<aside> ▶️ Every week during this module, I’m going to have a deep dive into the UX trends of a year to help me build my knowledge of the industry. I’m going to work backwards, as I think this will help me understand the trends more and be able to be more insightful when discussing trends.
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The main trend for 2023 is the feeling that a change is happening to the way in which we approach and consider design. Put simply, design is becoming more business-focused than user-focused, which for me is not an idea I like at all. A notable point in the article which really concerned me was this:
“Many designers who started a UX career with the goal of advocating for users are seeing their role shift to one that is focused on boosting company profits at all costs.”
This was really interesting to me as I feel it represents a larger societal issue which is the state of current capitalism. The quote suggests that like so many other industries, UX is beginning to be used purely for profit rather than for the benefit of the people. I believe this is due to two main reasons, the first being a response to the economy, and the second being the way modern capitalism affects business. UX is a new industry which is fundamentally tied to controlling people, and so, it’s unfortunately natural for this to be exploited for business use. While I wish this quote was referring to companies being tighter on the purse strings due to the results of COVID-19, I also feel if you were to look at large companies, this quote is referring to how UX can be used to exploit users, rather than the designers having more time restrictions. While this may sound like a big jump from what the quote first implies, it’s backed up later in the article with this quote:
“There is no place for photos of women laughing alone eating salad, or flat geometric-style illustrations of humans on this new web. Instead of showing how products fit our lives, web3 aesthetics shifts the focus to showing an exciting yet-to-be-explored universe.”
What I think this quote is getting at is the idea that companies no longer simply want you to want to adopt a product into your life, they want you to want that product to become your life. So much advertising and marketing is centred around being explorative and experiences, rather than being a tool for a user. What this does is instil in the user that the product is something for them to live in or around. The biggest want from the companies is to engage the user, as having them engaged allows them to gain their data, which is how they make money. I think when the article says that UX is becoming more profit-driven, it means that it is becoming aimed at keeping engagement and gaining data, rather than time crunching.
Hopefully, this isn’t the case, however, as someone who will soon enter the UX industry, I feel it is important for me to recognise and explore the flaws of the industry as that will allow me to become the designer I want to be.
UX Trends 2022 entry is certainly more optimistic than 2023 and is centred around rebuilding the industry post-pandemic. What’s interesting about how the pandemic affected UX is that because UX is a newer industry, it’s in a really unique place when rebuilding itself. It has far less that it needs to rebuild to and what's great is that the rebuild can be treated more as a rethink rather than saving the industry.
What I found most interesting is how the pandemic has affected how people within the industry consider their work-life relationship. With working from home being the norm for over a year, the mentality around work has changed. The article states UX has become a new “gig”, basically meaning that there are more people going freelance and working in UX in the short term. While this is good for the designers who this works for, I would consider if it’ll have negative effects on clients, especially small clients. When a client goes to a UX studio for work, they can have reasonable confidence they'll deliver, however, this short-term gig approach may make way for clients to get scammed or receive very low-quality work. From the way the article put this, I feel that this isn’t becoming the norm, but rather that it’s becoming an option, which is a good thing as it gives new designers a lot more freedom when it comes to work.
Another big trend from this year was the emergence of content creation as a job. This is largely a good thing as it imposes new standards on social media teams to produce “good content”, and of course, it expands the industry giving new opportunities. However, I feel this is a factor in what snowballed to become the main topic of 2023, that being profit and engagement. By having content creation as a specific job, it’s raising the “personality” of brands, allowing them to entice more users. There is a trend within this at the moment to have brands be personable, laid back, and cheeky, which gives the appearance that someone just let the intern loose on a brand's social media, however, I feel this is a much more planned idea which seeks to gain user engagement by making them see the brand as a person, thus leading to the company gaining data.
I suspected working backwards through the years of trends would give me a unique perspective and I really feel it has. By being able to track back like this, I’ve picked up on how things connect and I’m looking forward to seeing this go further in later entries. I feel I’ve been quite pessimistic in the last two entries, which may be down to my cynicism, but I do think what I’ve written about is important for me to understand. I hope that thinking about this now will allow me to become a designer who isn’t a part of this issue in the future.
Due to the pandemic, the 2021 article is quite different to the rest. Rather than an analysis of the industry, the 2021 entry is a list of 100 design lessons from 2021. After reading through them, I’ve picked out a few to discuss and which I think are relevant when looking at my previous analysis from 2022/23.