In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey made a lot of predictions about life in the 21st century.
Kubrick’s future meant casual flights to the moon, AI assistants and sleek video tablets for communication.
Fast forward to 2024.
We might not have a survival-driven murder robot like HAL or Moon bases, but we do have handheld screens with two-way video calling. We're grappling with AI assistants that can drive, interfaces that respond to our gestures, and users who are increasingly wary of the very tech they can't live without.
As tech revs up with advancements in generative AI, cloud computing and biotech, what does the future of UX look like—an industry that designs and enables the interaction between humans and technology?
Let’s be clear, this article isn’t going to be a quick and easy summary with solutions on the 9 ways your UX design career will change in the future. Instead, we are going to do some big picture thinking. We’ll look at what we know of the industry already, the reigning trends of the 2020s, and how work life, priorities and business models MIGHT shift for UX in the next few decades accordingly.
We'll explore how AI is becoming your new co-UXer, why users are getting more paranoid about their data, and how we might soon be designing for thoughts instead of clicks. Plus, we'll look at what all this means for your career - spoiler alert: it's time to become a master of all trades.
If you agree/disagree with these predictions, write to us here with your thoughts. We’d love to hear them!
Tech Trends Reshaping the 2020s
As much as I hate to admit it, you and I don’t decide the industries that end up providing the most jobs today. There are global factors that influence this, stemming from socio-political shifts, cultural and economic inclinations, and whichever shiny toy-esque trend the VC overlords choose to chase.
According to McKinsey’s 2024 report on the top trends in tech, these industries have seen the most adoption, job postings and investments in the past year—- Generative and Applied AI, cloud and edge computing, digital trust and cybersecurity, industrialized machine learning, and advanced connectivity.
Let’s start with the 800-pound gorilla in the room: Generative AI. Gen-AI tools are not just for creating weird art or writing your high school essays anymore, it’s churning out code, designing interfaces, and even running user tests. In 2022-23 alone, venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into generative AI startups, with job postings seeing a +111% increase. But don't worry, it's not here to replace you—just to make you rethink everything you do.
Next on the list is digital trust and cybersecurity. As our gadgets get smarter, users are getting more suspicious. It's not enough to make things look pretty anymore; users need to trust products and feel like their data is safe. The cybersecurity market is set to hit a whopping $366 billion by 2028. That's a lot of padlocks.
Of course, technology isn’t the only factor impacting products and their makers in 2024. Keep in mind the widespread political instability across nations, anxieties about climate change and natural disasters and an increasing mistrust and disillusionment with tech, as seen in the lawsuits and legislations against monopolies like Meta and Google. All of this plays a part in deciding what businesses are aiming to succeed in, the products they’re creating and the markets they’re targeting.
How will this impact the next few decades for UX? We have a few ideas.
3 Predictions for the Future of UX
In UX, the only constant is change—and the occasional user who still can't find the logout button.
That being said, here are 3 big possibilities for future trends in the industry.
1. UX as specialists and discovery guides
As budgets get tighter and priorities shift, we're seeing the rise of more generalist UX practitioners. At the same time, the role of UX experts is evolving to adapt to this new framework.
The AI factor
A big driver of this change is the growing power of AI to automate a lot of the manual, time-consuming UX tasks.
We’re already speeding up the workflow by using AI tools to build prototypes, analyze transcripts, generate affinity maps and tag mountains of data into themes. In fact, it's not hard to imagine a future where AI could even run full usability tests without any human involvement. After all, we already have unmoderated testing—-that’s 80% of the way there!
So the question is - what value do human UX specialists really bring if AI can do a lot of the manual parts of our job?
Our prediction is this. The role of the UX specialist will evolve to focus more on answering high-value, strategic questions that empower the entire organization, instead of tactical tasks like designing a button or usability testing a screen.
From methodology experts to discovery guides
Think of how design completely transformed with the advent of DIY tools like Canva. It’s not a perfect analogy, but essentially a faster, cheaper way for a non-designer to create usable designs. This doesn’t mean that graphic design—a $4 billion industry today, ceased to exist. Highly specialized graphic designers are still in demand, but you also have marketers and sales folks with no design training, creating brochures and Linkedin carousels using such tools.
The UX parallel could look like non-researchers running their own usability tests, leaving the specialized UX talent for tackling the most complex, strategic challenges. Smaller companies will have the ability to create better designed websites. They may even be able to run cheap, automated usability tests on these prototypes.
We’re already seeing this play out, but the change may be more radical as AI plays a bigger role in our lives.
As cross-functional team culture dominates and departments work in tandem to innovate, the UX pro's job becomes more about partnering with the business to facilitate that cross-functional conversation about the customer experience. Big-picture thinking, with big-picture questions. Not just about which button looks best on the sign-up page, or which feature launch will appease the target user best.
AI can tell you what someone said - but it can’t tell you why it matters, or read between the lines to provide path-breaking insights.
UX leader Jared Spool also talks about why strategic research is the future.
More room for generalists
Another side effect of AI tools that can do parts of your job? You need to also adapt and learn to do more, with a more well-rounded skill set.
For dedicated UX professionals, timelines for your work may shorten, as teams expect more to be done faster with AI.
As AI makes it easier for non-experts to handle many UX tasks, the true value of UX pros will be in their ability to guide cross-functional teams, facilitate customer-centric conversations, and tackle the most complex, ambiguous challenges. This new breed of UX expert will need to excel at skills like facilitation, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration.
Balance is crucial
While AI can definitely be a helpful tool, it’s too easy to overly rely on it. UX-ers need to remember to stay actively engaged in the creative process. There's gotta be a balance - using AI strategically, but also keeping those hands-on, imaginative skills sharp. Otherwise, the whole design field could start to feel a little stale and uninspired.
AI generates stuff based on existing data. Without the right datasets to learn from, the outputs it produces tend to be pretty similar and lack that unique, human touch that comes from true creativity and innovation.
2. UX as anticipating the future needs of users
Thanks to AI, things are moving faster than ever in the world of product development.. Previously, we focused on shipping what users want as quickly as possible. As customer expectations evolve rapidly in the AI-era, the role of the UX-er will become to anticipate what users will want in 3 or 6 months. The name of the game now is adaptability, and anticipation.
Anticipating future user needs
We’re in a phase of rapid technological innovation. New things are possible everyday.
In this context, customer needs and expectations are evolving at the speed of light.
Consumers these days have tons of options - there's like a hundred different apps all claiming to solve the same problem. It’s a hyper-competitive landscape, and products that just react to current user needs won't cut it anymore.
The products that stand out are the ones that live in the future. They anticipate the capabilities that users will want, even before the users know they want them. To build future-proof products, UX-ers need to take on a more visionary, proactive role. They’ll need a very strong understanding of what user needs and problems are. That way, when a new AI feature / capability comes out that can meaningfully tackle this problem, this org should be the first one to solve it.
UX needs to look beyond the feature requests and wish lists, and really understand the core human needs driving user behavior—-What underlying problems are users trying to solve? What is technologically possible today? And what is likely to be solved with OpenAI’s next release?
Of course, anticipating future user needs is no easy task.
The UX professional of the future will need to be part futurist, part user psychologist. Anticipating future user needs isn't just about forecasting trends - it's about deeply understanding the human condition and imagining how people's problems and aspirations might evolve.
3. UX for users who are increasingly wary of tech
Another big socio-political shift of the 2020s? Users, regulators, and the general public are becoming increasingly wary of Big Tech, bringing issues like data privacy and cybersecurity to the forefront.
This "tech reckoning" marks a stark shift from the past, when consumers tended to blindly buy into the dreams and promises of the tech industry. Those days of unchecked trust and impunity are quickly fading.
One of the most tangible manifestations of this is the heightened focus on data privacy and security. Your customers are getting more and more concerned about how their personal information is being collected, used, and safeguarded. They'll be much more discerning and demanding when it comes to understanding a product's data practices.
Just look at the increasing popularity of privacy-focused websites, browser extensions, and tools like Privacy For Me that empower users to take control of their digital footprint. There's also a growing awareness and activism around digital rights and the need to hold tech companies accountable.
Regulators are also getting tougher, with landmark legislation like the EU's AI Act setting new regulations for AI systems. So are legislators, as with the class action lawsuit against Google for collecting data from Chrome users without their permission. Platforms like Meta might still retain their monopoly, but there’s also increasing awareness about deceptive practices, behavioral manipulation and the negative impact on mental health for users, especially minors. The era of tech giants operating with complete impunity is coming to an end, and product development will reflect the changes.
It starts with a fundamental shift in mindset—moving away from the "move fast and break things" mentality and towards a much more considered, user-centric approach.
Transparency and trust will be paramount. UX designers and researchers will need to deeply understand their users' concerns around data privacy and security, and then bake those considerations into every aspect of the product experience. Things like clear privacy policies, intuitive data control settings, and transparent data use practices will be essential.
Product makers and UX-ers will need to think holistically about the human consequences of the products they design - not just the features and functions. How might this tool or platform inadvertently contribute to problematic behaviors or unintended harms? What safeguards and guardrails need to be put in place?
Wrapping up
The key to thriving in the future of UX? Stay curious, stay flexible, and never stop learning. Embrace the tech, but don't forget the human touch. Be ready to wear many hats – researcher, designer, strategist, futurist – sometimes all in the same day.
AI might take over some of the grunt work, but that just frees researchers and designers up to focus on the big-picture stuff. You get to be the ones who figure out how to make tech work for people, not the other way around.
Users are getting more skeptical of tech. But isn't that a good thing? It pushes product makers to create products that are more ethical, more transparent, and ultimately more useful.
Who knows? Maybe in a decade or two, you'll be designing interfaces for space colonies or brain-computer interfaces. Whatever comes next, UX will be right there, making sure it all makes sense for us mere humans.
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