The Future of UX Has Nothing To Do With Technology (Has It Ever?)

In this presentation Jeff shared his own professional experiences & perspectives over his 15 year career - in addition to the insights of authors Raj Patel, Ethan Zuckerman, artists Robert Bateman, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, the Canadian surgeon Dr. Brian Goldman, and lessons learned from interviewing the biggest names in User Experience over the past five years.

In a storytelling format, Jeff illustrated why the need has never been greater to put the technology away in an effort to stop the proliferation of reactionary environments; to the creation of spaces focused on trust and respect.

Transcript

1. The Future of UX... Has Nothing To Do With Technology (Has It Ever?) Jeff Parks @jeffparks @followuxleader
2. - Sir Howard Stringer “All great companies have a kind of row boat mentality. They’re rowing hard, but they’re looking at the past.” - Sir Howard Stringer
3. “I can’t get my boss to understand we are living in the information age. Trying to control the flow of ideas is impossible. How do I wake him from this fictional world he’s created?” - South Africa If I have to draw one more detail in these wireframes I’m going to lose my mind! How can I get the Board of Directors to understand the interactions without worrying about the color of the buttons?” - United States “We aren’t anywhere close to having services requiring an application for mobile, yet here I am being tasked with creating the solution that will allow our company to ‘compete’ with the rest of the market. Why?!” - Brazil “My Director can barely figure out his email and yet I have to implement his suggestions in creating a great design? It’s gonna be scary!” - Australia “Marketing and Communications are stuck in the print world. I don’t tell them how to publish magazines, so why are they telling me how I must design?” - Poland Future Leaders of #UX
7. That’s the system that we have! It’s a complete denial of mistakes. There are two kinds of physicians - those who make mistakes and those who don’t... Those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes... Errors are absolutely ubiquitous...we really aren’t [dealing with] the problems as we should.” - Dr. Brian Goldman
8. Purpose Will Instruct Process
9. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “The classic, pervasive seduction to designers has been to find a solution instead of the truth.” - Richard Saul Wurman
10. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “In order to know what’s good, we have to establish what’s true!” - Dan Klyn
11. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “The fact the we have a lot to learn doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot already!” - David R. Dow
12. “...Nothing is more useful than water; but it will scarce purchase anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” - Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations 1776)
13. “We need to look at the media systems we’ve built, over hundreds of years in the case of newspapers and a dozen or so years in the case of social media, and ask whether they’re working the way we need them to in a connected age. If they’re not, we need to rewire.” - Ethan Zuckerman
14. Real World Collaboration
15. “Forest Therapy is where they take stressed out office workers in downtown Tokyo... they go for a walk in the woods for under an hour... Their blood pressure comes down, Cortisol levels come down (fight or flight)... all they do is go for a walk in the woods.” - Robert Bateman
16. “The future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.” - Richard Louv
19. “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” - David Weinberger
21. Technology Will Be Viewed As A Possible Solution
22. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “We’re very good at heart attacks. We’re very bad with Cancer... Large organizations can be mobilized when you face a crisis. They are much more difficult to mobilize when they’re facing a slow trend that is eating away at [them]!” - Dr. Fareed Zakaria
23. “It is more reasonable to suppose a thing to have been invented by those to whom it would be of service, than by those whom it must have harmed.” - Jean Jaques Rousseau
24. “... if we want to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of connection, we have to take responsibility for shaping the tools we use to encounter the world.” - Ethan Zuckerman
25. Creative Corporate Culture
26. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “You’ve got cry without weeping, talk without speaking, scream without raising your voice!” - U2 ‘Running To Stand Still’
27. “Creativity is not something that occurs in a particular region of the cortex. Nor is it like emotions or balance, which are rooted in particular structures and circuits outside of the cortex. Rather, creativity is an inherent property of every cortical region. It is a necessary component of prediction.” - Jeff Hawkins
28. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “The real role of leadership in education is not and - should not - be ‘command and control’. The real role of leadership in education is climate control - creating a climate of possibility!” - Sir Ken Robinson
29. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS “I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays. I want to encourage the best of storytellers - the ones coming up - because I believe that ‘sending the elevator back down’ is a great way that we can all use success to benefit others.” - Kevin Spacey
30. Trust and Respect
32. ESSENTIAL SKILLS FOR LEADING #UX TEAMS A Future Conversation Between The Future Leaders of #UX... “OH: Do you remember, back in the day, when all the UX professional was known for by the business community were personas and wireframes?”
33. Thank You Merci Beaucoup Tout Le Monde UX! Jeff Parks @jeffparks @followuxleader