 all these new technologies that are emerging and we are discussing where are we headed to and this is really a hot topic that for all US designers and I think I'm not the person to talk about this alone and in fact when I talked to Melissa earlier this year she advised that why don't we do a panel kind of thing where people express their ideas. Right now we have a panelist over there. We have people from e-commerce, John is from e-commerce background, very strong, very strong on UX. Melissa has been in the design industry for a long time in the user experience. She has done lots of things. Then we have Kaitlin who is from, she's from the research agency background, design agency or research agency, sorry, design agency. We have Shiva who has done a lot of work in medical research, user research. We have Shea who is done UX research, she's doing in DBS. Then we have Sula who is from the software industry, he's a project manager at JLL. So we have a mix of people here coming from different backgrounds and a lot of experience. So they will talk about the topic which will be moderated by Melissa and then once this discussion happens you guys can ask questions after the discussion is happening and I will leave it to Melissa to decide whether you can ask a question in between or you need to ask the question after hearing their views. That's your call. But yes, I expect this discussion to be very noisy because I know all of them and all of them are actually good talkers. They can discuss on topics especially UX for a long time and therefore I think it makes sense for me to leave the stage now and then let them here. After this there is this wine appreciation session so don't hurry up. There is enough wine I think and then after that we will call it a close. Okay, any other questions that you have, concerns that you have because after that I'll just run away from here. Okay, none. That means we are doing great. Okay. Yeah, Melissa, welcome, welcome everybody. So we'll try to be on time for you guys because I know it's kind of late, it's the end of the day and you've been through probably three days of amazingness. So today we're going to be talking about UX and AI future like what's the next generation of experience design and I know there's a lot of buzzwords but there's also a lot of real industry about it. We've got about over 90 years of a collective experience up here so as Cool Deep was introducing we've got people from e-commerce back, we have people from finance, we have people from product, digital agency and tech. So what we really want to do is cover like what emerging technologies are impacting their industry, what that means to UX, what that means to our process and what that means to our roles. So we're going to kind of do a Q&A discussion so we'll be talking it's going to be a little holistic and informal as we go. When we finish we'll try to save about 10 minutes if a little bit less to you guys on the floor. If you have any questions you want to ask, if you have hard questions, if you disagree with something please do. All right so before we get started I know that Cool Deep did intros but I'd like for the panelists to be able to introduce themselves so you kind of know who's who up here and how they're going to answer. So my name is Caitlin Robinson I'm a creative director of experience design at RGA and we are a digital ad agency that really focuses in on product and service development. So I've been with the company for just over eight years and I started in our New York office working on North American business before transferring into EMEA and have been here in the APAC region for the last two years. I think my focus has really been on developing product and services for brands like Nike and Samsung as well as companies like NTUC here in Singapore. But the major theme I think for me as a UX practitioner has been how do we actually get to know our global markets and our global customers in a hands-on sort of way in order to build solutions that are ultimately dynamic and personalized to their needs. Hi I'm Che I'm from DBS currently I'm working as UX researcher there. To be honest this is my first job really focusing on user research and previously I was a designer as well like most of the people here and I think user research is actually in the area very getting very popular especially for client side and we are building a huge team here to help us to kind of look into the data analytics to analyze them and also to work with business team to identify the business issues. So my role at DBS is actually predominantly a kind of facilitator in some ways to make sure that these things are happening and then also coordinate with a different country emerging markets like India and Indonesia where we need to focus a lot of what the customers' segmentations are and what they need. I think building an app is easy but understanding what people need is actually very important because sometimes you just build apps that nobody want to use right. So we are facing issues right now with things that just features which are very very common and you know people are having other banks are having the same thing as well. So how do we differentiate ourselves is the next question we are asking ourselves. Hi I'm John Derrigan principle UX consultant I'm currently doing a contract work I've spent quite a bit of time in the UX field but start off in design as probably many UX practitioners have a design and usability so I ran a small design agency with several people in Toronto for about 10 years and then really wanted to dedicate myself to UX and go full in on that and so I was director of technocrat which was a UX agency in Melbourne and also born digital in Melbourne and now recently I've been working in Jakarta and in Ho Chi Minh really focusing on the UX of e-commerce and that's been really interesting. Hi I'm Shiva I have a background in product so both physical and digital have been working in product for the past five six years recently I've shifted to digital like a lot of people. In product I've done both medical products and FMCG consumer product design and recently I've been doing a lot of usability testing both for product and for software all around the world in US, South Africa, Indonesia, Philippines, India. Currently I'm working for a firm called Mindlands Worldwide we do a lot of UX for the government we look at their backend systems and see how we can help them renew and get up-to-date with the rest of the world. Thanks Shiva. I'm Sulep so in my current role I work for APEC region as a project manager and probably I'm kind of odd one out here so my background is developer not designer so probably I can provide a different perspective because I always see there's a there's a gap about utility and usability so someone was talking about app here so of course you want apps who are can be really used so but they should have a functionality so I think probably we would be touching on those that how usability and utility should be combined together to give best user experience to people. Okay thank you so I'm Melissa and I've been working for the last 20 years in experience design I'm currently experience director very similar to Caitlin an agency called Possible but my history before that was a lot of product and you know software as a service as well as now more on the marketing and digital transformation side so like I said you've got some good experience we purposely wanted to get a diverse panel so that we could get a very different point of view from each of these guys. Alright so Caitlin can she have the mic because I'm going to ask you first with the hot seat on you sorry next to me so with the emerging technologies that are hitting and I know this is kind of a little bit of a broad question especially for a global agency because you have multiple types of customers let's just pinpoint what emerging technology that you see that's coming that you feel that's impacting your industry the most. So I think to me the technology maybe that's not impacting us today but I think that will quickly start to impact us in pretty huge ways is the blockchain and I think that that's because the blockchain pretend let me back up a second and say a lot of what this panel is going to talk about is AI and AI is built on data and I think as practitioners we take for granted that customers are just giving us their data they're giving us they're giving brands and companies their data but what happens when customers start to hold their own personal information on the blockchain providing limited or timed access to their personal information so that it's not just a blanket sea of data that we can pull from but it starts to become more controlled and in that way I think we're going to start to see big shifts in terms of the product services that we can ultimately create or even the ways in which brands can respond to customers the permissions that they have to ask for customer data and the responsibility that they're going to have to ultimately use that in a responsible way whereas today I think a lot of customers give up their data often it becomes dark data in terms of companies just collecting it without actually having a reason yet to use it and I think that will start to shift in the very near future. So you say hello so you say near future like what are we looking at is this next year is this two years is this five years are you seeing some of it starting to be adapted today and some of the policies and things that are happening? Yeah I think you're starting to see it in the early wave and early adopters those people who know how to access and get their information on to the blockchain I think are going to start to see more mass adoption in the next five years when companies are going to build easier access points for the day-to-day lay consumer but I think it's only going to be an ever-increasing uptick in terms of people starting to become more conscious about how and when their data is used where it's stored I mean with every breach of customer data that happens out there in the industry I think there's only so much that or so often that that can happen before customers really start to rail against that and try to take control in big ways and I think that will push policy at the end of the day and ultimately also force brands to really think about do I want to own this data anymore because I think all of my clients are like I want to own this data I want it to be mine I don't want to have to share it with anybody else because data is like gold it's like power but at the end of the day when they also become culpable for some of these data breaches then what you know and I think that will start to become an ever-increasing conversation in the marketplace in this button John what about you what it what are you seeing I want to connect on to what you were just saying because that's it's exactly where things are going all the conversations I've had with people over the past couple of months in particular all point in this direction of blockchain cryptocurrency all of this having a major impact on what we're going to be designing so I think of an e-commerce perspective creating an account and doing that the financial transaction that's all out the door how what we've been practicing since the 90s yeah we've been refining that and we've simplified the process of adding a credit card into an account in the day this is going to completely throw that all apart and we need to be on top of that now I think the practitioners that are going to do really well are already mindful of that and they're already trying to figure out what does that interaction look like with a customer because it doesn't look like what it is now and I think they'll be a hockey stick adoption rate I think they'll just be suddenly some pivotal things that happen a common combination and all of a sudden everybody jumps on board and that's going to come pretty soon so when you're putting the five to ten year sort of time frame for this talk yeah and it's just going to sweep right up at some point within that and I think all of us have an appetite for it that we don't realize because we're tired of re-entering our credit card details we're tired of having a hundred different accounts on different services that we have to maintain and expend our effort to maintain and when this promises to alleviate that from us boy that's that's going to be a relief so within e-commerce so we've talked about blockchain as being a huge one and how our data is actually held are there any other emerging technologies that you were seeing within the e-commerce space that are starting to have an uptick or that you're like you know two years from now and this is going to be the standard norm even though we're just trying to put the commercial value to it right now maybe sort of in the direction of that conversation as I'm a strong believer in AR okay I think right now the foundation is being built for that and you're going to see commercial applications for that so people behind the scenes that are maintaining infrastructure or teaching or or tutoring or things like that it's it's all starting to happen when it starts to trickle out into the public and all of a sudden those first you know tours in a in a city that you're traveled to they say put on your AR sunglasses and let's go on a tour and you know it's it's guiding you through that you go wow this is an amazing experience and it becomes more and more applicable to your life why wouldn't you be buying things in that environment how many times I've gone to a startup weekend and somebody says geez it'd be really cool to have this startup where the person that's wearing that dress I want to buy that dress but I don't know where it's from I don't want to ask and it's going to magically figure that out an AR will overlay saying hey that's an Abercrombie you know it's 2995 here's the buy button literally everything will be overlaid with a digital ability to do something with that physical presence and that's an amazing thing and it's amazingly goes into e-commerce quite nicely so we're going to hold that thought too because I want to start you were talking about the overlay of someone's dress that gets us into ethics and privacy right which comes back to blockchain which will touch so lab what do you think what what what technology is hitting either in the next five to ten I get crazy saying that because when you see a lot of the charts about the future it says 2020 guess what 2018's in a week and a half right so so we say five to ten but we also mean maybe 2020 and what we're starting to see evolve today so that's what if you kind of hear me stumble around that's kind of what I'm visuallying in my head so I kind of agree with him the air is probably that's happening right now probably is visible to some of us in the forms of apps or probably you know in terms of those visual device devices variable devices that's are coming but I think I think we have to see and probably I'm seeing it's happening by 2020 is IOT that's going to probably take a larger space for for all of us all the things that probably devices that we are wearing or all the devices that we are having our home they probably start communicating with each other and I personally believe that's going to change the whole landscape and that's where probably the user experience will play important role because currently when it's being designed like if I talk about software designing probably 30 years back nobody really cared about the user experience what they cared about the functionality they just put the software there think of those phones that used to come before means those were smart phones like HP tabs and all those used to come they were smart but they were not usable so they were meant for really for developers or IT people then probably a revolution happened and a user friendly smartphone arrived then everybody probably the whole audience here is holding right so I believe IOT is something that already emerging now and it's it's together with AI that's going to be the future and probably user experiences will be affected by that and we have to probably provide better experience to IOT devices where human can interact with truly question to you so since you are software development and with the maturity of platforms that are happening do you see any of the automated tasks putting more of the focus on experience or do you know and taking away a little bit from the software development because it can kind of run independently or do you see that there's going to be big growth for an IOT type engineers as well with the experience so for sure I see the more and more need of IOT engineers that will be emerging but if you see the fundamentals of IOT they are not very far from the other software development that you do so it will be easy transitions for the you know the current team of developers available out there and they should be easily they should be able to easily transit to software IOT development and secondly if you see that software development is really getting rapid and easy so nowadays it's not so difficult even if I ask a probably 8th Gator he should be able to write a software for anyone like it may not be complicated but it means the overall development process is getting simpler so I don't see a issue with you know software developers losing jobs or you need like developer where there's not enough developer so I don't see that. So we kind of cheated a little bit we'll get more into that in depth some of the other topics as well but I figured since you were touching on IOT you wanted to dive in a little bit more. Shiva for you what do you think what are you seeing as emerging technologies that are impacting by 2020 2025? Yeah that's because upon IOT I mean from product point of view it's all in product systems you can see it all around us be it the O-bike and Mobiq it's just not a bike it's a system it's the digital and the physical are have been merging and will continue to merge so you cannot just have a individual product and think of it only as a product and everybody's like you need to think of a system so when you're designing a product you cannot just think of the product but you have to think of the whole ecosystem and the system that is going to be so that's where it's going you can see it in a light if even from light bulbs to projectors or any product you take it's not just an individual product anymore yeah so that's the major trend which is probably not ten years in the next five years itself yeah okay Shae what about you? I think for for me right in the banking industry I think chat chatbot AI is actually one of the biggest thing that you know we are talking you know in the industry now so we're talking about how intelligent the chatbot could perform the transactions for us without us you know for example need to type in our trans you know our so-called account number and you know don't need to you know put in our credit card number either so everything can be on demand so this is a this is an area that we thought we could we need a little bit of more investigation in terms of whether this is actually a safe and secure environment and how that integrate together with other so-called intelligent chatbots as well like Google because I think there only maybe there's only one survivor like you know when you open out the mobile itself there's only one way you can interact just talking to your mobile phone right and but you don't want to open up various apps just to have a chat with that particular app itself so how how do we actually have that seamless as experience so there's one thing they were we are probably investigating how to integrate into different platforms how to work with Google how to work with Facebook maybe there's just one winner in the end so who knows so service bots is what Jay is talking about for those in the audience and they estimate that by 2020 85% of customer service or sales touch points are going to be done by a service bot utilizing AI so that's when you start hearing terms like machine learning or deep learning or applied AI to some degree and natural language processing which uses it and we're seeing an explosion in this space which is really exciting sometimes I wish I can go back 20 years to be in this industry all over again because you guys have access like the reason why it's blowing up is all the different data points in the computation power that we have so we start talking about service bots we start talking about blockchain and privacy and who owns the data and policies that are around it we start talking about IOT which is opened up even the way kind of like these service bots are right because it's all these different data points that can feed into how we service a person and that gets into things like conversational UI or like virtual assistance whether it's a box on your on your counter like a Siri or if it's you know virtual through a device right so with that what do you think would be some of the challenges that we need to be aware of or look at Caitlyn within I think not just to the ethics of the public but also like UX design and like how we need the kind to you know be aware design for these systems so one of the biggest things that I think I'm focusing on and I'm asking my design teams to focus on is how do we ultimately combat what I call dead end design in the process of AI I think we're constantly on this trajectory to optimize right we're going to give you an information bubble in terms of we're going to feed you articles that are similar to the ones that you've shown engagement with we're going to give you music tracks by artists that are similar to the ones that you spend the most time listening to and sometimes I wonder if it's not a little bit of a hamster in a wheel situation does the hamster on the wheel realize he's not going anywhere right and in that way do people realize when they're in these sort of self optimized loops where they're getting the same information again and again and again slightly different format slightly different imagery maybe a slightly different length right and so how do we create the opportunity for people to change and evolve how do we allow them to take a left turn and then come back to where they were before and then take a right turn and come back because right now we are just this collection of passive inputs every time you like something on Facebook or every time you look at an image it's you know these AI algorithms are spending time crafting the story about what it is you're gonna like and how do we ultimately so in trying to combat this idea of dead-end design where we're just sort of sending people in these self-fulfilling loops how do we allow people to change and evolve and ultimately either hit the reset button sometimes say I am not that person that I was yesterday I want to be somebody different in the eyes of technology or conversely sort of say I want to shift I don't want to take a radical departure but I want to shift and broaden my horizon and yes that means sometimes I'm not going to engage as much in this in my newsfeed as I did before because not everything is as relevant but it gives me the option to try to expand my horizon a bit so how so question to the panel in whoever wants to answer how how do you guys feel that we can harness this technology so we've got these long rhythms and we have all of this data input and there is the device of like learning right that you can have across your systems where do we see in our everyday process with all of your years of experience of how we have to approach this can be software and this can be experience design or research where are you seeing an impact or where do you think that impact is going to be like in personas or journey work or you know how do we take that information and shape it I think we'll end up with living apps and living websites because right now if I was honest and I really looked at a lot of what we do each day and we're moving menus around and you know we started with these large canvases of desktop screens and now we've gone down to these five inch screens and honestly there's there's only so many ways we can rearrange a burger menu and some content cards and stuff like that so I think AI will play a role of saying look we're I'm gonna adapt this based on an individual basis based on the circumstances that person is in at that time that person is a 25 year old male just coming from work he's in the back of a taxi what does he want to see and I think AI will play a role in defining that and actually pulls us back from meeting to do those things because really the when you look at the typical design of a mobile app these days we go to the safe zone and we say well material design and while we've just put ourselves out of a job when we do that AI can do that very soon so it'll it'll give a more enticing and engaging experience because it talks to that person and that particular circumstance and at that time it'll be contextually aware in so many dimensions that's where I see it going and adding some value yeah for sure and I also want to talk a little bit about humanized design so this is something that I came from experience while working on some of the projects on the chat banking so a lot of my customers obviously wanted to have a life agent experience but we want to shift that the reason why is because obviously there is actually a lot of information that is repetitive that you know you can easily dig out yourself on the internet of even from the resources that we have but it's just that a lot of customers they do not want to do that you know that that that work themselves they want to call out someone and help to find that page of that information so the talking to a live person is great because then you have to you know it's more natural and it feels empty and you feel that you couldn't find some information you can make a complaint I mean be sometimes nasty but with a chatbot you can't do that right so you can't score a chatbot yes well not today do you think we're gonna get that in the future get what do you think in the future that that human touch that you're talking about so we're talking five to ten years from now do you think that the computers are gonna get smart enough that you don't know the difference yes I think so it's getting there already I mean if you really try to use other chatbots there's more intelligent than what we have currently in our banks they do have the emotional intelligence to basically react to your to the way you write the semantics of your language so that part is actually very interesting so I think we may be able to go you know to be able you know help our customers to feel that they actually talking to a real person and be able to address their concerns and even emotional upheaval they're having at that point of time the frustrations the good thing is 24-7 this chatbot is there forever and can be you know you can call upon you can rely upon it it won't fail you in some ways if you really want that person to talk to is there but sometimes it's a sign it hard to reach a live agent that's for sure because they work from 9 to 5 which means that the 24-7 society for a human being will be almost impossible in the future too because which means that you have to monitor the chatbots you have to monitors in order to have ships to monitor the chatbot and how they interact with your customers I don't know we still have to go 24-7 but then how do we make sure that our society allows us to do you know have to kind of lifestyle with ones even with the AI in our lives so that's that's another question so I think what you were saying though is it's not perfect just yet you have to watch yeah kind of keep it on the rails as you're moving forward so yeah from a design perspective where do you think in our process or how is our process going to shift designing for these types of experiences where we have systems that are getting smarter and pulling in more data than what we can compute what do you see in your research or your testing or any of your journey work that you're doing that could possibly be impacted well I can definitely see the customer journey be impacted because first of all we need to kind of decide when and where what customers trying to do on the site so when they come in we would monitor their journeys we monitor their transactions we also look at where they will go and then ultimately where do they drop off and when do they actually seek help from the chatbot so we should be able to map that journey quite you know quite easily and then understand where the frustration or pain point is and then the chatbot will come out and rescue the rescue right so this is where the chatbot should have enough data information about what the customers has done before the footprints right and then they would they will give the right intelligible answers to the customers so this is a part that I think data and design you know experience could combine to make that experience much more seamless again yeah so just to add on to I think what she's saying it's for sure it's about getting experience either through miss everybody prefers to have his own assistant right physically is better but if you get a virtual assistant that's available to you 24-7 who doesn't want it right means why do you want to go to a website yourself and search for it as you could just tell the person oh this is what I want get me here so I think chatbots are probably leading us that way but probably in future they would be demand I don't want to even want to type right so I want something like Siri which I just talked to the person and he gets me think there and of course emotions are something for sure it needs to be built up because be it for fun or be it for objectivity like I said together with the utility there should be usability right so probably taking care of the semantics of the sentence sentences or the localized version of the English that everybody use here so that should be taken care together with the emotions and that's probably I think we all are leading in the future that all of us will have our own assistant at his assistant and we may not be going to individual apps or individual websites I just talk to the virtual assistant and say okay this is what I want from this place and there you get me what where I can get so really quick John so I think what I'm hearing and then I want you to chime in is that Jay what you were touching on is saying because of the data and because of the technology that we have things like doing our customer journey and doing our research and seeing our different segments or micro segments and micro personas are going to be a lot easier so we can put more thinking to it and then what you've just touched on is more of a soft skill type thing where we start thinking about language the locality of the language up to who the person is so all of us have different personalities in this room and having a personal assistant that knows how you feel and can pick up and have empathy with you that sounds like there might be a shift of that more to designers as well exactly agree with both of you actually I see a consolidation of these interfaces happening there's there's no need for us to have a dozen messaging apps sitting in our and social network apps sitting on our phone that we're constantly opening and closing the access what is basically text images and videos so why do we need to do that it doesn't make any sense and you know for us to have all these proprietary chatbot channels again it doesn't make any sense and it's unnecessary work we can have all that funnel through your personal system that knows you and can prioritize based on what things are important to you and the AI will enable that you'll have that single point of contact that you feel naturally being able to know with certainty that they'll understand what you want to do and get that routed to the system that's appropriate for it and respond back so I think you guys bring up a really interesting point and say you touched on this earlier when you were talking about whether or not these chatbots are going to have to handshake do we really need so many of them or can they ultimately can we ultimately have one to rule them all but then I guess the question for me becomes who are we giving that power to because we're basically saying Google you got this Apple you got this and we're sort of anointing kings in the industry as opposed to DBS not your like area of expertise you got to give it up to Apple you know what I mean and it's like is is that consolidation easier for the consumer yes but does it ultimately challenge the idea of a free and open market place where you go somebody knew a novel on the scene could bring something game changing but Google and Apple are getting so big that they're never going to let that happen or they're never going to want to share or they're okay taking but they're not necessarily going to give back in return it's interesting because I also see that there'll be you know we have all these devices everybody in this room probably has a phone a tablet a computer a home speaker and I don't see that playing out in the long term there's too many interaction points that behave a bit differently we spent the past I don't know how many number of years trying to do this Passover where you know I'm doing something on my Mac and then wow it shows up on my phone but it's unnecessary it'll all be in a single point or something like that I can't describe what the interface is for that because it's it's a number of years out but I don't see us having this sort of collection of devices that we're always having to maintain and grab for certain purposes doesn't make sense you're seeing a beyond the screen kind of experience that could be central so what do you think that's going to play out from an experience design perspective because we've been designing for a long time all of us and developing so what does this actually mean well if it means that essentially your Ray-Ban sunglasses become the singular interface to all of that then there you go so we're basically building spatially aware sort of overlaid interfaces which are completely different than what we have right now screen-based so we're also talking now about from an experience design perspective not just a two-dimensional me and screen or even IoT that's three-dimensional when you start talking spatial that's starting to get into a different design medium so how do we bring all these different design perspectives and how do we get the experts to actually be able to design for these experiences especially as they're evolving out Shiva do you have a point of view yeah so I mean there are a couple so the main problem right now with designers is that we don't look at screen as a medium because we're so used to designing for the screen so that shift is something that needs to happen sooner than later so that's when we can think beyond otherwise we're always looking at at the end product as a final thing has a screen so touching upon what he said that's where I see your immediate change required as such so that we can look beyond and make really better and get where we still don't know where it's going but yeah so with your product bag in your digital bag what skills do you think would be necessary if you had to be dropped into years from now and start designing an experience a more holistic approach because as I told like we shouldn't look at only as a product or only as a screen that's something that has to probably start at a college level because we are right now focusing either at a screen or at a software level which is very constraining so if we can start thinking from outside and then narrow down which is not which often happens so we immediately start looking at softwares that we want to learn and screens that we want to design or specialized for iPhone or Android so that whole approach has to change a little bit so that I think with this what's what's an amazing opportunity is say for example look at iTunes right this is basically thumbnails of your of your catalog and then a track list right and if you think of what AR VR can do to that as someone that really loves music what that can turn into and when you look at the you know the massive amount of access that we have to data if you look at that you're a house music fanatic right and what that can do to extend that experience beyond just a list of files essentially you know for the fact that I can't even zoom in the album cover art that worries me because I came from a time when albums were these physical things that you look through and you'd literally spend hours just looking at and I've talked to many people that have that same thing wouldn't it be good to virtualize that and really make it a more engaging experience to listen to music and that's just I think a very small example of where all this stuff is going beyond just lists and thumbnails and content cards say what do you think from an experience point of view I don't know I don't know how far you go to to create that experiment you know that experience that you want do you which you implant a chip in your eye or would you want something to plug into your brain and it downloads things that you would like I don't I don't know I think another thing people talk about these days is cybernetics you know half human half machine right my husband used to joke we will create a name called Manchin but it's kind of funny we just anticipating we are so we are sold in awe by what is going to happen but we forgot that actually the technologies we're just talking to our designers here we're talking the technology is catching up so fast that we have don't have time to really think what we need it for sometimes do we actually need all these things do we actually need to have you know an AI that could you know basically be a kind of a service 20 you know a service person 24-7 for you then what do we do do we just lack so what do we become do we become a beach bummer is that what we all wanted or let AI succeed in you know and all the robots are seeing the future I don't know this is a bit better question but I want to go down there that's okay what about yeah but I think even though what you're touching on is we're talking about the rise of specialists so being really deep but also being deep in a couple verticals right so having to be aware across as well as getting in how would you yourself going back to the question of like two years from now right and technology has changed how would you yourself like what skills would you be looking for to increase or what do you see in our methods or processes that are changing because they've been I'd say UX design for the last 20 years has been pretty consistent we do research we figure it out we build personas we do customer journeys against it we have business goals then we go into ideation design right against those pain points tools that are coming out that are making it easier our data points that we can track not just I but now we have all of the the different data points just even with like your bio versus even the physical space and then we have machine learning and tools that are now pulling massive data points that are giving us more insight than we ever have how is that going to continue to evolve if we're looking at like an AR VR life if we're looking at blockchain right if we're looking at IOT what does that mean for a user test because we're no longer a screen to a test we're looking at an ecosystem okay I'll attempt to answer that difficult question first of all will I still be a researcher right will I still be a designer we still people around here we still code because effectively a machine could code for you in the future right then what would you do then I think the process will definitely change but I think we probably need to think about what AI is best or you know machine learning or what is that whatever we call that is its best for whatever they do and then what we humans do is to identify you know the so-called insights and outcome and analyze them and how we can turn that into a product or something that is meaningful and useful in our own lives and you know enhancing ourselves for instance maybe in terms of medical you know the domain that we can think of is you know targeting certain kind of for example cancer treatment things like that how do we use the data and how do we actually understand the kind of different patients how do they feel about the treatment and how do we make sure that the treatment could target for them and help them to get better so those are the things that we think that could potentially be useful understanding the person so as researcher I mean I may not be a researcher in the future but maybe somebody who really goes around to understand and talking to people getting their connection understanding their needs understand their pain points and then getting the so-called AI to help me to collect the data and then analyze and then help me to create a product that is useful I think that is probably the the basics of it but I don't know how the process is yeah so I'd love to really build upon that because I think one of the areas that I see UX designers really focusing on moving forward especially in this AI future is almost to become technology or AI's ombudsman now I know that that's a weird word and it's also sort of a throwback to a dying industry of newspapers right but an ombudsman is basically the gut check for a newspaper of record that says you've reported fairly unjustly on this you left out this side of the story you didn't actually sort of give readers all of the facts that they needed to make a fair and balanced assessment and I wonder if UX designers today to your point are going to be taking all of this information and taking all of these uses of technology and AI and cryptocurrency and AR and VR and going should we be doing this is Facebook accomplishing its sort of stated mission vision purpose using technology in this way and is it being done at the expense of the consumer or for the benefit of the consumer I'm picking on Facebook a little bit today but there they're a big behemoth in this space right so easy to do a little bit of and I wonder in that instance are we going to be able to almost push technology which is this technology in particular unless you are an artificial intelligence specialist or machine learning scientist feels a little bit like a black box into a place of further transparency where people feel like they can have an opinion about whether or not this AI is working for them or against them or to the benefit of their community or counterintuitive to the stated sort of goals and desires of the community and I think that maybe that's where you ask we'll start to push in terms of becoming more the not just user experience designer but sort of human experience designer in many respects I'd say when we start getting out into the 10 year mark I'd say you know right now we're kind of very constraint based design if you look at the screen size you look at having to touch a screen there are immense constraints that that creates in the interface and what you can do with that as soon as you eliminate that and that's out of the equation you suddenly have an unlimited way of interacting and we have to relearn how how that plays out secondly the constraint is we don't actually have a lot of information we don't have a lot of data coming in we've got bits and pieces that are sitting on databases and there's often constraints in terms of accessing that information and having engineering effort expended and utilizing that when that becomes unlimited as well and we have so many data points coming in I think will become the specialist of knowing when and why and the how of how to best utilize that and then you know the AI can't do that the AI is just simply you know responding will have an amazing opportunity to shape that and I think the ombudsman thing I that's what we are now but I think it'll play or should be now it'll be even more important you know down the road for sure yeah so I guess I agree with the point which she made about ombudsman because for sure if you're if you are designing something with emotions with almost equal power that you are you should be have you should be able to control it somewhere right because like what she said you don't want to be just slacking around and let someone do the thing so so long you have a minimal control that's that you required on the person should be good enough for you to let the person do the job for you be it a virtual of course virtually because that's where we are looking for and as far as data is concerned of course I think it comes over the period right so let's say I design a person now after interacting the data whether they are data points which the virtual assistant will be collecting from you and probably creating a image of you that okay what could be the need of I shouldn't be saying the word master but probably what could be the need of my master that he would need at these these hours of the time or at these points at these points in a day right so probably that's where the data collection happens and that's where the intelligence gets built up and that's where the artificial intelligence would probably be taking over lot of your workloads and I think that's what we want them to do not the whole life I guess yeah adding to what is saying it's having this we designers we adapt to change probably faster than anybody else in the industry and we are forced to do it so we have I mean that's what we are good at being flexible thinking out of the box so that's we're always playing catch up with the technology no matter what because we are not driving technology so the process are going to change and even now if you see it use the testing and the results the cycles of features have really been shortened like even if you look at e-commerce just through data analytics you can release features for a couple of weeks and if it's not working a bit testing it just you have solid data to back it up so you can actually take a lot more risk because of the data we have so the testing is back solid I mean we have solid backing for all the testing we do a lot more than we had before so the product life cycles have become short because of that in general yeah so sounds like dynamic product life cycles and designing for dynamic product life cycle which is different than like a scrum right or a small epic what's interesting here that you guys have all kind of touched on is Shay we were talking about how we'll have the tools that are going to do the heavy lifting for us that we can do more of a focus in on the human aspect I know in school programs you might have psychology today right or looking at empathy or human design what you brought up Caitlin is getting into the ethics and I know I personally have never taken an ethics course in 20 years of design and is that something in our future and is that something that's going to go into legal I mean when we start looking at human Facebook not to pick on Facebook I think Facebook is amazing but when you look at what they've just recently gone through even in our American election with where you had an outside country supposedly help influence an internal vote with how they were doing ads this is not something I don't think Facebook thought about 20 you know 15 years ago when they came out and where does that place us as a designer who are creating tools for that so we've talked about ethics right and then you just talked about shorter time frames that allows us to not have to be in the common life cycle that we see today because we can be on demand with our testing because we have data and try more things and be more rapid so it sounds like key skill sets that we're going to have to look for is change management right and I don't know how many of you have taken change management courses or clear with that potentially into an ethics land which is interesting diving deep into science of some sort it could be you're an AI specialist or machine learning specialist or you're working with these logarithms building out your empathy right do you guys think that there's anything else that are within that list yeah I think there's two things that we're going to come back into the spotlight that I think we haven't neglected but I think I see a lot of cases where they they haven't had the attention paid to that they should firstly information architecture if we're going from a say a 2d environment with 3d environment our relationship with categories and how we structure information will likely change and we'll have to rethink about it likewise with interface list design if we're talking with Syria or Alexa or whatever the information architecture of how that's presented again I think is quite different and we're going to have to rediscover that secondly I think as UX there's always this emphasis on designing in terms of a visual perspective but I think we often tend to forget the other part of that is the written word which is often why they're at where they are because so that they can digest the content and we should get back to writing the written word well purpose for these new audiences so when you're in an interface list design and you're just sitting there babbling away to Alexa those responses somebody has to write those responses and it has to have you know this has to have a persona it has to have a consistency and a reliability in how it's conveying messages and I think we need to get back to that likewise if we're in some virtual environment how do we consume that written word it's fascinating I think those are two things that will come back I would also build upon that and say I think one of the accessibility has always been a focus of experienced designers but I think as we're looking at these new interaction paradigms and methods for communication we're starting to see the rise of new accessibility challenges which haven't quite been mastered and if we are going to move to a place where everything is controlled by voice what sort of fail safes do we put in place so that others who don't have that option still have the ways to interact with the world in the same way that everybody else does okay quickly coldy if I'm looking at you for time because I want to make sure you guys are good okay and tired does anyone have any questions for us before you escape I'm just kidding hi I have a question because for all of this discussion I was wondering even the earliest discussion I have a feeling that in this whole process the user is in our considerations a bit like lonely even in the world user experience there's just one person but in the end we are community and people always exist with other people so what are the considerations for AI if there are any like an opportunities or threats how the AI may impact the people interaction and the society because like even like what you mentioned the Facebook the ads were targeted towards the users that put the single user which as a big group affected the whole country and some sort of whole world so yeah any any thoughts on that I think it's a really interesting question that you raise because one of the powers of all of the technology that we see emerging right now is connection and the power that you start I mean isn't that in essence what's powering blockchain is this idea of networked computers that come together so it's not any one single source of information or truth but rather a network or community and I think in that instance communities of people and users as well hold a lot of power in terms of how and where they're shifting brands and organizations where they're starting to say you know we want something different or conversely our needs aren't being supported and I think to me one of the biggest things that you're going to start to see from a community aspect is the rise in the importance of reputation and how individuals are representing themselves to the broader community and how we're ultimately forming trust networks that's why you're going to go to an Airbnb and trust that you know the sheets are going to be clean and the towels are going to be hanging where you think they're going to be and conversely why somebody's going to let you into their home and know that you're not going to throw a rager of a party while they're gone and I think in that way community and networked communities are going to expand it's less going to be about sort of your trusted circle that you might know and interact with because you live in the same floor of the apartment block and AI will help facilitate those connections and that sort of wider trust barrier would be one impact. I also think that that's really good so I also think that when you're talking about like what AI means to the community there's the low hanging fruit like the things that we can use I think today in the next few years right that's going to change but what do we do like when you have like the you know Elon Musk talking about the responsibility and policies that need to be put in place because these computers can get smart and what does it mean to community and what happens when we create systems that can begin thinking right because that's true AI right like that's that's that's the general that's the future and I don't think anyone's really laid down what those repercussions are to community and I think that's why when ethics kind of came up here and understanding what that means and what that means to large bodies getting into like government and policy and how we govern it is going to be extremely important because we're going to have a responsibility right and that's not I mean there is a responsibility design there always is like banking right we have to make sure that we guarantee that you know you have a secure login right now with autonomous driving we have to ensure that cars aren't going to go crashing into each other there's always that responsibility but I think the stakes are going to get heightened as we as humans try to process what this is and I don't think there's any set answer so I think from a community perspective the reputation and trust is going to rise in importance in our in our every day like in the stuff that we kind of do now but as for when we are get and I think I think we're close actually I don't think you know this is 20 years out you know they just created what was it was it Google that did the the go where it was they created these two computers that I forgot the actual technical term where they can actually battle out with each other and create like what the strategies are and then they could beat the go players and they were learning so they're learning quicker than I think we know what to do with and so I we're in I think we're going to be entering into a new land and that's personally why I've started actually looking at policy and ethics myself to prepare myself to be able to answer some of these questions and I've never ever thought that in my design career because I started as a designer that I would consider these things so that's that's why I hope that answered your question are there are there any others yeah me yeah my question is sort of along those lines and it's about the idea of control and power so there's lots of tentacles to this jellyfish you know they're just going everywhere and it's it's becoming you know just listening to your panel discussion it's becoming so multifaceted and almost out of control and there's lots of catch up so I'm wondering then about control about it just like you were saying is is ethics then the thing that will be the controlling power and another thing is you know you were saying that particular brands will be that the trusting point but those brands weren't necessarily trustworthy so how does all that fit in with you know the power and the control and and it all fits in with ethics so I just wondered where you see sort of the next step then because it's obviously it's a big issue and it's not necessarily being addressed and from a user perspective you know people with kids and things you know they they worry about that kind of thing how do we consider that at this point big question yeah and I I don't have a direct answer but I have something that weighs on my mind that relates to it if you look at the ruling that recently occurred with net neutrality right and we've we've sort of handed back the companies the ability to sort of shape how we're going to experience the internet what I see coming in 20 years from now after we've all handed in our car keys is place neutrality and I think to me that has a much greater threat of us losing our freedoms as people when a company or a government can dictate where we can go at what times we can go and at what costs we can go at that's an amazing thing to think about and that really starts going into that territory when a company can say you can go to this place but not that place or that place causes double or the government says it's curfew time and or decides certain segments of people can drive at a certain day and others can't it's fascinating but who's going to control that given we just relinquished it for the yeah but I also think like the press for example so Uber right and I love Uber I use Uber E to use Uber car or whatever they just we just found out there was a massive security breach here right in Singapore so the transparency and it happened over a year ago so I think what's going to happen is from a consumer perspective because we have so much choice we really do even though we're saying there's consolidation you don't have to use Uber you've got a bazillion other different things and I think that there's going to be a backlash from consumers because we're going to start to expect that the brand's just going to have that transparency and that protection and if they don't they're going to be accountable and so we as designers what I would say is is our responsibility just kind of like when I started working in e-commerce many years ago before there was a thing called PCI compliance which we have now right which protects you know people's credit card information and things like that to ensure and how you know how data stored and making sure that people can't just you know get the credits it's supposed to protect us as a consumer we're going to see more things like that and just like our responsibility and I remember when that was first coming out and before that it even been declared a lot of the question and answers that we had about security and working with our software brethren so I think that gets into like kind of that cross collaboration and then I think it's just going to come down to your own individual choice of where do you want to work right so if I'm in an organization where they're not putting the consumer up front or their safety or protection or they're trying to bury that thing I don't know how comfortable I would be so I think we're getting into a new age of design where I hadn't really been thinking about that usually most companies I was super excited to go work for it's great technology but I hadn't thought about that aspect of how are they being within the community how are they protecting the community what's their reputation and I think that's increased in importance because we are becoming a digital currency you know regardless if it's money your personal data or whatever and when that leaks out that has massive repercussions to our everyday lives I hope that answered your question yeah I'd like to touch on Melissa's point of view about and also Caitlyn's point of view about brand brand loyalty maybe a little bit more about the reputation as well I think the reason why you like a brand is also the brand itself has probably built up many years and they you know thought of mine you could be your parents using that brand for a long time and could be yourself having very good experience with it before but maybe it has fought a little bit but then you still have trust in the brand so I guess it's like it's that persona a brand needs to be built up you know in a way that people through the culture of the company too like people you hire for instance Uber we know the CEO is have a lot of them you know interesting news these days but I thought the culture of the company is important but the reason why I stress is because DBS right is it's been a national bank for many years and even though we have other competitors in the market but the brand itself had actually resonates with a lot of locals so we still remain a strong brand and hence remain competitive in many ways but I see a lot of newcomers coming in new new bands coming in that Europe and a simple bank and all this kind of brands digital bands get coming out but I believe this these so-called disruptors have very short lifetime you know they have they have a lot to prove themselves so if something went wrong people would just kind of go away and try something else especially with the millennials they are not loyal as well so they only loyal it because their parents are using that brand has been passed on to dancing a word or mouth or you know through many years of experiencing with themselves then they like the brand so I thought that's something to think about because I think culture in a organization is important who you hire who you interface with in the you know with the employees of the bank that is the reason why you like that brand as well it's not just the brand the name yeah there are no more questions than I would like to call it okay so with all the evolution that's going on all the changes is coming I just really wanted to know your own personal point of view to how open you are with the changes coming and in your own different experiences how are you guys actually like accepting these changes and evolution is it a positive one a negative one for your own yeah I'm embracing it otherwise you become obsolete right so to back that up the number of conversations I've had with individuals that are really becoming subject matter experts around blockchain cryptocurrencies and things like that a lot of conversations over coffees and beers etc over the past number of months because I need to prepare myself I can't keep designing you know shopping cart checkouts and you know the same way I'll be gone right this this is this is mandatory that we all go and embrace this stuff yeah for me I think only constant that's available in technology is change so you have to follow the change or you have to lead the change so you just decide are you going to be the leader who made the change or you're just going to follow that so if you can't be the leader be the follower at least there will be a point in time where you can evolve something new from there and you could be the leader there yeah I mean it's not being scared I guess I mean it's always so when you think about how fast the technology is changing you're always apprehensive and that so being not scared and just going along with the flow as it all I mean it's like there's some kind of fear you like it or not because of getting getting left behind it like so yeah one of the negatives to it that can be as fatigue so it because there is so much that's happening in so many things to keep up and so much information that you sometimes get fatigued so I think one of the key things that we're going to have to think of as designers is not only the excitement like your personality I think has to be okay again we talked about change management earlier and that's just adapting to change but it's also how do you how do you break yourself from fatigue so that you give your mind a break and that you can jump back in because it actually requires your brain to be at peak performance what we're talking about between the lead and the follow and some of these technologies of where we are this isn't a place where you can just kind of chill out and relax and not be really active it is if you're working within the screen methodology and kind of today but these other like diameters that we're talking our parameters dimensions I think we're going to have to focus a little bit more on self-care do we want to be a peak performer what does that mean how do we keep our mind ultimately healthy so that we don't get burnt out and that's something that I've experienced for the last 20 years and I find that it's kind of growing it could be because I'm getting old but also I think because the technology is getting more complex like there's there's when we start talking omni channels and things when I first started yeah I was looking at shop management software like in a shop and how users interacted with you know the car but they were looking at a single screen to fix that data the journeys that I deal with now are voice conversational tax environment you know pulling in all the different multiple connected dots dealing with shit tons tons of data and being able to make sense of it and then having this evolving kind of technology come so I do think it's embrace but I also think get those meditation apps take yourself care or you're gonna burn I've seen designers actually burn out recently because it's just like oh my god it's so intense so you got to have those breaks yes I'd say that's really good advice I really do you know that the meditation I amazing yeah that's right whatever whatever form that is for you that that works for you I think is very important and I also think that companies have to move away with from the concept that for you to be productive you need to work from nine to six and sit at a desk in a white room open concept glass tower office to to create these beautiful experiences I think they need to move away from that and accept that the creative process is not optimal in those conditions and also that like now it is more and more you're not expected to do everything I mean that is something the trend especially for designers where you may have seen a lot of job openings where you need to do right from say research till coding so actually living up to that is not something that should be done or doing although it's been a recent trend so it's also staying in in sync with the technology but also knowing what you want to do because there is so much happening there if you want to do everything you'll just skim through everything and you won't actually know anything so if you know what you want and you can plan for it then you can have in-depth knowledge about one thing and really contribute yeah that really helps yeah I think yeah I think I'll have to put a hard stop to this maybe the questions can be discussed over the networking session which you can I think decide the time yourself I just want to thank everybody on the panel for this great discussion I'm sure that there are no answers to be honest and that's why it's good that you didn't ask any question because because there are no clear answers at this stage that's what I think but it's actually good that we have such discussions which sets in a way a tone for the future and at least one message that was clear is that designers need to catch up and this is a phase which is confusing for everybody nobody knows what's what's going to happen but you need to choose your paths or choose your routes wisely so that at least you are not left behind so that's that's the only conclusion I can make out of it but if you have a conclusion you can tell something about this and then we can call this a close I think I think the conclusion is is that anytime we have technology that accelerates and that's the period that we're in right now there is confusion of how it's going to shake out but I do think that there are some clear pathways today so when we're talking about AI in the marketplace I do think things like conversational UI voice UI utilizing service bots you know for customer service sales in a marketplace security these are skillsets that designers need today and they need to focus in on today so if you're not getting it in school you're not getting in your career I guarantee you're going to find an online source there is online courses on this you have MIT there's a couple really amazing universities that offer free courses on this there's going to need to be a lot of self-learning and a lot of community as for where this rolls out from like a moral stance or these types of things that's going to continue to evolve but if you don't understand natural language processing if these are all new words to you my recommendation to you is find a course or start googling because in the next two years it's going to be here and you better know how to design for it so the general statement that ship just talked about you can't be so that trend that you're hearing about coding you know UI design UX design yes that can happen depending on the organization structure and what the product offering is but as it gets more complex you're going to need to be more specialized or you're not going to get those jobs and that's the marketplace today yeah thanks thanks a lot and I think this is time to to give a round of applause to the panel it's been some some great discussions around here I would like to give a small token of appreciation to to each of you are the panelists here it's a small sum of money you're not going to be rich with this but maybe you want to get down because it just sounds a bit yeah so so here is this for Kaitlin thank you very much I have to do a bit of running around as the names pop up so she thanks a lot yeah Shiva thank you very much this is Melissa thank you yeah and so love thanks a lot and yeah and just last point before you go out is that we had this team of volunteers without which this was not possible half of them were coming from other countries so they have left already because the bus flight was flying off or the bus was leaving so all of them can you please come in the front so that and please request you to give them a good applause because right from the time the because these guys used to come early around 7 30 here that's the story behind and they leave and all this arrangement that you see here right from removing the trash to setting up all this for the next day all has been done by us and these are actually all of them either as students they are lecturers in polytechnics some of them are let's say UX professionals and yeah what else can I say yeah so all of them are actually just people like you and me and they are not hired per hour basis so it's a great sense that it brings because the community this is what is community you do say things for yourself by yourself and that's where I think these guys have shown the great spirit it's unfortunate that only half of them are right now here but still I think a big thanks to them yeah so now it's time for the yeah okay so I think now it's it's time for the wine session and then mingling and singling or whatever you call it and then we I would just wish you all a good week ahead and great holidays and of course our hello dot hello at uxsa.com dot info is open so you can always write email to us and we will respond yeah thanks very much and hope you enjoyed the show here thanks a lot bye