Designlab Q+A: How to Master Trending UX/UI Design Skills

Hired is excited to announce we’re partnering with Designlab, a mentor-led online education program for tomorrow’s leaders in UX/UI design. To help answer some of the questions top-of-mind for future-focused designers, we sat down with Harish Venkatesan, Co-Founder & CEO of Designlab.

Here’s what Harish believes is next for UX/UI design:

The tech industry is evolving rapidly. How can UX/UI designers future-proof their design careers?

HV: Anyone with the right design experience can create “good enough” UX and UI designs. But in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, good enough isn’t going to cut it.

Earning a career in UX/UI design is more popular than ever — it’s an in-demand job that allows design thinkers to be both creative and technical, and the pay is pretty good, too. But as with any up-and-coming career, more popularity means more competition (with both humans and robots).

Designers have finally earned a place at the table—so listen, take notes, and seek to learn from a variety of perspectives on how you can drive business outcomes with thoughtful design. Designers of the future will be generalists—well-rounded professionals with competence in all areas of UX/UI design, including:

Interaction Design
Usability
Behavioral Design
User Research
Content Strategy
Visual Design
Information Architecture
Interface Design

What UX/UI trends should designers be watching?

HV: UX writing is becoming an important skill for designers, but it’s often overlooked. As well as creating meaningful copy to use instead of placeholder text during the design process, designers are increasingly expected to write about their process on the company blog, and to contribute snippets of text for email marketing campaigns or UI mockups.

Many large companies—including Amazon, Google, and Facebook—have UX writers on their teams. In the years ahead, we’re going to see more and more companies embracing this role.

Any predictions for the future of UX/UI in 2020 (and beyond)?

HV: In the past 10 years, UX/UI design has tended to refer to the creation of digital products—usually websites and mobile apps. As we look to the future of UX/UI design, we’ll see UX/UI designers looking beyond digital interfaces and addressing user experience more holistically.

Here are a few predictions for the future of UX/UI design in 2020 and beyond.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being developed to support non-linear, complex tasks that require logic—and, historically, human involvement as well. Luckily, designers will always be needed for the human-centered strategic thinking, but certain aspects of design are likely to become automated.
One billion people, or 15% of the world’s population, experience some form of disability. Recently, the United States Supreme Court began allowing blind people to sue retailers if their websites are not accessible. In the coming years, designing for accessibility and inclusion will become a stringent requirement, not just a “nice-to-have”.
Voice user interfaces will become more important in our interactions with televisions, music players, and in-car phones and dashboards, but will remain largely ignored on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Chatbots continue to have useful applications, for example in online customer service. But user frustrations with these systems will mean that companies offering a “real human” will be able to trade on that added value.
Most services will no longer require you to remember passwords, but will instead use only verification codes and other secure authentication methods. As effortless authentication becomes a user expectation, companies will need to overhaul the UI design of the authentication process.
Demand for UX design will expand to innovators tackling the small irritations of daily life—like remembering medication, having to struggle to find your keys to the front door, or choosing one of the 100 programs on your washing machine. Whatever you find frustrating in your everyday life, that’s probably where UX designers will be needed next!

As with any career, the best way to prepare yourself for an evolving workforce is to stay up-to-date on the latest software and tools, best practices, and new discoveries. At Designlab, we offer a variety of part-time and full-time courses to help you future-proof your UX/UI design career.

If you’re already well within your design career, Hired can match you with your next dream design job with top companies such as Wayfair, PayPal, Zillow and more at hired.com/designlab.