 Now, it's time to talk about the transformation of the design industry. We have Steve Fadhan among us, who is the head of research for measurement at Google. Steve is here to talk us about how the design industry and UX as a discipline are shaping up. So please welcome Steve, our data whisperer. Huge round of applause, everyone. Thank you, Armin. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for, wow, this is cool. The timer is changing. This is great. Just for those of you don't know, there's a timer up here. There are slides here, except you can't use Google Drive for the slides. So I'm winging it. I'm assuming I know my slides well enough to know what's behind me. But if you notice me looking back, it's because I have no notes and I can't see this screen. So despite that, I think we'll be able to pull this off. Thank you, everybody, so much for participating. I'm going to chew into my own time, and I promise I'm not going to run over. But I would just like to have a round of applause for the volunteers, for Kaladar Bapu and the other leadership of UX India. I think this is a wonderful conference. You might know this is my fifth time here, so I keep coming back. And I just love it here. But this time I'm coming back as part of my current company, which means, whoops, which means, oh, I'm pressing the wrong button. There we go. So I just have to give a brief shout out to Google. For people who are interested in pursuing careers in UX, in Google we have five different roles, designers, researchers, program managers, engineers, and writers and content strategists. So if you want to learn more, definitely check out the careers link. It's always changing. There's always new job opportunities coming online across multiple sites, including here in India. All right, so now I'll talk about what I was here to talk about. As Oppen mentioned, I'm talking about the transformation of our industry. And I wanted to deliberately name this enterprise research and design trends because that is absolutely my bias. I want to point out the fact that I've worked in Western organizations my entire life. So obviously your mileage may vary in terms of my ability to predict the future of what's going to happen. But I do see a number of trends and themes that I think are important for us to think about as we envision the future of the UX and design industry as we know it. Another bias that I have is for the last 10 years I've worked in the Bay Area. So the San Francisco Silicon Valley bubble, as we like to call it. I think we have unprecedented access to technology fields, but we absolutely have our own point of view on it. And that view is not necessarily true for other parts of the world. So please, as we say in the US, think of this, actually we don't, we probably say this everywhere. Take this with a grain of salt. I'm sorry for the beep. Whenever I press this, it beeps. Let's talk about some of the fundamental changes we're seeing in UX across the world. One is the notion described here by Michelle Stule of Forbes. A superbly designed product sells itself. I remember 20, 30 years ago, we were fighting for the right to be able to run a usability test. Just to make sure that software we were designing actually had a fighting chance of being okay for the end user when we shipped the product. Now most companies have usability as an expectation. In fact, one of the trends I'll talk about is we're going to see usability is actually starting to go away. It's being seen as a basic, it's a given. Why would we waste time with a researcher doing usability testing? Maybe there's a way we can offload that to AI like Randy was potentially predicting for the future. So as we move toward a world where companies accept as an axiom the benefit of design, we're starting to see more and more data supporting that proposition. These findings are from a study done by McKinsey and Company. They published it last year. And it was done by looking at 300 companies, large companies, and looking at over two million pieces of data, 100,000 transactions that happen within the company to identify what kinds of design related actions and activities lead to shareholder value and revenue. And what they found was, thank you for the slides, what they found was analytical leadership is one of the top priorities for generating revenue and shareholder value. Basically UX and design thinking starts from the top and it must cascade down. It's not sufficient to have a team or a group just responsible for UX. It has to be driven by somebody in leadership. Also talent needs to be cross-functional. UX can't be a thing that just lives within a little department. Everyone needs to be a design thinker. Everyone needs to be a researcher. Everyone needs to have an analytical mindset. If you're not asking questions like show me the data, then that's a problem for the organization. Continuous iteration is also critical. You need to have exposure and opportunities to interact with people and users regardless of your job description and regardless of where you are in your organization. And then finally, user experience needs to be multi-channel. It needs to be cross-device and across platforms. You can't think of a user experience as we're designing for a mobile app. You need to think about the entire service experience. You need to think about the cross-channel experience. Excuse me. These four themes are key drivers of value for shareholders and for companies and they're all tied to design, which is awesome. And it also identifies the importance of leadership in user experience. This quote here from the McKinsey authors say, many of the key drivers call for company-level decisions and investments. You can't do that with a design team or with a research group. You need somebody in the C-suite to be driving that. And as a result, we're seeing a rise of articles like these. What is behind the rise of the chief design officer? The rise of UX leadership. Why do we have so many design-minded people sitting in the C-suite? It's not just because of media related to people like Steve Jobs, it's because it's good business and it helps companies create shareholder value and revenue. As a result of these investments, we're seeing greater investments in user experience. This is an article from TechCrunch where they looked at the trend over the last five years from 2012 to 2017 of the number of designers to developers and how those ratios are starting to level out. So you'll notice on the left-hand side, that's the number of designers. On the right-hand side, that's the number of developers in the organization. IBM, 72 developers for every designer back in 2012. By 2017, eight. That's a huge increase in terms of design capacity for an organization. And we're seeing that across the industry. To hire good designers, founders have to battle over them. It's only going to get worse, says Dillon Field, co-founder of Figma. And what we're seeing as a result is major changes in terms of how companies think about design. It's not just, I need one designer. I need an entire ecosystem of people who are design-minded. I need information architects. I need creatives. I need researchers. I also need people who understand data and metrics, all dedicated to understanding the value of design and user experience. Because of these expectations, it makes me feel a lot better because a lot of my students, when I'm teaching, don't come to me asking, hey, how do I become a full-stack UX unicorn? And I say, there's really no such thing as that. You have to identify what your passion is and realize that design is multifaceted and you need to really develop expertise. In fact, just today I was talking to some folks and they said, what would you recommend somebody who's just coming out of college? My advice is declare your major, have a focus, be an expert. Don't worry about this full-stack nonsense. In fact, Nielsen Norman and many other authors are starting to publish articles like these talking about the fact that this idea that there are those UX full-stack unicorns out there, that's really a myth. And it's a myth propagated by companies that don't wanna pay the money required to create teams of design-minded, skilled professionals to actually do good UX. If I can save money by just hiring one person who claims that they can do research, analytics, design, testing, implementation and prototyping, wow, I've just saved the budget for 10, 20, 30 people. That's not the way to do it. Nielsen goes and says, forcing one person to do it all is a prescription for mediocrity. And I think the McKinsey data support this. So as a result of all these trends, we're seeing really interesting job expansions. Robert Haff international sites UX designer as one of the hot jobs. CNN Money identifies design and research within user experience as emerging job roles on the top 100 list of careers. UX Design Institute has published articles to recruit people because UX Design Institute is like a certification center. And they said, if you're thinking about a career, now is definitely time to get started. Organizations like UX Design Institute, Jared Spool Center Center, organizations like the, I think, Design Boat out here. And other schools that give specialized knowledge in UX are starting to pop up all over the place. And part of that's because we just don't have enough UX people available for companies to hire. So let's talk about some of the contextual implications and trends that are happening. The first trend I wanna talk about is the role of metrics. Now people who know me know that I've worked in analytics for a while, but I'm a cognitive psychologist and an engineering psychologist is the name of my dissertation. But I focus on data. And for quite a long time, back in the 80s and 90s, we always wanted to know what's the magic number? Is it net promoter? Is it customer satisfaction? Is it some quality score? And now we're hearing more and more organizations saying, regardless of the number, what does it mean? What's the thick description behind this number? Why did the customer give us that net promoter rating? Why did the individual make this complaint or that complaint? Where were they in their stage of the customer journey? More and more we're seeing the importance of emotions over functionality. This is the hierarchy of user needs from Aaron Walter. Basically what he says is it's great to have things like functionality, reliability and usability. But if we don't also think of the emotional impact of our products that give us pleasure, it could be hedonic pleasure or it could be values, ideological pleasure, then we're missing the boat in terms of our user experience goals. We have to think about aesthetic appeal. We have to think about ways to reaffirm our humanity and our connection to one another and respect our values in order to demonstrate what is actually a pleasurable experience for the products we're designing. At the end of the day, emotions and values matter. And I think it's really critical for us to understand and to realize that emotions and values change based on context, which is why we're seeing multiple calls over the last five, 10 years from design thinkers saying focus on empathy. Make sure your entire team understands how people think and how people feel because if we understand how our users feel at specific points in their journey, maybe we'll have a better chance of making the correct decisions when we're not able to take the time to do the research necessary or due to the design necessary to truly understand what to build. This is a video from a research agency called Standby, STBY, they're out of Europe. And they focus on doing ethnographic techniques like these videos to demonstrate just what it's like to be in the user's shoes. And I find them fascinating. This is just an animated GIF. If you look at the actual video, it's a real video and I'll stop it. I'm gonna go back to this slide because it makes me nauseous to watch it for too long. I think being able to truly understand what it's like to be in people's shoes gives us a greater capacity for empathy. There's an interesting study that was done by a collection of researchers from the University of Michigan a couple years ago. They did a meta-analysis of several thousand studies sorry, several hundred studies looking at several thousand students that were tracked from 1979 all the way to 2009. Different students, but they were all assessed using an empathy scale and what they realized was empathy has been steadily declining over the years with the biggest, most profound declines happening after the year 2000, especially around 2002 to 2005. And they find it to be an interesting correlation that that's when mobile phones started to become more ubiquitous. The iPhone was launched in 2007 I believe and if we think about how much time we deploy attention to our mobile devices I'm very mindful of the fact that I have two mobile phones in my back pocket right now and I'm trying to make my brain not ask myself am I getting any notifications? With these constant distractions we might be impinging on our ability to actually empathize with each other which is why videos like this can help bring our teams back to the basics. And also the importance of understanding the full journey that we take. A journey that your customers have with your product or service doesn't start when they log in or when they onboard. It starts when they first become aware that your product exists. It starts with awareness and discovery and then with exploration and eventually hopefully commitment and then hopefully engagement and then ultimately re-engagement and then unfortunately or maybe fortunately if we've planned it that way they leave. So what is the experience through the entire arc of that journey? And more importantly now what are the emotions that users feel as they go through these experiences? And we're starting to see a lot of journey maps. The illustration on the right hand side is from one of my coworkers back at Salesforce where she and other coworkers were looking at how do we map emotions as part of the customer journey of a person using our software? Unfortunately these contacts and the growth of the importance of UX and design come with a series of concurrent tensions that have been caused. One tension, as you can see I've really fell in love with the animated GIF for this presentation. One tension is this tug of war of ownership. Who owns UX? As a researcher I find this fascinating because we all have little pockets of data but even for design teams I'm noticing these tensions. Classically we had tensions and I'll just leave that slide so people don't get too distracted by it. We had tensions based on your role. Are you an engineer? Are you in sales? Are you in marketing? Are you in design? Who owns the user experience? I think it's even worse for researchers but granted I'm biased because we have many data sources. We have customer satisfaction. We have loyalty. We have data science information. We have logs showing usage data. We have qualitative information coming in for observations, even usability studies. We have quant information coming in through things like pricing surveys and looking at what features go together best for certain needs. As a result ownership of UX has become less of a team sport in some companies and more of a silo game where we decide maybe it's the chief marketing officer who should own it or the chief product officer or the chief engineer. And only recently have we seen a rise of leadership positions where we have user experience officers or vice presidents of user experience who own this data. And I think this points to a need for collaborative ownership which reminds me of the parable of the blind men and the elephants. I'm sure most of you have heard of this but the idea is that there were a group of blind men touching different parts of the elephant coming to conclusions with what it was they were touching and the one who was touching the ear thought maybe it's a banana tree because it feels like a leaf. The one touching the tail. I think it's rope because it feels very thready but because I couldn't see the full picture they weren't able to really understand what they were perceiving. So from a user experience perspective that's the same thing happens when we take a siloed approach. If we only look at serviceability what tickets are coming in with customer complaints or we only look at usability or we only look at data coming in from the logs. We don't see the full picture. We have to collaborate. Ray Crock, founder of McDonald's is well known for saying none of us as good as all of us and I think that's especially true for the UX game. We have to understand user experience as a team. As a result we're seeing a trend. I'm seeing this in research. There's absolutely a trend toward mixed methods. An expectation that researchers will not only produce but also be skilled in how to do different kinds of research techniques. This is why I encourage students to become an expert at something. Absolutely be a generalist but you need to have expertise. So if you have an expertise in, I don't know, interviewing then also become familiar with loyalty measures like net promoter score or satisfaction or survey metrics. So you can start looking at how do I tie all of these data points together to give me better data. There's another tension happening in our field and that is job roles are changing. There's this really provocative article in Fast Company entitled five design jobs that won't exist in the future. I love it. It's mostly click bait. It's not as I'm terrifying as it sounds. But notice the last job that they're predicting that won't go away. I mean that will go away in the future. UX design. Wait, didn't Randy just say that UX design was gonna be the most demanded, the fastest growing need that we have? And I think what's really happening is a fake out. The authors of this message, designers from Teague basically said the design community has played fast and loose with the title UX designer. It jumps between disparate responsibilities, tools and disciplines. So what's going to happen is we're not gonna see a departure of UX design. It's we're going to see a departure as UX design as a job hiring role. And they're going to get a lot more specific. Instead of UX design, meaning graphics design, creative, interaction design, icon jockey, we're going to see people who are actually looking for very specific needs and very specific talents based on how things are changing in our organizations. And what this looks like has been populated by what we're seeing in virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Virtual interaction designers is one prediction from this report. AI design specialists. We have them now for conversational agents. Why not have them for everything else? Specialist material designers and organizational designers to help product be designed better with an eye toward how an organization should be structured. And then the thing I love the most about this is post-industrial designers. Designers who know that when you create a product or a service, you're not just creating an app or a tool. You're actually creating a part of an ecosystem. So you're going to have to understand how the API works. You're going to have to understand what does the ecosystem look like? So if I created an app for an iPhone or an Android or some other device, what other devices is it interacting with? What does the internet of things look like with this device added to it? And then how do other people react to those changes? The last piece I'll talk about is the design strategist, which points to a need for strategic thinkers. I think for a long time we've trained our designers and our researchers to really build expertise and skills that could be deployed tactically. But as you heard Ken talk about in his discussion and also his workshop about design systems, tactics is really just part of a toolkit. It's what the strategy is for a design system that decides whether or not you can flex and deal with things like complete redesigns of systems. I think futures thinking and strategic thinking will become a wave of the future. We don't really have this right now, I think in UX. Right now we have future institutes and labs that are focusing on these things. But I believe this will become a core requirement for UX designers and researchers in the future. And this isn't about predicting the future by looking into a crystal ball. This is about taking our current trends today and extrapolating how they're going to change a little by little over the next 20 years. We know that 20 years ago, let's see if I can reach into my pocket, these things did not exist. And if you look at funny movies with car phones from 20 years ago, they were like the size of shoeboxes. So let's extrapolate that trend. These might go away and they'll become so miniaturized they'll probably just become part of our person. Maybe even embedded, like in our ear. The displays might be embedded in a contact lens. And it's not too hard to see many science fiction movies that show these types of predictions. So we're gonna need people who understand how to work with this complexity and how to deal with VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And people who are trained to think this way are gonna be absolutely prepared to excel and help their organizations be better. We also see the rise of the need for insights and foundations. In research, instead of being called in to solve a problem, is this task usable? Is it possible for my user to achieve this using our product? We have more and more research teams saying, I want insights. I don't really care that much about is this task usable? I care more about what should we build over the next two years? And what questions are we not asking but we should? And as I deal with students who are graduating from universities coming into career, I notice a real struggle because they're not being trained to think that way. And so for those of us in industry who are being required to train foundational research, it's a struggle. So organizations that can leapfrog that I think will have a leg up. We're also seeing design systems over local solutions. As Ken mentioned, many design systems still are local solutions. They're pattern libraries, they're style guides. But the real good design systems, and I'll highlight Google's material as well as Salesforce Lightning Design. Granted, super biased because I've worked at both of those organizations. I think these are design systems that put principles first. They basically say, we stand for this and here's how we're going to achieve it and here's how that might change over time. They have to be flexible and fluid. A last theme I wanna talk about is teamwork and diversity. Now there is so much data out there. It's no longer contested that diverse teams actually do better than homogenous teams. Boards with women and people of mixed race and ethnicity are actually more profitable than boards that have people who all look the same. Diversity matters and diversity improves how we operate. And I think that is a great opportunity to bring up the off-sided quote from Reed Hastings, do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high. So if you are a brilliant jerk, congratulations. Go be a freelancer. Don't take down my team or my company. So thanks. I think we need as a result to really start embracing cross-functional team ownership. There are still debates about whether or not it's appropriate for the product manager to do research or for the engineer to be engaged in a design sketching exercise on the whiteboard. My response is, oh, the more the merrier, it's a big tent because the more people we can get engaged in design thinking and ideation and empathy, the faster we can make better decisions. And we're seeing a rise of this in many organizations. So I'd like to close with some implications and considerations. Because I work at Google, I want to pose these as some how-might-weas that we can think about as we move on. One is we need to follow a code. We, as a UX organization, do not have a code. We have codes of ethics, especially for researchers, but UX design itself does not have a code. There's a great article by Dorothy Shimanski in UX Magazine where she says, we can actually look toward architecture, a field, a design field that's been around for a long time. From the well-living standards codes that are looking at how do we build built spaces to promote people and support people, to support connections, to support mind and community. We could learn a lot from this as we think about building our own code. Also, represent our user's values. How do we keep our users front and center? Because after all, we say user experience and user-centered design, but it's really us. We're the users. So as Jane Fulton Surrey from IDEO is starting to say, it's really not user-centered design, it's life-centered design. So how do we keep the values of life and ecosystem at the forefront? And so how might we develop principal design systems that defend our users? This is from an article where they found over 1,000 shopping sites engaging in dark patterns just to get clicks or just to get people to inadvertently purchase something. How might we fully inform our users and implement strategies to educate people about trade-offs? Both Google and Apple have initiatives to show users how much they're using their data and their systems, as well as recommendations for maybe how to better balance that. I think that's a good first step. I don't think it's the end. We also need to understand the full design, the full impact of our designs. If you look at landfills, you can see that we have tons of e-waste that's being generated. And as we use cloud-based systems, we often don't think about the amount of heat and electricity that is being generated and consumed in data centers. So how might we extend our design thinking and our empathy toward human values that guide our organizations? And how might we encourage design and research toward affirming our humanity and our connectedness when we know that that's a problem? And then finally, how might we prioritize sustainability in our design systems and our foundational research studies? The last thing, because I'm also an educator, I wanna say that we need to bond together to figure out how to address our skills gap. We have Oasis right now, places like Hyderabad, Bangalore, where I work in Silicon Valley, California. Those are like Oasis. Lots of jobs, lots of designers all in one place, but most of the world doesn't look like that. John Dennehy of Recruiting Firm says, UX is one of the most difficult roles for companies to fill. There's a shortage of experienced professionals, so demand is currently outstripping supply. Jacob Nielsen is predicting a 100-fold increase in the number of jobs in our field by the year 2050. If he's right, how are we gonna get there? We can't get there with our current institutions because we're just not pumping out students fast enough. We can't even get there with the certification companies like Design Boat or UX Design Institute or Center Center, so we need to bond together. So how might we partner with each other to develop mentoring programs? How might we explore new ways of working to share critical talent where needed? Maybe there's a rotation program where a large company has a designer who then rotates into a startup and then rotates into a nonprofit. Sounds crazy, but maybe we could try it. And then finally, how might we foster strategic and futures thinking? How might we make sure that our next generation of design leadership thinks about the future and future scenarios for their teams and the consequences of their work? So to recap in my final 35 seconds, I want you all to take action. Ask yourself, which how might we can I take back to my school, to my office, to my organization, to my family? Which one can I do to make the world a better place for design and for all people as we move toward life-centered design? Thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. I know your room is full with all the momentos that you have collected from UX India, but we won't let you go without collecting one more. So I would like to welcome Mr. Kaladar Bapu, founder UX India. Thank you, my friend. Don't leave us. Don't scare us like you did this morning. Put this in here. Where's Beth? Huge round of applause, everyone. Hello. Thank you, Steve.