Design trends 2023
Design jobs, social media influence, and AI
UX Collective published its annual The State of UX outlook on the year to come, and it doesn’t look too good at least at a first glance.
Here are my takeaways from this report.
Generalists vs specialists
Industry clearly favours generalists.
In reality, it always did.
That’s the reason you got all these “weird” job postings that make you wonder if the company is looking to hire a marketer, business consultant, researcher, designer, developer, a coffee boy, or all the above…
It is not that they don’t understand what UX is, or what UX designers do. They don’t want a specialist. They want a generalist. They want someone who is reasonably good at many things.
It was like that before, it is going to be more like that going forward as companies are looking to cut costs, optimize processes, and deliver just enough to stay afloat.
If you are a working designer you will have to adapt to be relevant.
And if you are still looking to become one you will have to change your learning strategy.
At the core, you still need to do what UX designers actually do but you need to cover more than just design. Consider obtaining and growing the following skills:
growth hacking
coding
leadership
I’ll be covering skills a well-rounded designers should have in the coming weeks. Please subscribe to stay updated:
Social media is not a good influencer
I had this feeling for a long time, and I am glad it was voiced in the report.
Content creators have to cheat the system to get their content to rank (and really to be seen and heard). As a result social media is flooded by superficial content, and superficial teaching produces superficial students.
That’s why I recommend learning from books again and again.
Courses are fine too, but I’d stir clear from Instagram, Twitter and even Youtube as main sources of learning material.
Don’t get me wrong social media is great for discovering resources and getting exposed to ideas. But you have to follow the lead and do the hard work! Read books that influencers recommend. Explore design patterns, trends and techniques. Learn to differentiate between truth and opinions.
AI is fun and scary
Even in the beginning of 2022 I was very sceptical of AI. But then Dall-E came along, and now Diagram and ChatGPT.
And I am impressed!
I asked AI for step by step instructions on how an absolute beginner can learn ux design from scratch:
Not bad for a bot, wouldn’t you say?
And of course, I couldn’t resist a Siri moment:
Sorry, I couldn’t ask a bot if it would marry me, but you can.
AI is getting good, like really good. It is here to stay.
It might take some time for it to replace us at work. Meanwhile we should learn to use all it has to offer.
Enough of my incoherent rambling. Please read the full report when you have time.
And please, please let me know how I am doing. A like, a comment, a short email do wonders to encourage to write more and better. Please also consider sharing. Every bit of exposure helps!
Of course, if you had enough of what I have to say feel free to unsubscribe. I’ll be sad to see you go, but no hard feelings. We all get way too much email these days. I understand.