- At our Q and A session
during our New York Virtual UX Conference,
several attendees asked Jakob Nielsen
to give his thoughts on how the field of UX
will change due to the current pandemic
and which industries may experience increased demand for UX.
- Evolution doesn't stop.
Or technology evolution doesn't stop.
And so there will be new things invented.
What will be the big things in five years?
That's hard to say.
But there will be something.
That's, I think, it's pretty much guaranteed.
I think that in the shorter term,
so while this COVID pandemic is happening,
I think that the kind of realistic expectations,
probably that we are all going to be about
30 percent poorer than we were before.
You know, just because everything works much more.
First of all, companies are closed, right?
And secondly, even the people who are not closed,
or they work from home,
for most people it's just not nearly as productive.
And so, as an overall impact on the world
everybody's about 30 percent poorer.
But you know, that sounds not so nice.
Truth is that 30 percent poorer,
that means that in the U.S. we're back
to where we were, in standard of living,
about 20 years ago.
20 years ago, Don and I already started Nielsen Norman Group
we were operating and we did good projects.
On Europe, maybe it's like how it was 30 years ago.
Well I lived in Copenhagen 30 years ago
and that was pretty nice back then.
So it's not necessarily so bad to be
reduced in your standard of living by 30 percent
you know, there's still UX.
There's still user experience,
There's still the science going on.
There was back when we were at that level of income before.
I mean, it's certainly very bad for developing countries.
That's a very different and very sad story, right?
I mean, I think the expectation's that
about 300 million people in the world will be reduced
to extreme poverty who had otherwise escaped.
The happiest news for the last 20 years
is one billion people got out of extreme poverty.
But now about 300 million are gonna get back into that
because of the economic slow down.
And so that's not so happy.
But if you just think about,
and so maybe about 50 million people will die
because of reduced, you know, economic circumstances.
But that's in the developing world.
In the rich world being 30% poorer
doesn't mean we die, right?
It just means that we are back to where we were before
and that is a little bit bad for UX
because UX is partly a luxury,
and it's only partly
but people can more afford to demand high quality,
which means great user experience,
when they're rich.
And so when they're 30% poorer,
you know, it's gonna get a little bit more back to basics
and let me just get stuff that works
rather than stuff that works well
but I do think that it's a little bit different
then to say well we're gonna be back to where we were
20 years ago, back where we were 30 years ago
because there has been those 30 years
and those 20 years.
They've happened, people have experienced that
so they've gotten used to higher quality products.
So I think that even if they're poorer
they will still like higher quality products
and so I still think there will be that need
for user experience to create, you know, high quality
in different type of interactions.
But also remember that that's only half of what UX does
is create higher quality.
The other half of what UX does
is creates higher productivity.
And that is in fact one of the ways we can get
the world economy back again
is that we can have higher productivity.
And so right now, the main productivity challenge
is this entire work from home scenario
where people are not as productive as they used to be
and, you know, that is,
I think there's many reasons to that.
But one of the reasons is certainly,
it relates to things like
what different software tools are
and so we have not had as much, maybe,
attention on collaboration software in the past
but now it's become a much more critical thing
and so that could be worthy of a lot more UX attention.
And just all the things that we've always done
in terms of improved productivity
are still gonna be more so in demand.
The poorer companies are,
the more they will want to crank out results.
And therefore, they should anyway,
invest more actually rather than less in UX.
You know, the more it becomes critical for them
to have higher productivity
and then creates their value.
But that again goes back to,
we had to like, argue for that
or demonstrate that if you do better design
in our way of thinking of what's better design,
you're actually gonna get more output.
Which I believe is true,
but, I mean, not everybody believes that
so we have to keep arguing that point.
I think that's even more so true in this scenario.
And this scenario's after all going to continue for,
it's hard to say how many years,
but, you know, two years work from home scenario,
probably something like that
before, if we're lucky, we get a good vaccine, right?
Most people say that's about one and a half
to two years away.
So that's a long time, so we kind of say
well, you know, let it keep going.
No, we've gotta make it better.
That's our field, we know how to make knowledge work better.
- Thank you.
And I think we may have time
just for this one last question that came in,
just kind of around
what industries do you think will experience
some sort of increased demand for UX in the future?
- Well, in the very short term future
I would say it's probably something like the work from home
and collaboration software
because that really can have a lot of big improvements.
But other than that,
I do think that a lot of entertainment oriented areas
can benefit a lot from increased better improved UX,
you know?
And that I think is one of our next frontiers.
It's always, video games we've always sort of,
partly I will say, conquered
or turned around to the UX thinking.
There's a lot of games research,
games usability type of activity
because the games people,
they used to be very against this.
They used to be okay, you know,
the hardcore gamers they all care only about like,
boom boom boom, shoot shoot the monsters or whatever.
But after a while they discovered
in that if people can figure out how to shoot the monster,
why if I'm shooting like this
and not shooting like that it works.
That makes a game much more enjoyable
and so in recent years,
I would say recent is maybe the last 10 years or so
there's been a lot of emphasis on,
they don't always call it usability and so on,
but sort of on interaction research in the games industry.
So now we just need to kind of broaden that
into a broader set of,
it's sometimes called experience economy,
so just needs to like make that extra twist
that experience and user experience,
are really just, they're the same, really.
And so we just need
to have our style approach adopted there.