to be invented or designed,
you might say, to do things in different ways.
And so for example, service design,
which is one of our big issues we talk about at the
conference here, that's really important.
And that's the way you can design these services to work
better than they did in the past.
And for sure better than they would have.
If people just say, Oh, let's just put a camera up.
Well, that's just the first step.
You've got to actually do much more than that
for let's say telemedicine or any,
any other application, really.
You've got to think of it as a service design problem.
And also of course, anything that you do do on the screen,
but that's classic user interface design,
and we need to really enhance our collaboration technologies
in, in companies.
So there's a very,
very large challenge there
and challenge is opportunity, right?
It's just two ways of thinking about it.
So really big opportunities for good UX work in helping
companies really become more productive
under the circumstances.
So this is a lot of internal work in
IT departments in doing better digital workplace support in,
in this environment.
And also of course, in terms of, of products
that are being developed for the open market.
I mean, we are using Zoom right now and it's,
it's, it's nice.
I mean, honestly, it's better than it was before.
That's why we're using it for this conference,
but you can also still tell it's kind of primitive and
much more could be done and again that's our opportunity.
At the same time,
I think there's also some downsides of some,
some fears I would say.
One is just simply that we are in a bad recession
and I'm sure some people will lose their jobs
as a result.
I'm actually not that worried about that specifically
for UX people,
because this is such a growth field that there's going to be
other jobs.
So yeah, people will lose their jobs.
Some of us will, but then other jobs will be there for us,
other, other disciplines are in much worse trouble
in that respect.
But what we are a little bit in trouble on the other hand is
that our field relies so much on that tight connection to
the users.
And I do have that fear that we might lose some of our user
context now that we are in isolation and we can do a lot
of great work remotely.
We actually have at our next conference,
we have a course on remote usability testing that that Kate
is actually teaching.
So we have a lot of things we can,
we can absolutely do and stay in touch with our users.
We have to remember to do that and not just be, be isolated.
Then there's also all our creativity type of things,
all these inventions that we had to do and again that can
also be supported in a virtual environment.
But I do feel a little bit that we're not always getting
quite the same as in person.
So there's, I think some, some fierce narrative,
we just gotta be aware of that and work that much harder to
overcome them and be sure to stay in touch with our users,
be sure to be, have creative meetings with our colleagues.
And then as I said,
fulfill this vastly enhanced demand for user experience,
for service design, for all the things that we know
how to do becoming a much,
have always a big part of the world economy and of,
of growing businesses.
But it's even more so now that basically almost
almost everything you know, is, is,
has become virtual and it's driven through a user interface.
So it's not just even the user interfaces,
like the interface to the world economy, you might say.
And so it's our job to, to enhance that.
And that's a great opportunity I think.