[Music] so the year is nothing like on a grand scale of things and if you zoom out the trends are really not the trends it's just the themes which you need to be aware of and then make your decisions accordingly what I'm going to give you is really just most signals so that you can take it away and think for yourself 2024 is going to be quiet if not pivotal it's going to be a bit of a trans formational to the actual tech industry and it's an obvious one too if you take something like LOF FYI data the actual lofs are on a downtrend and it's not surprising as well all the different big Tech and uh the inspired companies who took that inspiration and just followed through and kind of just chopped down let's say the 10% or so employees across the tech industry now going to start realizing that we need that talent to support those different initiatives or we're just going to be in better pastures or have more funding to actually explore the Innovative bits or the new green field type of opportunities or projects you're going to need to start rehiring it's not that you know the times are getting better which they are slowly getting there it's because people just ran out out of people to lay off so I foresee it actually slowing down and a lot of a RS opening up which you can already see on LinkedIn that a lot of people are starting their new position and big Tech is starting to rehire which I want to cover in the next Point why I believe that a lot of folks things are actually sorting itself out one is the big one is financial Market because it doesn't matter how good is your product or how much value you deliver to your company if the finances are not right and the stocks crash and you need to still sustain the valuation of a business or provide value to the shareholders which is usually the accountability a lot of Executives have to face because of that we need to look not just about how well the company is doing let's say from user experience perspective because that matters even less it's almost like a downstream from the actual decisions we need to go upstream and that would be the actual Financial Market fluctuation this figure I think is pretty good because it kind of informs that the tech is going to follow again there is just so many Industries and so many firms out there and so many types of work which is low tech savvy in need of digital transformation that's where the tech kind of comes in and helps it out of course it depends if you take something like Silicon Valley or big Tech it's a totally different ballpark but if you generalize and zoom out worldwide across all the different Industries SAS the digital the tech were like the least growing Industries in general and everything else like transport Supply chains Healthcare Myriad of a lot of different Industries are on a climb and I think once you know we stay iiz the tech is going to fall big signal I guess as well to just check is a Wall Street holds firmware after its three we slide as big tech stocks rebound this is a massive one they actually are evaluated better they're doing much better they have much more cash to play with ultimately they can start rehiring they can start planning for a future uh granted because a lot of the firms are burnt they're going to be very cautious and risk aares the three big flags which you need to look out for is one once the tech IPOs and Acquisitions start to happen again that's where you know that things are going to start to look up and they are looking up and this is a screenshot I took today by the way is the staff ux opening at Google and once big Tech is hiring a lot of other firms are going to start hiring as well and the third one and perhaps the most important bit it might surprise you by the way the actual recruiters being rehired and this is very important and I'm going to repeat again the actual recruiters being rehired why because once the layoffs happens across the board the first people who usually tend to go are the ones who are sourcing other people because you don't need to hire you don't have cash to hire you don't have cash to invest into getting more people on board and recruiters were that if they're being rehired chances are the new programs again are spinning up the new rows are opening up and someone has to admin that and within last few days anecdotally so but again look out for these signals yourself I saw at least a few recruiters getting back to their roles in different firms so these three signals and especially the last one are progressively more important for you to keep in mind if you see this happening you know that we're going to be good and I see this happening and that's why I'm calling it out for you following on from the last bit by the way the certain industries will have to recover sooner than the others and lives happen like Blitz instant basically now this creates obviously debt and a lot of debt and that's why the industries and my law is that the industries and parties that had laid off most employees will be the first ones to rehire upon market upter so let's see if we take this data set of 10 or so different Industries the retail as well that's where the cash is mostly being generated they're going to soon realize that we don't have enough people to support new initiatives or we don't have enough people to even maintain the initiatives we had before because we are going to be running on that maintenance mode where let's say maybe let's fictitiously take 10 designers and nine of them got chopped off one was remaining what could that one designer do in The Firm do bare minimum be a design team of One support maybe one or two big initiatives maybe take a program level challenge if they're senior enough maybe plan to rehire stuff like that but it's kind of like a zombie mode and a lot of affirms are in that state some are Maybe not maybe doing better but they are in that kind of like a limbo and because they chopped brutally in both areas I predict and again a prediction they're going to be the ones to quickly rehire so if you want to I guess get into ux now is the time to look out for those Industries or those opportunities like retail consumer Hardware food Healthcare Finance Transportation sales education Media stuff which is also quite low on the actual Tech involvement or on a lower scale if you have any case studies in any of those Industries or you were maybe affected in both Industries chances are when the upturn happens and and we start to climb up the rehiring these are the industries which I'm not going to say might they will need to rehire it's just a given quite frankly and I don't know if this is my next point oh yes it is so my next point is that AI is hot right now and it's like catnip for product managers and Business Leaders now this is kind of throwing a spanner in that works for us and massively so I didn't even look for ux openings cuz they're you know they're small they're still recovering right now it is high with AI specific product management it's just another way to describe a technical product man manager who maybe has experience with AI That's about it but that then has a lot of the impact on what we do day to-day because product managers are magicians who actually make a lot of the different things happen in orchestrates and usually make lives of a uxers much easier as long as we know what we're doing but given the demand for technical product management my hopes are quiet low and it's likely going to end up with this kind of wild west cowboying around if a lot of people jumping in it maybe having some AI experience or technical experience or engineering experience but not so much of a ux experience they might not be equipped to shape products which actual people use and we see a lot of that already you know AI wrappers and chat GPT versions of it it's garbage like we might generate some substantial Revenue here and there because it's Noel and it's new and it's exciting it's hype but most of those tools and I think once all that typ kind of you know died down you realize that we are not that good because we don't really answer any human needs if you don't have someone who's advocating for it and now you're going to have a lesser partner in that it's going to be very dangerous so it's going to create a lot of a debt in the user centricity and and it's going to further increase so if your product was already in shambles or the user experience was kind of like secondary to all the things now it's probably going to be quiet you know even more so you you are going to be taxed even more so to fight to change Minds to coach to partner up with a product manager who might be Technical and then try to build that appreciation waste of working fight for the seat at the table too cuz if everyone's so drunk with a drive to use llms left and right let's say then you're going to be the one probably someone who has a bit more sanity to be like why are we doing this or is this the right thing to do and it's going to be even more challenging but that covers massive opportunity flip it upside down the the man of ux skills once a business's failure start to show because it's inevitable once you just put all the eggs in a technical basket and you forget about human centricity or making products people actually need and want to use then you end up with a lot of dead experiments and failures are going to kind of make people learn it's almost like that vicious cycle where as uxers we I think especially if you're ux leader you're kind of used to like ah God damn it we're just way too far gone and we just need to almost like Let It fail so that the Business Leaders can learn and we can do better decisions next time and that's I think what's going to happen in a way again some areas might not see any of this some might see all of this it's going to vary but General theme could inform a trend of sorts it's definitely time to shift from a simple chat Bots and again that crappy ux or some people thought it's amazing ux I still challenge it AI Gardener life cycle right like where you have a lot of hype and you are running for it there generative Ai and everything else included in this and we are probably somewhere I think again this is depends how we look at it but if we zoom out we're somewhere here we're not yet at the slope of Enlightenment and ignore some of these signals like computer vision let's say being a big one it's already a big one I think we're not yet ENT entering this which is the most important part which is slope of Enlightenment that's where obsessive AI going to reflect and say we need to think about user experience there is some thinking here and there but it's very anecdotal and very very small it's not a trend just yet so I think in the next year we're going to start going into this section you need to basically reflect and say hold on chill out is this the right thing to do does it that produce enough value is this the right bet to take and that would create as the preferable future my pet peef I guess with last year has been as well that a lot of the ux courses for AI have been focusing on how to design better chat Bots or just introducing what llms are they're not thinking about what would ideal experience powered by AI would look like I think I'm going to also work on a course for AI powered user experiences do let me know if you want it f cuz I want that demand too but I feel like a lot of the people who didn't really work with AI before we just kind of think oh let me know how to design yet another experience where it's conversational is you're not considering of what type of AI it is and what value delivers like when I have a chat with some of the people and I say is it assistive is it autonomous is it something which kind of like just automates your data presentation layer and it's likely is that there is no value in it with the next year and if we get to that reconing and that pivotal moment a lot of the AI has to be going from this mid assistive point to the decision support so this is what's lacking it's not understanding that there is so many different layers to AI powered user experiences that it's not just about Bloody chat Bots and llms with a UI wrapper and your on the vision level experience is going to be fullon bloody automation where everything is done by Ai and that's your goal now work backwards to see exactly how you can get to a decision decision support we used a lot of cognitive mapping mental model mapping the decision support research specifically which was tied to how to design the bloody AI experiences as they should be type of a ux work in 2024 simply put generalist are still favored over Specialists if you take ux copywriters or uh motion designers or something like super specific I know some companies are going to say yeah we cannot live without them and it's not super specific we must have them I agree like you should always have them but most roles are still a few both Rolos are usually the ones which might shop down to the minimum and then the generalists might follow but you still end up with a pool of the generalist skill sets who can do more who can kind of again maintain those different initiatives and projects because there is no one else to do so in the next year it's going to persist the risk of VAR behaviors even if we get to a good State and we will in in rehiring the generalists are going to be rehired first cuz everybody's going to be slowly moving ahead they're not going to go and say we need to now you know form new teams for research we don't we need to do this or that that's going to take months or years to recover the next one is that the core to design skills such as visual design holds foundations of previously flourishing ux Oro and that's kind of a given because most of the companies still think of ux as a visual thing because that's what we show you know when we talk about user experience we need to show we need to show prototypes we need to show mockups that's going to persist as well I think if compan is just going to use ux to design flashing mock-ups and churn it then in that case we're going to definitely increase the rate of failures because we're not going to get everything right if we don't know enough and there's massive uncertainty and risk but the failures then going to drive and reinvigorate demand for more holistic ux the ux industry Trends video this one by the way if you haven't seen this do look on my channel just search for ux industry Trends 2023 is going to sum up that because it's not going to be any different even if we are going to start rehiring there's still going to be the obsession with this ship and measure approach I think it's going to persist again because of that lean nature of things however that the message from my end would be still challenge the business the product ownership the executive leadership whoever at whatever level are your peers or you know people above and make this much more holistic all of these have a lot of values in different challenges with AI let's say specifically and if you specialize with AI which is going to be fraction of all the people viewing a lot of it should be research heavy and quiet design heavy or somewhere in between but it should be research heavy because it does need a lot of discovery about user needs their mental models cognitive mapping of how we make decisions and how to support them so I would challenge to still think holistically and if we know that appreciation is going to be for generous low fight the battle and expand the things towards research heavy and towards design heavy instead of just shipping and measuring and making those driven Solutions which nobody really needs a lot of that accountability is going to come down to you cuz you're a designer of experiences and you facilitate that at the minimum then in that case you are the fighter to basically fight the good fight and ensure that the user get the tools they actually need not just necessarily what's cool or what's hot or what could cost business so much to maintain because running their bloody models or renting that database space is way too expensive and I think that's about it do make sure to look out for other signals especially those I highlighted which would mean that we are getting there we we're in a good state do rewatch this too cuz that certainly helps but on that note I'm going to end it here I hope you have a good evening or a good day wherever you are thank you so much for tuning in