Design Trends 2020

20
20
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INDEX
CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER 6
Sr UX Designer at Netsmart
CH. 02 – BENJAMIN HERSH 15

Product Design Lead at Dropbox
CH. 03 – SCOTT RILEY 24

Independent Designer
CH. 04 – PIOTR MAKAREWICZ 36

UI Designer at CipherHealth
CH. 05 – ADAM FERCH 47

Designer at Cisco
CH. 06 – BREE WALTER 58

Sr UX Designer at H&R Block
CH. 07 – ADAM RUF 68
Product Designer at AngelList
CH. 08 – WOJTEK ALEKSANDER 80

Sr Content Designer at Nordea
CH. 09 – DAVE MALOUF 88
Sr Director of Strategy and Operations

at Northwestern Mutual
CH. 10 – CHIARA ALIOTTA 99

Art Director at Until Sunday
CH. 11 – JOE CAHILL 107
UX & Creative Leader
CH. 12 – AGATA ORŁOWSKA 120
Sr UX Designer at ClickMeeting
CH. 13 – CHERYL COURIS 126

Sr UX Design Manager at Cisco
CH. 14 – CHHAVI SHRIVASTAVA 136

Product Designer at N26
CH. 15 – LEE SEAN HUANG 146

Design Education Manager at AIGA
CH. 16 – TORREY PODMAJERSKY 155

UX Writer at Google
CH. 17 – CHRISTIAN TRYLLER 166
Sr Interactive Art Director at Invitae
CH. 18 – ALEKS SAFAROVA 174

Director of Product Design at KAYAK
CH. 19 – KIM LENOX 184
VP Product Design at Zendesk
CH. 20 – RAMSÉS CABELLO 194

UI Engineer at GAN Integrity
Interviews have been conducted

by Katarzyna Kempa.
GRACE
BREWER
ɔ Designing healthcare software apps
ɔ Minimalism versus maximalism in UX design
ɔ Business-oriented design: how design can

fit into the company business strategy
ɔ Design leadership
01
UXPIN – DESIGN, PROTOTYPE, COLLABORATE.
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends for UXPin. We’re here

to talk a little bit about design trends for 2020. First
of all, please tell us a bit about yourself.
Grace Brewer Hello, my name is Grace Brewer. I lead a small design

team at a medium-sized healthcare IT company that’s
based out of Kansas City. Our team just started about
four years ago. It’s been really exciting to see the com-
pany become more design mature. We utilize UXPin and
we’re very big fans. We’ve spoken on behalf of it before
because we find the tool to be really user-friendly and
extremely powerful for what we need to do, particularly
for designing healthcare software.
And then as far as usability testing we use some other tools

for tracking metrics which is really important for what our
team does, including validating moderated user testing.
In our field it can be really hard to get face-to-face with
our users since we’re working with those in healthcare.
Because you work for the healthcare industry, I would

like to ask you how the practice of inclusive design
and accessibility will grow in 2020 in your opinion. Is
this trend important to you?
Yes, definitely. I think being in healthcare software we

need to think about that more so than other sectors. But
the great thing about that trend is that we’re beginning
to understand how it applies to so many different types
of technology. Overall, designers have more of an eye
7 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

on it, even for things that we might not have necessar-

ily associated with accessibility. So it’s important for us,
especially because we get checked for whether we’re
meeting regulatory standards. It’s been top of mind for
us for quite a few years now. But I do think it’s just going
to become more and more common amongst those in
other sectors as well, which is really exciting.
I read something a couple of days that had me think-

ing, which said, “when is the time companies will
measure how many disabled people are using their
app?” Because if only one person uses your app, you
should be thinking about accessibility, right?
Yes. I think it goes beyond a change in mindset. If you go

into it with the mentality that we have to account for 20
people who maybe have this sort of disability, versus 20
people who are different in another way, then you’re always
going to end up kind of excluding someone or just not
doing it quite “right”. It’s more than just being creative in
the way that you actually build your software – you need
to allow for people who have different needs to be able
to actually use it effectively. It’s not necessarily, “Here’s
this group of people and here’s this group of people.”
You can think of it in a more inclusive way overall, how to
help people who might have different backgrounds – and
not just disabilities. Of course, there are many things that
can lead to design changes and approaching software
differently. We focus on all the ways we can think of it in
a more holistic way.

Do you think that 2020 is going to be the year that

people are going to think holistically about that?
Goodness, it’s so hard to say because every

company moves at a different speed. If you look
at today, there are so many different companies
that are on different levels. So, like anything, it’ll take
time for different groups. Some will move more quickly
towards that than others, but hopefully 2020 will be the
year that it gets more traction.
More designers are advocating for accessibility, so

I think the trend is going to be pretty huge in 2020.
My next question to you would be: minimalism or
maximalism? I can see that there are two versions of
design and two sides of the trend. Which party would
you consider yourself in?
I don’t know. Once again, I think it’s kind of hard to say

because it just depends on the market you’re in. Some
types of software or some types of designers can get
away with a little bit more. For healthcare, we don’t get
to try as many of the hot new trends because they move
in and out very quickly, and healthcare software would
not be able to keep up with that. But also, we are utili-
ty-focused – people come into our software needing to
get a job done.
For us, we are a little bit more on the side of minimalism.

The more straightforward that we can make it, that’s us

doing our jobs well. We’re not trying to compete in a

market where we’re convincing people to download our
app versus another app. We know that our users typically
don’t have a choice in the matter, because they’re the
ones who work at the hospital. The hospital is the one
buying the software, but we want to make sure that the
employees also enjoy the experience. So the simpler we
can make it for them is usually the route that we have
to take.
So it’s not whether it sparks joy like Marie Kondo said,

but it’s about usability, right?
Yes, exactly. And to that point, for those who have more
consumer-facing apps, it can be very joyous and very
happy-inducing for users to actually see a minimalist
design sometimes. But there’s always a place for both
routes.
Exactly. So my next question to you would be, I assumed

that you are aware that Pantone said that Classic Blue
is the 2020 color, but do you think that there will be
another color that would be the new black of 2020?
I don’t know. It’s always hard to compete with blue.

Obviously, if you look at the amount of logos that are
blue, it is always something that’s very accessible to a lot of
people. There’s a lot of psychology behind that. So I don’t
have any particular [color] in mind, but you know there’s
always something that comes out of left field. Obviously

when Material Design happened, nobody expected that

pink was going to be the hot new thing.
There’s this whole psychology of colors,

right? And blue is connected with the in-
tellectual sphere, etc. So I think that’s why
blue is connected with the tech industry.
But as you said, you never know. What is your favorite
emerging trend in your field of design and industry?
Meaning healthcare, obviously, but also you are a UX
designer. So please share anything that pops into your
mind that would be what you are most excited to watch
for in 2020.
Something that I find particularly

exciting is the fact that the lines between
business and design are becoming
a little bit fuzzy but in a very good way.
In recent years there’s been a lot of teaching business

leaders about design. There’s been design thinking and
trying to democratize design and make it more accessible
to people. But I’m really excited for a little bit going the
other way, with designers getting more involved with
business decisions and understanding a little bit more
of that side. It aligns with my passions because I also find
the way that businesses are run to be very interesting.

But I do think it is becoming more prevalent because for

so many years now, as designers, we’ve said, “We really
want a seat at the table.” That’s a very common phrase.
And we need to make sure that once we do get that seat
at the table, we really understand what that means and
switch from this mindset of, “Okay, what does the design
team need?”
Because for so long we were really having to fight for just

getting resources on design teams, but we need to switch
that mentality to what the business needs and how can
the design team help.
Usually designers are considered artistic souls who

wouldn’t know anything about business. And there
are strict rules, how to design stuff, especially apps,
and how to bring business value.
I completely agree. For so many years it was really easy

to write us off as creative idealists. There’s been a lot of
trends that helped that. Big data and more focus on user
research has helped people understand that we’re not
just making these decisions because we think they look
pretty. But I think the next step will be us being able to
speak the language as far as how businesses are run so
that we can also understand how what we’re doing fits
into a bigger business strategy.
So you think design thinking is one of the ways to

develop this kind of thinking in the whole company?

Yes, I think so. It’s funny – for the past few weeks my team
has been doing weekly UX research time for continued
learning. And for the past several weeks, I’ve just been
reading design-thinking articles – ones that are for design
thinking and ones that are against design thinking. And it’s
really interesting because there are definitely arguments
on both sides of the spectrum. Like anything, it can be
used incorrectly and it can be used to say [a company is]
really design mature, when really they aren’t.
But there are also times where it can really help spread
the word and help people understand that we need to
not just make decisions to make decisions. We need to
validate these assumptions. We need to iterate. So, like
anything, of course there’s a good and a bad way to apply
it, but I think generally helping people better understand
design and understand the value that it provides is a
good thing.
I agree completely. So my last question is what are

your professional goals for 2020? Are you following
some kind of trend or going against it? What are your
new year’s resolutions?
I have a passion for the way businesses are run. So I think

mine is learning more of the business side. I already
listen to some business podcasts, but I think within my
own company, especially now that I lead a team, I want
to start being a little bit more proactive of going after
those business conversations and trying to have more

understanding, and really making it known throughout

the company. I want them to know that I want to listen
in for things so that I can learn more about it.
I’m also very excited to see what UXPin has to offer

because when you guys release a new feature, my team
always says, “Did you see what they did? Did you see how
it does this?” We always find that to be a really great part
of our year as well.
Work faster with

built-in libraries
Use one of the ready-to-use libraries,
such as iOS, Material Design or
Bootstrap full of interactive elements,
colors, text styles, and icons.
14 YOUR DESIGN PROCESS. SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.

BENJAMIN
HERSH
ɔ Device-dependent design
ɔ Educational resources for

learning designers
ɔ New jobs in the design industry
ɔ Cultural differences in designing on

different sides of the planet
02
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends. Today I’m joined by

Benjamin Hersh. Ben, could you tell us a little bit about
yourself and your little friend there?
(Ben is holding a small dog.)
Benjamin Hersh I’m Ben, a Product Design lead at Dropbox. [The dog] is
my associate creative director. I’ve been at Dropbox for a
while now. Previously, I was a designer at Medium. Before
that, I was designing karaoke apps and briefly worked at
a zoo. It all comes together.
So we will talk a little bit about design trends for

2020. I’d like to hear your opinions about a few things.
And first thing I would like to ask you is, what do you
think about this discussion on AI in design, because
I’m hearing about bridges being designed by AI, and
they’re 3D printed and put on rivers. That kind of scares
me, but also really inspires me. What would you say?
I feel like AI and design is nothing new. I’m definitely not

an AI expert, so I can’t speak to the developments on
that end. But in tech we’ve been using AI and machine
learning for a long time, usually for purposes that are
not entirely in service of the user – making products
super addictive or hard to put down, and making feed
suck up your attention. One of the things that’s exciting
now is that we’re starting to see uses for these tools that
are much more aligned with human needs. I’m thinking
about some of the stuff that Dropbox is doing, because
16 CH. 02 – BENJAMIN HERSH

that’s very top of mind. We’re doing things like making it

much easier to stay focused and stay in flow when you’re
working. Meaning, using tools to make sure that your
workspace knows which documents you’re going to need
when you’re sending someone a bunch of stuff at the
end of the call, or just being able to streamline a lot of
very small processes to make it easier for you to actually
pay attention to things.
And I’m really excited by the developments in AI that

make it much, much easier for us to make the design
a lot more seamless and disappear. And to address the
very basic human need to feel effective in what you do,
to feel in control of your work, and to connect with other
people. I think it’s exciting when AI facilitates these basic
things that are ultimately the reason why anyone uses the
tools that we make. So that’s the stuff that I’m looking
forward to seeing develop.
So do you see it just as a tool, and not nothing to get

worried about?
Not yet. I’m sure that we’ll get there. Right now, we’re seeing
things that make tools better, make them smarter – there
might be a point in time when it gets out of control. And
that’s terrifying. I don’t know how far away we are from that.
But it also has a lot of upsides, and there’s a
lot of opportunity to use it responsibly and
intelligently and to enhance design instead
of seeming like it’s in conflict with human

design, which I think sometimes happens in press coverage.

It seems like a bridge is designed by either a human or a
robot, and there’s no middle ground. But the truth is that
there are humans who are also working on [the design]
and guiding the AI. And AI can help find creative patterns
that humans may not be able to see. So, I see a lot of
opportunities for collaboration with robots.
As long as we are the ones who hold the cards.
Yes. I was just thinking about Neuralink, the company that

Elon Musk is putting together for brain-computer interfaces,
where there can be very real integration between AI and
human minds. And that certainly has its own scary science
fiction-like scenarios. You can imagine a situation where
computers can control our minds directly. But there’s
also a lot of opportunity for really interesting design work
and what it would be like if the interface was literally just,
you think something and the tool does what you want. It
would be completely subconscious and seamless. That’s
kind of the holy grail for interaction design. I’m excited
by the opportunities ahead.
Now we are starting talking about voice commands,

or the UI design for voice directors like technology,
but I think that’s the next step for mind-directed
stuff. But here’s another question – a couple years
ago, everybody was about making everything mobile
first. Now it’s about making everything voice first. In a
couple of years, maybe the focus will be AI first. What

do you think is the brand’s response to the demand

of device-dependent design?
One of the things that I’ve been observing from where I

stand is how even though a lot of things on the surface
have changed as the tools we use change, a lot also hasn’t
changed. A lot of the core patterns
and directions we use are the same as
they’ve always been. I’m thinking about
the basic stuff like URLs on websites
and buttons—an interface—a thing that you press. With
voice interfaces, you don’t have that. But there’s a lot of
patterns that we carry with us through all the different
iterations and form factors.
As an extreme example, I’m wearing a watch where the

hour hand goes around [clockwise]. If you trace that
design pattern back, it goes 500 years back to when we
thought that the sun was moving around the Earth – we
still have that exact same pattern in Apple watches. So,
even as the tools we’re using become a lot more powerful
or distributed, or integrate with us in different ways, a lot
of the design elements actually stay the same. And I think
that’s because there’s more of a need for familiarity. So,
with voice interfaces, we’re supposed to talk to them like we
talked to normal people. That’s as basic and familiar as an
interaction can be. That’s the way we grew up interacting
with the world. I see more continuity with the way things
have always been done, as these tools enable us to let
a lot of these interfaces sink back into the background

or become more seamlessly part of our everyday lives.

I see the role of design, in many ways, keeping it super
grounded in the familiar, and making sure that all these
new experiences are packaged in a way that feels very
old and tangible. In a way that any regular person can
wrap their head around.
When you talk about things that are evergreen, like

the basics, and new trends that are growing on top
of that—design education, for example—do you think
that new designers have the basics, and also already
embrace new things?
I don’t know if anyone is ever ready. The unfortunate

truth is that we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go along.
Having new people with a new perspective is always
good. But I do think there’s never been a better time
than now to get into this stuff. I’ve been marveling at a
lot of the educational resources on the internet. There
are couple different websites—I think one of them is
growth.design—that
have what are basical-
ly online comic books
explaining the way in-
teraction design works.
I would have killed for something like that when I was
getting started 10 years ago. It’s inspiring to see that
the design world is finally making itself a little bit more
user friendly, and much more accessible and fun to get
started. I’m excited by all that stuff happening now that’s

making it easier to understand the kind of work that we

actually do.
Yes, I think the landscape of jobs in design is changing

as well. So, you say you would kill for those resources.
And maybe people from 10 years ago would kill for a
job like you have now. What do you think, because
I’m hearing that the UX designer job is disappearing?
I can’t say whether the job is disappearing or not. It hasn’t

for me yet. I do think it’s one that changes constantly.
We used to have webmasters, and now we tend to talk
about product designers, at least in San Francisco, and
there’s a lot of content annuity network. But the things
you’re accountable for have definitely shifted a little bit.
And the skillsets that you would have needed 10 years
ago are slightly different from what you need now. A lot
of the work that I remember doing when I got started is
now being automated or made very easy.
I remember, and I’m going to date myself here, there was

a time when we used to manually round corners for UI
and have a little asset that you’d take into photoshop and
make a rounded corner. And then you’d have to manually
position it on top of the UI to give it that appearance. But
now it’s so easy, you wouldn’t ever think about that. In two
clicks you have exactly that you handed off to the developer,
and they know exactly what to do. It’s not anyone’s job
to look at that level of the design. And as a result, we do
spend a little bit more time being strategic about business

impacts, how to weigh the different tradeoffs between

design options and a much bigger context.
Certainly, in my own career, I’ve been liberated to spend

less time focusing on the details and more time being
a little bit of a philosopher and thinking about, if we
introduce this metaphor, what is this going to mean for
our users? What kind of research can we do to validate
these things? All that time that, at one point, would have
been taken up with much more obscure and arcane details
that, thankfully, I have not thought about for a long time.
When you talk about designing good UI, I’m thinking

about the trend of the struggle of minimalism and
maximalism. I strongly believe that 2020 is going to be
like a big war because we’ve had this Marie Kondo-like
trend to slowly delete everything and make it as simple
as possible. And now we are experiencing more vintage
stuff, like neon blue colors. But whenever I talk to UX
or product designers, they always want minimalism.
Would you say the same thing?
Honestly, yes. I enjoy maximalism, I don’t begrudge

anyone who does that. It’s just not the kind of design that
I happen to do. But that is culturally relative. There are
parts of the world where people tend to prefer maximalist
designs. There’s been a lot written about web design in
places like Japan where there are different expectations
for what kind of information is available. I think for better
or for worse, the mainstream web culture is minimalism.

And if you want a website to be really easily understood by

a wide audience, that’s usually the way to go. One thing
that sometimes gets lost in these conversations is that
it’s really hard to pin down what minimalism actually is.
You can have a screen that has two elements but it can
still take 10 steps to do something. And often there’s a
tradeoff between the simplicity of the process and the
simplicity of the basic elements on the surface. It’s easy to
have something that looks simple, but it’s actually really
complicated, and vice versa.
And sometimes when I see maximal stuff, I’m actually

surprised when I look a little bit closer, and I see that it’s
actually very simple. It might hit you over the head when
you first look at it, but once you engage with it, it’s much
more obvious and intuitive than expected. So, I kind of
feel like you can do both, if you try.
In UI design, it is more about usability and intuitive-

ness, right?
Yes. And I think there are ways that you can get away with
being a little bit maximalist. Look at the art direction on
big websites right now, which are very filled with illustration
with really lush, vibrant typography, and you could make
the case that that’s maximalist. It’s definitely a lot of design
detail that might have been ignored a few years ago. But
for the most part, these things are still very simple to use.
I think that’s ultimately what matters.

SCOTT
RILEY
ɔ Inclusive and holistic design
ɔ Humanistic design and its role in AI and

tech development
ɔ Social impact of technology and design
03
UXPin Welcome to a 2020 Design Trends by UXPin. Today I’m

joined by Scott Riley. Scott, please tell us a bit about
yourself.
Scott Riley I am an independent designer. I work with startups, usually

in the early stage of the idea process to help them explore
the problem space, do a lot of workshops and early stage
design, early prototypes, iteration, and all that stuff.
What people generally used to call UX design,

I still don’t know what that fully involves after
10 years doing it. I’m also the author of a book
called Mindful Design, which is all about un-
derstanding how certain mental functions and properties
of the mind and the brain work and how we can use
them to design responsibly rather than take advantage
of people. But generally I do lots of early stage stuff, let
the process work, lots of early product explorations, etc.
I’m assuming your book is a little bit about how you

should be using your empathy in your designs, or
maybe inclusive design, because I’m gathering that
inclusive design and accessibility will be a very huge
trend in 2020. What do you think – is it a thing for 2020?
It should have been a thing since about 1980. To be

honest, when we talk about accessibility, it’s always kind
of been one of those things that people treated as an
afterthought. After a certain point with the web when it hit
a certain majority, people were like, “Oh, we can actually
25 CH. 03 – SCOTT RILEY

do cool visual stuff.” Now, rather than just pages with

blue links and black text, it’s fun. I think we’ve casually
eroded accessibility a little bit. And that new, fun period
where every website was glowing, and full of shadows
and image backgrounds, and all that fun stuff. I think it’s
one of those things that is a give or take on the web – we
hit a certain point with the super cool, trendy visual stuff
that was a little bit absurd, but incredible, and then went
the opposite direction with it. We’ve been going flat and
minimal.
But I do think that generally, accessibility

is criminally overlooked, and it’s not so
much a trend because it’s something
that should stay.
That’s the thing with trends, they come and go. Accessibility
needs to be baked into the process. If I’m getting feedback
from a client, I pause that feedback process to check
whether they think it’s accessible or not. They should
understand that I should be the one teaching that to
clients. With the front-end developer, one of us should
be able to talk to the other about accessibility without
feeling like we’re asking the other person to do too much
work. It’s a basic consideration. And design tools now
are bringing accessibility more into the foreground, like
UXPin, through plugins or immediate product features.

Things like colorblind generators are really useful. But

they’re really the basics to me.
People are talking more now, especially in front-end

development, about people who prefer reduced motion.
And so we’ve gone through this big kick of everyone really
enjoying animations, with lots of tools
being accessible for developers, not users.
They’re bringing things like spring physics
to the web where you really can make native-feeling,
incredibly responsive animations, but at what expense?
Now we’re discovering people who really do not need
animations in their life. Maybe they give people migraines
or ocular issues. And now we’re looking at how we can
design around that.
How do we now step back from cool animations and stuff

like that? And I think that’s a big thing. When we talk about
interactive design and animation and people who’ve
made their career through those things, it can seem like,
“Oh shit, people exist that do not need my work in their
face every time they try and send a message or read an
email.” So, there are just a lot of growing pains around
accessibility. If you’re fortunate enough to be able-bodied
and neurotypical, and those things aren’t immediately
apparent to you, you won’t notice them.
And then someone points out 12-pixel body copy in

every design. You might ask what’s going on and get a
bit defensive, or you think, “Great, I’m getting asked to

do more work now.” But there’s not a lot of expected

amount of pushback when people do talk about that
stuff. It’s about finding that balance between people and
understanding why they’re being asked about developing
empathy – which is definitely a buzzword, but is also
important for our design. We talk about it a lot, but get
just enough for our process.
And accessibility isn’t just about color blindness and the

right kind of contrast, or people who need screen readers
for whatever reason. There’s a mental side to accessibility
as well. If you take a step back and think about is acces-
sibility as a way of trying to be as inclusive as possible,
that needs to be taken into consideration.
You could design something that passes

all the WCAG guidelines.
When the user needs motion reduced, we take care of

all the visual stuff, all the motion-based stuff. But it can
still be incredibly detrimental to someone with anxiety,
or someone with limited cognitive faculties, or someone
with depression. Understanding this is where a lot of my
research comes from. A lot of the work that I do with clients
is helping them understand those potential triggers and
the mental systems that allow for someone to be anxious
for a prolonged period of time, or for someone to not
respond positively to something that someone with more

of a typical mind would – and I really hate the idea that

one person has a “typical” brain and another doesn’t.
So we’re understanding that it’s not just about the typical

accessibility discussions. And there are no Lighthouse
results for whether something causes or increases anxiety
or not. They’re very humanistic things that we need to be
aware of. When you talk about accessibility and inclusivity,
the global conversation around mental health opens
up that conversation within our work as designers and
developers, clients, product people, and everyone else
who has a say in what a product does. And I think that’s
super important as well. It’s not so much a trend, but an
approach towards a more holistic, inclusive routine.
We look at accessibility as new features become available in

browsers and on devices and to mainstream, able-bodied,
able-minded general public first. And then we discover
this is fucking people up who get migraines, and people
who are partially sighted. And then we kind of scale back
from there. There’s movement
towards understanding that
with every new feature, every new device, or every new
browser feature, there are people who may be excluded
from them.
And to explore that as part of any kind of project explo-

ration, if you want to explore empathy maps and include
some technological or mental health-based accessibility
issue, you’re talking about it at the very early stages of

your process rather than handing something over to a

front-end developer and just being like, “Cool. Make
sure a screen reader can speak this thing.” I hope that’s
what we’re getting more towards. We’re seeing a lot of
people talk more about accessibility because people
demand it more. And that’s coming from all angles as
well – developers want to develop accessible experiences
and designers want to design with accessibility in mind.
So as time goes on and these discussions carry on, it’s
something that will become front and center in everyone’s
process, I hope.
I think it’s becoming a new trend that is not an extra

but a necessity. But it is rooted deeply in the needs
of humans, right? Historically, it’s not very new. You
mentioned that technology is helping us designers
and product builders to be more accessible. But do
you think that there’s a whole other level of design
with new needs or completely new possibilities for
designers or product builders? Accessibility, or inclusive
design, is something that we should have had years
ago, because it’s only human. But there’s this whole
new part, like AI design, or computational design, that
people are afraid of. Maybe there’s some link between
what is new and what we need, right? What’s your idea
for like, cute AI in design?
I think there’s been a lot of experiments and failed prod-

ucts that have revolved around completely automating
the design process. Or at least, a lot of people think of AI

and they have this almost offensively libertarian outlook

on it, where they think if computers can do everything
for us then that’s going to make us money, and we can
sit back. Without getting preachy, I think that it’s very
difficult to talk about AI.
And to talk about something that intrudes on people’s

jobs or may potentially reduce the perceived value of
someone’s work while we’re in a system of rampant
capitalism – it’s very difficult to talk about something
that could potentially be a benefit to someone’s process,
while systematically removing jobs and affecting people’s
lives, just from a societal perspective. As a designer, and
as someone who has a love-hate relationship with AI, I
think that as a tool and embellishment to my process it
could be really useful.
But at the same time, as something that is celebrated for

the potential negative impacts on the perceived value of
people’s work, it’s quite difficult to get excited about it,
or to say that what we really need right now is ramping
artificial intelligence that’s going to take over all of our
processes. The way that I’ve seen people benefit from AI
is like an assistant to the design process.
So, rather than being, “Here’s all my data and all the
content I need to design around, now magic me up a
layout, please. That’s my job done,” it’s more about concept
generation. As humans, we’re really good at making a
decision based on a limited data set. Whether it’s looking

at pure data and deciding what’s important and what’s

not, or whether it’s looking at multiple design concepts
and deciding what’s best for a given scenario, I think the
least efficient part of design is actually generating those
concepts.
So, I could be drawing a box and putting some

text in it, and it looks great. That part’s important.
But part of the design process from there is asking, “Does
this button fit with the visual style of the product, if it’s
an existing product? Is the color of this the background,
the color of this button, something that I’m going to be
able to propose as a primary brand color? And then what
would it look like if it was green instead of blue? What
would it look like if it used two pixel character spaces
instead of one?”
All those questions and all those different versions of a

button you produce – there’s no decision making in there.
It’s a silly example, right? Because we don’t sit there and
make 500 variants of the button. But you think of logic
components—a header, paragraph text, a button, an
image, a standard media box component—it’s very easy to
just settle on one of the first couple because it looks cool.
I think there’s value in artificial intelligence in the gen-

eration of those concepts. And it can look at stuff that
has worked well before in specific contexts and spit out
five or six different versions. But you still have an actual
human designer make that decision.

Just as much as I wouldn’t want the postal company

to replace delivery people with drones, I don’t want to
empower bureaucrats and tech companies to replace
developers or designers with artificial intelligence. But
I think as tools, there’s room for artificial intelligence in
concept generation or comparison, or just assisting the
worker rather than replacing the worker. That’s my socialist
rant out the way. AI worries me as a technology, but it
worries me as a technology because of the system and
not because of its capabilities, if that makes sense. It’s
more the intention behind its use rather than debating
whether it’s useful or not.
It’s like that with every tool. We can do a lot of things

with a hammer as well, right? AI is just basically the
same. I’d like to ask you, what is your personal favorite
emerging trend that you think is going to be really
hip in 2020?
I think it’s a pretty boring one. As we spoke about at the

very start, it’s just about more of a focus on inclusivity in
design. Since writing my book, people I’ve worked with,
whether it’s designers, developers, clients, founders, or
people who’ve hired me as an advisor, I’ve felt a bigger
acceptance of systemic thinking and inclusive thinking.
And something I’ve noticed in my career even as close
as a few years ago, people weren’t as aware of the social
impact of technology as they are now. Because of the
state of my work, I generally work with people for three
to four months, and then they go off and build it with a

larger team. So I only work with people for about a year

really at the very early stages. And I’m noticing people
generally give more of a fuck when they start a project. So
that’s my favorite trend. Giving a fuck. There are a lot of
examples of people going in the opposite direction, and
I think it’s because of technology. There’s this discourse
around inclusivity and the potential negative impacts
of design. There’s a lot more openness than I’ve seen
previously for people who realize that we’re not building
something that’s going to be positive for everyone – it
could be harmful in some way.
What’s the social impact of this? What

if it’s used incorrectly? How could that
cause harm to people?
This is definitely a bit of confirmation bias because they’re

the questions I asked at the start of projects. But people
seem to understand the social impact of their ideas or
work. You’re talking about people who’ve got tens of
thousands of dollars to invest in a product, but are starting
to understand that they might be investing in something
that could cause harm. Whereas maybe five or six years ago,
it was pure optimism. So, people now seem to be more
aware of the potential negative impacts of technology.
And I think that should continue. I think people should
have a bit more cynicism in their early ideas. Anything
that seems like a pure net positive probably isn’t. There’s

probably something they haven’t explored with a feature

idea based on their myopic view of a problem space. I
think people are more open to exploring social impacts.
It’s not a hip trend. It’s not variable fonts. It’s not Pantone
Color of the Year, but it’s something I’ve seen that makes
me happy. So, we’re getting there.
At the end of the day, it is really optimistic what you

said, as long as we stay human and keep technology in
human hands and make it the most usable to humans.
I think we’re fine as long as we take care of each other,
with design and technology as well.
Create inclusive designs

Accessibility in UI design leads to a better
experience for all users, regardless of ability.
With UXPin’s built-in contrast checker and
color blindness simulator, you will make your
design more enjoyable for everyone.
35 YOUR – SCOTTPROCESS.
CH. 03DESIGN RILEY SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
PIOTR
MAKAREWICZ
ɔ Computational design and how to
prepare for AI revolution
ɔ Coding designers
ɔ VR and AR in product design
ɔ Inclusive design and accessibility

for healthcare software
04
UXPin Today I’m interviewing my dear friend Piotr. Piotr, will

you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Piotr Makarewicz I am a graphic designer based in Poland – Gdańsk, ac-

tually. I’ve been designing for some 10 years. I’m a UX
designer in CipherHealth, an American company. I started
designing with branding designs, logos, pretty basic stuff.
I was doing this while I was studying at Gdańsk University
of Technology where I was studying programming, which
is pretty weird for a designer. I was actually trying to go
further and I started doing some web design, and after
that, I went back to coding for a while. It was pretty in-
teresting, but boring, because it wasn’t that creative. At
least at that moment. Now it’s changed, so it’s something
new. And after that I became a full-fledged UX designer.
But I don’t like the term UX designer. I don’t like terms
at all. I think that we are all designers, so I call myself a
designer with some hints and some knowledge of code.
Maybe you have something to tell us about the land-

scape of UX or designer jobs, because I’m hearing that
job title of UX designer is disappearing. Do you have
an opinion about that? What is going to be trending
in design jobs in 2020?
Actually, I’ve been thinking about that. In the course of

my career, I’ve been called many things. Sometimes it
was designer, sometimes it was UI designer, sometimes it
was UX designer. I know all those terms that we are using
to call each other in the industry, but actually what we
37 CH. 04 – PIOTR MAKAREWICZ

are doing is designing stuff. And there is a separate part,

which is research. It’s a part of the UX designer’s job. But
I think that’s the most separate part from the designer
job – the UX researcher. So even though we as designers
have to be UX researchers, UX designers, UI designers,
and sometimes information architecture designers, we
need to be motion designers.
We can label people differently, but

there isn’t a company that focuses
a person on only one job.
I think that the designer term is the most important one,

and I would like to call everyone designers to be inclusive.
But if I want to be specific for different terms, I think that
a trending job will be typographers, because they have
been a bit overlooked in recent years as we have moved
to phones. For web, actually, it has been trending for five
or six years now. It has changed a bit, of course – there
was a big Helvetica craze, and everybody missed Arial. But
we need more and more customized fonts. And actually
companies are doing this all the time. Apple has its third
typeface – it was San Francisco, New York, there is going
to be another one.
They are focusing on this one very much and it is really

a device-dependent typography. A lot of brands are
creating their own typography, their own phones, their

own message hidden in the letters – and we need those

people. Not every designer can also be typographer
because it’s a really hard job to do. Even though it’s a bit
easier than it was a while ago when you had to actually
chisel the font – that was a lot harder. But now you need
to take into account many alphabets, many people, and
many sizes.
There was a very good trend a while back, I don’t know

what happened to it. But there was a responsive type
of typography that meant if the font gets bigger, the
width and height of the letters changed. So that was very
interesting. I would like to see that come back sometime,
because that was really cool, and this
is the way we can use technology at
its best right now. Motion designers
are gaining more and more attention
because we need more illustrations.
But illustrations have become a bit dull because we are
being attacked by illustrations all the time. They are really
cool and awesome and we love them, but people need
movement because our attention span is lowering day
by day. So actually, using some of the motion animation,
gifs, or movies to give life to illustrations is gaining a
lot more traction. So I think that this is going to be the
path. As we are speaking about UX designers, I think that
using augmented intelligence or AI, which is normally
called artificial intelligence, is going to be augmented
intelligence for us. We will need a new job that is to work
with AI to create new designs.

So in terms of typography, it’s not anything new, but

you anticipate something like a digital typographer
or something like that. More animation and more AI.
So while we’re on the subject of AI, I would like to ask
you one thing – what do you think about the whole
discussion of AI designing things instead of real people,
like computational design, AI-based design, usability
testing, machine learning, or any use of machines and
artificial intelligence in design?
So I’m going to start off with one thing. Everybody is

scared of AI because they don’t really understand it. I
have to be honest, even people designing AI systems
don’t understand it fully, and that’s a problem. It’s like a
big black box that gets you from point A to point B, but
it’s really good right now at prediction, getting data, and
learning the best possible way to get the best possible
result. But even though our imaginations run wild and
we think that they can take a person and find the best
soulmate for them, or maybe create art for this person
specifically, it’s not that simple. We need to take into
account a lot of different factors and AI is not actually
capable of doing this right now, because we need to
provide the data to it.
We don’t have the understanding of the human

brain in this whole matter. We don’t understand
it fully; our understanding is in the single per-
centages, even. So it’s not possible for AI to create designs
that will wow us. They can create millions of iterations

of design and create a lot of different variations of the

design. But it’s the human’s job to pick out the ones that
stand out and are the best. So actually, even though
we are afraid of it, I think we should be glad that it’s
coming and it’s going to be better. Just imagine, if we’ve
got augmented intelligence in let’s say, Sketch, and we
have a possibility of actually clicking a button that says,
“Create more variations of this design,” that’s going to be
super helpful because you don’t need to create 10 or 15
versions – it will iterate that quickly by itself.
So that’s something that could help us, and take those

small, meticulous tasks away from us. That could help us
really much. If we are trying to say that AI is going to take
our jobs, I think it’s going to create new ones because
we’ll need someone who is going to work with the AI,
and work with design, and with developers and other
people, to actually deliver products with the help of AI;
those people are going to be completely new. I think it’s
going to be the fourth category of trending jobs in 2020.
So we are not afraid of AI in design. You welcome it,

embrace it with your arms wide open to help you with
computing power, right?
In a general sense, yes. But I’m also a bit afraid. Most

people watch Black Mirror. It’s not that easy to not be
afraid of AI. But still I try to embrace it. I try to understand
it. I try to read papers about it. Actually, the predictive
feature of it is super entertaining and really cool. You see

it with Netflix, see it with anything that has to do with

your music – Spotify does it greatly, and it’s like super
awesome. So we have a lot of things that we can do, but
when it comes to design, it’s not that good yet. Actually,
Airbnb created some kind of software that uses AI to
create code out of design files, and it works really well. I
think that they also do some kind of user research using AI.
That’s really interesting because user research and the

whole UX approach to do things is to understand the
problem. You’ve got the insights, you understand the
problem, you’re trying to solve the problem and come up
with different variations of the possible solutions. You’re
even trying to think of ideas that wouldn’t be so easy to
come up with. AI will be very good with that. It can help
us when we need to iterate and then test, and as we
need to test we can use AI to do it because that means
presenting different variations. It means getting data.
I’m not saying that AI is going to do user research as in

go and interview someone, but maybe in the future that
could be possible. I’m using AI right now for transcribing
interviews and helps me find categories in it. So in this
way it’s very helpful, and not scary yet.
We were talking a little bit about new technologies,

but I’m really happy to talk to you about the technol-
ogies used in design because I know you are a little
bit geeky. So would you say that VR and AR are just
breaking into design from the gaming or social media

worlds? Are there business applications for real-life

use of the technology?
That’s really interesting actually. The use of VR and AR

that I’ve seen so far is mostly fun. It’s games, it’s the
thing with the AR kit that Apple is trying to do, to make
gaming more fun. We are trying to use AR for something
meaningful, but we are starting with measuring stuff. We
are trying to place stuff inside of our homes like Ikea does
with AR. But it’s a bit clunky actually,
because we need to watch through our
phones at the world. We are not the
youngest generation, who are used to
sticking with their phones all the time
and having this peripheral vision that helps them see stuff
around the phone. And maybe for them, this is going to
be something better.
But for us right now, it’s actually kind of awkward to

just walk around with your phone, with the exception of
Pokémon Go. But actually, it’s a bit hard to use. VR in a
sense, right now, it’s a bit expensive. Not everybody can
afford it. So it’s the opposite of inclusive. The use that we
have it for is mostly fun, but why? Because it’s not precise.
It’s not meant to be used for a long period of time. It
can give you headaches, dizziness, and other problems,
and it’s not for everybody. Also, we look weird. Did you
see the Facebook picture of people with the new Oculus
walking around? It looks weird.

So that’s the whole problem with it. I was thinking, let’s

say SAP or Atlassian or another company that delivers
software that is complicated and also really helpful, but
it’s meant to be fast and help teams. Do you imagine
people sitting around with VR headsets and doing agile
tasks, or maybe doing some retrospective? It’s going to
be hard and awkward. So I don’t think it’s going to jump
into this kind of design. But on the other hand, we can
use some stuff from VR and AR because then we have to
add a bit of depth to the whole design perspective. You
don’t have to move your mouse up and down. You can
go deep and you can pick stuff.
We are still far away from Minority Report. But we have

some really cool apps that let you draw in 3d space. Those
have really cool user interfaces. If you have, let’s say, HTC,
Vive, or Oculus, you can use your hand and actually just
see the whole menu on your hand and pick out stuff.
That’s pretty futuristic for me, it’s really cool. But until
this goes into the real world, when we have real menus
on our hands, it’s not going to be a big help because we
still have to face those basic problems like standing with
the VR headset and having to use your whole room. We
need to actually jump over some hurdles to do it now.
On the other hand, there is something really cool for
gamers that is coming out, Half-Life, which is going to
be completely VR.
It’s said to be Half-Life 3. It’s like Apex—I don’t really

remember the name—but it’s going to be completely

VR. They’re betting on VR. So we’ll see what’s going to

happen after that. Because if Steam, a huge company
that has millions of dollars of revenue and actually knows
what it does, is going to put out one of the biggest games
in 2020 in VR only, that’s saying something. I think it’s
going to go somewhere. And maybe more people could
afford the VR headsets and the whole machinery, and
maybe we will find some more uses for it. Maybe AI will
help. Nobody knows.
So unless the hardware gets where our technology

in terms of software is, it’s still maybe not 2020, but
definitely the 2020s, right?
Yes, I would say so.
So, tell me one more thing. What are your professional

plans for 2020 and are you following a specific trend?
Oh, that’s a broad question. At CipherHealth, we are

focusing on outreach in the USA, which is getting into
medicine and pharmaceutics, and just actually trying
to help people. And this is also in the hospitals and for
the nurses to do their patient rounds – we have a vast
library of apps. I think that the next goal for me is going
to include inclusive design. I was doing websites, let’s say
apps, that needed to have as many signups and as many
customers as possible to improve the whole experience.
It’s something different right now because we do have
the majority of people, 83%, that are fully capable. But

some of them in hospitals, are, by definition, not.
We actually deal with a lot of different disabilities and

different problems for people. Those are mobility problems
and problems with perception. Not only color, but also
problems with the sizes and devices, because sometimes
we are being used on devices that are provided by the
hospital. If I’m going to say something about the design
trends for 2020 for web designers, it’s because I’m also
a web designer in my spare time.
Okay. I’m so happy that you mentioned inclusive design

because accessibility is something that we actually
count on at UXPin. We have quite a few really awesome
features at UXPin when it comes to accessibility. Some
businesses, as you said, would count how many people
in your target users are disabled. I say if it’s only one
person your design should be accessible, right?
Animate between
states
Create different versions of your inputs,
buttons, and plenty of other elements
with powerful states. Then, animate
between them using micro-interactions.
46 YOUR – PIOTRPROCESS.
CH. 04DESIGN MAKAREWICZ
SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
ADAM
FERCH
ɔ DesignOps and roles connected to
design management
ɔ T-shaped designer jobs
ɔ Technology in the design world
ɔ Ethics in design and technology
ɔ Open design culture
05
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends by UXPin. Today I’m

joined by Adam Ferch. Can you tell us more about
yourself?
Adam Ferch Currently, I am a designer at Cisco. Previously I was at

Microsoft and other companies such as Amazon. I got to
work for a cool startup in Kenya for a little bit building
cookstoves. That was a blast. But at Cisco, right now, I
work on a centralized creative team. And our goal is to
help evangelize the brand, building cohesion across our
design language, evolving our design language, and scaling
and evolving our current design system momentum. So,
that’s where most of my day is spent.
Design systems are not really a trend, and we’re sup-

posed to talk about trends for 2020. But I think it’s
something that more and more companies are looking
into, would you agree?
Yes, I think design systems are still a little niche. In the

design bubble, they’re really popular and seen as common.
But if you engage with other disciplines like a product
team, they’re still seen as really new. A big thing is the
value that they bring. How do you quantify and create
qualitative results for a visual language? You can say that
it speeds up a designer, or builds more coherence. But
from a customer’s or user’s point of view, are they feeling
the ramifications? Are they seeing improvements in the
experience? Does it make your product more delightful?
So yes, I think it’s a total trend. In design, you’re also seeing
48 CH. 05 – ADAM FERCH

other organizations think about design terms of design

thinking – I don’t love that word, but it’s something that’s
still relatively new. I could totally see it being a trend in
2020, with more small- to enterprise-scale organizations
buying into it.
There’s even the role of DesignOps.
Yes, DesignOps is huge. Producers, DesignOps, project

managers – those organizationally-minded, systemat-
ic-minded individuals. It is so important to be able to take
something, whether it’s a design system or a product, and
manage it through its lifecycle. When you’re at a company
like Cisco, there isn’t just one design team. There are
several. So designers and other disciplines have day jobs,
and they go and do those things. But are they taking the
time to connect the dots across the organization? Maybe,
maybe not. But that’s where operations can come in and
really bring the picture that we all believe in. Is this a one-
system-fits-all kind of idea? And they can make sure that
we’re moving in a direction and scaling it appropriately
for everybody.
Speaking about the design job landscape, do you

think that other than DesignOps, there’s something
emerging?
I do. The “design dot something” has been like a trend

for a really long time, like, design-user experience, de-
sign-visual design. I think T-shape is going to be more of

a trend in 2020 – instead of focusing across areas, I will

be really good at one thing.
Design technologist is one that’s becoming more and

more popular. You see engineers getting more excited
about design, taking classes and getting educated, and
fitting into those roles and vice versa. Designers want
to have a little more control over their product or in the
impact on their product or to help bridge the gap like in a
design system. But engineering resources are always hard
to find. So if a designer can take it to that next evolution,
then it’s easier for those types of handoffs. But it’s hard
to say. Maybe just design, right?
“Just designer” will be the trend. I’m not

a visual designer, I can just do a little bit
of everything – or I like to think I can, at
least.
It’s very funny that you say that, because most of the
designers that I talked to in these interviews are saying
that their jobs are going to be more niche, and people
are going to be more specified in their fields. So, that’s
very interesting that you have the opposite view.
I think the work is going to be niche, but in terms of

the interpretation, or what I call myself, or what another

designer calls themselves, it’s not going to be so micro-

scopic. It’s not going to be like, “I am a designer who builds
micro-experiences for blockchain this on this platform.”
Over here, it’s just like, “I’m a designer,” because other-
wise its computer speak – our output gets
non-human. It’s really important for designers
to maintain that empathy and that human
side of what we do, because we are so close to technology
now, and we get immersed in it. It’s everywhere.
You mentioned design technologists, and now you talk

about the technology that is coming into the design
world. So, I’m hearing about computational design
and an AI designing very important stuff. And what
do you think about that? Is it really coming in 2020 or
the 2020s?
I think so. I feel like we’re starting to kick off with a lot
of the tools that are available today, like releasing APIs
so that designers or engineers can build tools for their
discipline to improve their workflow. And because of that
you’re going to see roles change because a computer
can automate, or an algorithm can automate, or we can
automate some part of the workflow of design or research
or engineering.
It doesn’t mean that those jobs are going away. They’re

just going to shift. We’re going to focus in different ways
and create new areas of opportunity. And I think that’s
really exciting. There’s a little bit of unknown there, and

I say embrace the fear. It sounds like fun. I couldn’t put

my finger on what that would be as a trend, though.
What I think the biggest trend you’re going to see is

the translation of designers putting something in a tool
and being able to compute that out into a framework,
whether it’s for Swift or React, or all these other tech-
nology frameworks, I think that’s going to be like a big
trend in 2020, or the 2020s – being able to translate that,
to maintain the design intent, and in space all the way
through the process.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but they installed

a bridge in Amsterdam on the canal that was fully
designed by AI, and then 3d-printed.
What?
Yes, and I saw it. It reminds me of a design by nature,

or Audi. it’s not as “architectural” as we would think.
And that makes me think that AI is something that
we have to still explore, but also control a little bit,
because there might be some computational power
that we don’t understand.
Yes, you hit the nail on the head there. There’s so much
ethics and confidence and discipline that goes into building
those types of things. We’ll never be able to think as fast
as computers until we have computers in our head. And
if that’s the case, how do we stay relevant? And how do

we teach whatever we’re building to maintain our rele-

vancy? That’s like a whole Elon Musk tangent we could
go on there.
Like Neuralink…
Yes, there’s all kinds of goodness that we could dive into.

As a technologist, it’s fascinating to dabble and think
about those things and, you know, worry sometimes. Do
we matter at any point, in terms of robots or the termi-
nators of the world taking over and doing things for us?
What do we become? I call it the Wall-E effect. We’re on
a spaceship and we sit in these chairs, and they feed us
and change our clothes. Do we want to be designing for
that? Or do we want to like, build that block where we
can say, okay, we’re too close to becoming that. So how
do we work backwards?
Yes, but on the other hand, there’s this whole new

trend of inclusive design and being more human in
designing. Meaning not calculating every business
decision when you’re designing it, but to focus on
very small issues that might be good to acknowledge
for only one user.
It’s huge. We saw accessible and inclusive

design really take off from 2018 to 2019. There
are companies that are investing in really pow-
erful ways on all ends of the spectrum, from hardware to
software, which is awesome to see. As designers, because

we’re visual creatures to begin with, we tend to focus on

the things we can see. And that’s why visual impairment
is a big focus in that area. But there are so many other
disabilities and abilities that exist in the world, whether
it’s mobility, vision, hearing, and so on. It’s another one of
those areas where artificial intelligence is an opportunity.
And not even an opportunity, it’s more like we have to

because there are so many people in the world today that
get left out. Whether it’s design, or working at McDonald’s,
or hustling on the street, we’re all human at the end of the
day. We should be affording for that as creatures of the
earth. And so, I think it’s more important than focusing on
other areas. Because it’s so cool – it’s so easily attainable
right now. It’s a challenge to convince stakeholders that
it’s important. So we have to do it from the beginning.
It’s new, uncharted territory for some organizations. They
are still figuring out how to accomplish those goals, but
there has to be something that has to happen, right?
Today. It’s accessible, inclusive design.
We’re not going to do a design sprint

and then do another design sprint
because now we think about inclusion
or accessibility. It has to be built-in, not
bolted on. That is not the solution.

Yes. I think that it should become an evergreen trend.
Yes, totally.
Do you have a favorite emerging trend, or something

that you are really looking forward to in 2020?
My favorite is seeing that gap from design intent, like

putting something like in a tool, and seeing the output
and being able to handle the outputs, like in space. So
not just building components, and then an engineer
goes and puts them together, but a system to be able
to spatially understand where my design is in space, and
I’m excited about that right now.
Another one is open design culture. In the past, there’s

always been this ownership of “it’s mine.” It’s special to
build something as a designer. I think we’ve run into all
these silos of design, and nobody can agree on anything
or focus.
That’s where design systems come in, and helps break

down those barriers. But even further outside of that,
there’s open design culture in terms of knowing how to
critique, the idea of nebulous feedback, and removing
all those barriers to truly build something that’s great. It’s
not that we’re just building a product, but we’re all in it
together. I know that sounds super fluffy and “blue sky,”
but that’s just the human being than I am. And I think
it’s really important.

It’s more important to be able to trust the person next to

you than to be able to compete or think, “They’re good
at what they do.” If they’re not as good as you, or if you
think less of them in any way, you still have to work with
them. So build them up and build the trust, because at
the end of the day, you and all the rest of the people
around you are pointed in the same direction. And it’s
super important to lean on
the people next to you. So, I’d
say my two [favorite trends]
are open design culture and
being able to output or build
design intent in some tech-
nology frameworks. It would
be awesome to see.
So bridging the gap between design and development.
It depends on whoever is doing it. Everybody’s going to

do it a little bit different, which is fun, right? And each side
of the coin wants to have more ownership. If you talk to
designers, they want the control; if you talk to engineers,
they want the control. Unfortunately, sorry designers, but
engineers have to build the thing unless you’re gonna
go and build it. So ultimately they’ll figure out ways to
have more control because they’ll think about it first. So,
we’ve got to catch up.
Yes, but if you switch this way of thinking, like, “It’s

mine, and I need to control it,” to more like, “We are

a team and we’re building this together,” that might

make their work more smooth.
Yes. I love that you just threw my previous point right back
in my face. I think you’re totally right. Maybe I was a little
close minded in that last statement.
I was trying to agree with you!
You agreed with me, I disagreed with myself. You’re like,

“Hey, wait a second. Didn’t you just say that?” Yes, I did.
Let devs inspect

your designs
With just a few clicks, developers can access, copy,
and even download all the specs they need before
taking your work from design to development –
from dimensions to colors to CSS code.
57 YOUR – ADAMPROCESS.
CH. 05DESIGN FERCH SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
BREE
WALTER
ɔ Interdisciplinary collaboration between
teams in the design process
ɔ The concept of “tiger teams”
ɔ Micro-communities and sharing

knowledge
ɔ Building a creative environment for your

design team as a leader
06

joined by Bree Walter. Bree, please tell us a little bit
about yourself.
Bree Walter I currently work at H&R Block as a lead user experience

designer. We’re headquartered in Kansas City. And for
those who don’t know, H&R block as a tax company, but
we’re trying to expand our horizons to fully embrace the
financial world and personal finances. What I do is work
on the products that serve our tax professionals in the
field. So, we have a pretty large user experience team.
We’re broken up into client experience and employee
experience. I lead up employee experience, which is
specifically the applications in H&R Block offices used by
all of our 80,000 tax pros across the country.
That’s impressive. We’re talking today about 2020

design trends. Can you tell me which of the emerging
trends is your favorite one? What are you like really
looking forward to?
I like to think of design not just in the visual and UI as-

pects. But being a designer or user experience leader of
a team, we have to think about operations and business
and strategy and testing and all of that. The trend that I
think I’m looking forward to the most would be design
ethics. I actually saw a really amazing speaker this last
summer at the USP, a conference that I went to in Arizona,
named Mike Monteiro. He has a book that is one of the
best-selling design books this last year.
59 CH. 06 – BREE WALTER

It’s called Ruined by Design, and it’s basically how the

world has been ruined by design. But even with that kind
of light-hearted title, it was a really serious talk about how
we commonly get put into a position as designers where
we have to somehow consider the user’s needs while we’re
being asked to make decisions that go directly against
those needs. A lot of times it’s because a company is
considering ROI or conversions, and their revenue. And
sometimes we do things that are really deceitful, and really
wrong, and not very morally or ethically right, because
of revenue. And so, it was really empowering to see that
talk this summer. I came back really excited because of a
couple instances where there were questionable things
that had been brought up, that didn’t seem like a big
deal. And it was neat, because I actually had this foun-
dational knowledge now about design ethics, and could
encourage the rest of my design team and my product
managers, and some of my business leaders, instead of
just making the best decision for our revenue to make
the best decision for our client experience.
So, I’m really excited to see where that goes in 2020, spe-
cifically because I think we’re at the cusp of the awareness
of design ethics. Everybody has surface-level knowledge
about it, but maybe not necessarily how to apply it in our
day-to-day work.
The world of design ethics is going to erupt and people

are going to be empowered and rally around it. And I’m
really excited to see where that’s going to go.

I’m excited about it too. We are actually preparing a

few accessibility features that could help designers
using our tool to embrace ethical design. But as you
said, sometimes the design is here, and business is
way over with money and ROI. But I strongly believe
that specifically this year we’re going to collaborate
more so that designers get like a seat at the table. Not
only caring about the pretty stuff, right? But business
and ethics too.
Right. Collaboration is also a key part of what I’m kind

of looking forward to in 2020 as well. Exactly what you
said – it’s not business versus design versus development,
or us versus them.
How do we work better with developers,

because we feel like we’re totally siloed and
segmented, and we don’t get each other?
But we’ve seen a trend over just the last couple years in
these amazing articles and empowering speeches about
how people can work together as a team, and not think of
yourself even as a development designer, product owner,
business leader, or IT director – but how can we truly think
of ourselves as a team. And we’re all in this together.
Speaking to collaboration, that is another trend that

I’m looking forward to that I’ve seen grow immensely
at H&R Block over the last year. We have done so many
crazy awesome things in the collaboration space around
doing workshops and strategy sessions together, and

we have people going out into the field, like developers,

IT leaders, product owners, and shadowing together as
a team and talking about it as a team. And we’re doing
collaborative road-mapping sessions.
What I think has been really huge that I’ve seen this last
year, and that I think is going to keep growing across the
whole industry, is that teams are embracing each other
and doing it in ways to not position each other against
one another. But, for example, in collaborative workshops
everybody has an equal voice. And every single person
on the team, regardless of your role or discipline, has a
seat at the table and is able to contribute to the future of
that product from the very beginning. That’s something
that H&R block has really grown in this last year, especially
on my team. I think that’s going to continue in 2020 as
well for the rest of our industry.
Yes, I strongly believe that too. But would you say that
this kind of approach needs a little bit of a change in
mindset of how we think about teams? So, what are
the responsibilities in the design team?
Absolutely. Whenever you get away from this idea of

people having very specific titles and roles and responsi-
bilities, and this person takes on this thing, and this other
person takes on this thing, and you hand it off, and it’s
not really a collaboration. It’s easy for you to have an “us
versus them” mentality whenever you’re in that kind of
dynamic. But when you get to more collaborative methods,

it’s funny because the lines actually start to blur a little

around teams.
What H&R Block is seeing is that,

back in the day you would have a
product owner with very specific
rules, and you would have very specific rules. And if you
ever dabbled in each other’s worlds and tried to help each
other out, it would be like stepping on their toes. What
I am seeing with my teams is that we’re integrating this
idea of feature teams or Tiger teams.
If you’re not familiar with that concept, it’s that instead

of trying to tackle a gigantic product as a whole, we can
create these micro-teams, or as we call them, feature
teams. We create a self-sustainable team that can design
and develop launch features completely autonomously.
That means that you don’t necessarily have specific roles
or responsibilities. I actually have some VAs or business
analysts, some UI developers, and product owners who
are all helping make UX decisions. And I actually have
some of my business analysts going into the prototype,
updating content and putting in documentation nodes
for our developers – they’re getting really hands-on.
Sometimes the product owner might not always have time

when we need to have a discussion to make decisions. So,
I can actually step in and be a UX/product owner hybrid,
and make some product decisions as well. I think it’s neat
because with this idea of a feature team or Tiger team, it

allows you to move so much more quickly. And people

become multipurpose. I have really strong developers
who are actually making design decisions and product
decisions. I have UX and MBAs sometimes doing our
QA work.
And so, I think whenever you allow

people to not be seen as boxed-in to
a role with certain responsibilities, we
learn to help each other’s strengths and
weaknesses.
And whenever we see that a certain person is swamped

we can step in and help them. It goes back to the fact that
collaboration happens when you start to work together
as one autonomous ecosystem, and not these separate
siloed roles, and different people on the team can become
extensions of you. I have many extensions of UX on my
team, and I trust them because we’ve gone through all
these collaborative workshops together. They’re going
to be making good decisions. You can give up some of
your ownership because you know that you’re all in it
together as a team.
Nobody’s out to get one another. Everybody understands

the common goals that we’re working towards because
we’ve done vision mapping and workshops. I just get

super empowered and super excited about speaking

about Tiger teams because it’s such a new concept that
I think is still new to the industry. But I know in the tech
space, like here at H&R Block and in our tech industry, it’s
growing like wildfire because it allows you to get releases
out so much quicker and so much more effectively.
Yes, and also, building a collaborative environment in

your workplace helps you learn from each other. I think
this will grow in 2020 – a lot of learning from each other
like in smaller teams, and also in the communities. Do
you think, where’s that coming from? Or where’s that
going to occur, in your opinion?
Prior to the epiphany that we had about how we can

act more synonymously and integrated, we were always
trying to take on certain things here and there. And we
weren’t really understanding things holistically, or how
we could all work together and how we could use agile
methodologies, or collaborative workshops and meth-
odologies, to create one kind of team working together.
Some people point out this idea that feature teams create
more disparate natures because they’re smaller teams
working in their own little areas. But actually it’s really neat,
because what I’ve seen on my teams is that you may have
certain feature teams that are building features that are
part of a bigger product. But everybody
is so aware, because they are in a smaller
group, of how to stay integrated and

aligned and how the work that they’re doing impacts

other teams. We have had so many more alignment
sessions and other sessions around how we can be better
integrated, for example this team is developing a certain
feature so let’s utilize that, and that team is testing out
this new technology, can we learn anything from that.
We’re actually in the process of creating a company-wide

design system right now. So, we just went through a really
long process to get that designed and do user testing on
it. And now we are using UXPin. So, our designers and
developers are using that and referring to that. Whenever
you go to the feature team model, design systems are
so helpful, because that alleviates the concerns about
consistencies and discrepancies, and how can teams stay
aligned on design standards and paradigms. Whenever you
have a really solid design system, that’s your foundational
level – all of the feature teams can just run really quickly,
because we all know what our common design goal is.
And with design systems, and when you stop having

to do the mundane work of repeating everything over
and over again, you can jump onto another level of
creativity.
Absolutely. You can finally focus on strategy, and not

just pixel pushing. I think that’s something my team has
loved. And I know that my development team is utilizing
a lot of crazy new technology, like an immense amount
of new technology. I know that we can’t get hung up on

these small, little design paper cuts, because we have

really big things that we have to work on and consider.
And it’s not just like, “How does this one button display?
And how can we build out the interaction just right, say,
with only seven different prototypes?” Instead, we’re
using our design system. It’s seamless, it’s nice, and we
get that extra time back to instead talk about how we’re
integrating this one application into all of our applications.
And how we are getting everything on one platform.
That’s our bigger-picture technology goals right now. So
yes, I think it’s exactly what you – it empowers you think
more strategically.
Create a Design System

Make sure all design assets are consistent
across the entire organization. Keep
creating a single source of truth for your
team to design from when working on
projects.
67 YOUR – BREE WALTER

CH. 06DESIGN PROCESS. SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
ADAM
RUF
ɔ Device-dependent design in
different industries
ɔ User needs and accessibility

challenges in design
ɔ Essentialism in product design

versus new trends
ɔ No-code movement in designing
07
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends by UXPin. Today we

are joined by Adam Ruf. Adam, can you tell us a bit
about your field of design and a little bit about your
experience?
Adam Ruf I’m currently a product designer at AngelList on the

venture team. And I’ve been a product designer/ UX/
UI designer for the past seven or eight years, working
in startups, medium-sized companies, large companies,
across enterprise, and consumer products, largely. I’m
super excited to chat with you today.
Thank you for making the time. I’d like to discuss a

couple of trends with you. And the first would be AI
design. What do you think about the whole discussion
on AI in design, computational design, or AI-based
usability testing and machine learning in UX research?
What are your thoughts?
I have many thoughts. Mostly, I am excited and cautiously

optimistic about AI and its ability to help me and people
in roles like mine to get stuff done. When I think about
computational design, as far as UI design and these kind
of software products and apps–the kinds of things that
I’m working on–I don’t see computational design as really
having a strong foothold yet, in terms of being able to
deliver things. I think it’s more about AI tools for design.
You mentioned usability testing. Or research. Just imagine

AI chatbots with the ability to recruit people. That’s a fairly
69 CH. 07 – ADAM RUF

time-intensive process, as you might know from recruiting

people to participate in this project.
One thing I would love is the ability to codify, or put into

code, design guidelines or principles. So, for example,
I’m working with a team where we have our portfolio
of products, and we have rules around spacing, around
use of colors, around this and that. I think engineers and
developers have a lot of built-in tools with their coding
that will say, “Hey, you violated a rule,” or “You broke a
rule.” Whereas in design tools, we don’t really have that.
It’s up to other people looking at it and saying, “I think
there’s something off right here,” or “Hey, this doesn’t
really follow this guideline or this principle.” How can we
change that, or how can we get alignment? That’s where
I see the potential for AI to come in and help with some
of those things.
Having said that, I don’t see a lot of progress or momen-

tum in building some of those tools – I see more of an
opportunity. I’m excited to see if anyone’s going to start
doing some of those things in 2020. Maybe it’s going to
be one of the larger companies like Google or Facebook,
or some of the companies that have resources and have
done things like material design. So, I’m going to be
watching those big players to see if they’re starting to
develop any AI assistant tools.
You said something about different roles, and oppor-

tunities that AI grows for us. What do you think about

jobs in the designer field because I’m hearing all over

that the UX designer job is disappearing. What do you
think the new titles are going to be? What are the new
jobs offers for the 2020s?
I’ve seen a shift in things. Number one, I don’t think UX

design—the core problem-solving design role—is going
away. We need it more than ever, and it’s just becoming
more and more important, especially to compete with
people who are investing and adding those types of roles
onto their teams. I definitely don’t see it going away.
I do see quite a few changes. I’d say there are two big
shifts. One is UX/UI designer, which I’m seeing in the San
Francisco Bay Area quite a bit. It tends to be a little bit
more focused on designers who do full stack UX design,
from understanding research and doing user research, to
bringing in familiar patterns and UI things all the way to
coding. So they may be involved in some of the light front
end, or will work very closely with front-end developers.
It’s kind of a designer/builder role.
The other title becoming very popular

is mine – I currently have the title of
product designer. And this is some-
thing I’m seeing more and more first in larger companies.
They’re designers who have more experience, or skills, in
terms of product thinking. They have some of the skills
that we associate with product management, or even a
founder – someone who’s really thinking about the business

impacts, and not just the customer or user experience.

But they think about how you can align these with things
that are good for the business, because when you deliver
value for the business then you have more resources, and
you can deliver even more value for customers, and so
on. It’s kind of virtuous cycle. So those are the two titles,
UX/UI designer and product designer, that I think we’ll
continue to see going into 2020.
I know for a fact that you are a huge advocate for

empathy in design. And you mentioned that you don’t
see the UX/UI designer job disappearing. What are
the skills needed in UX design, or design in general?
What will be the secret to getting hired in the design
industry in 2020?
That’s interesting. I don’t think it changes very much.

Having a very clear story that aligns with an organization’s
mission is where some of the product design elements
come in.
Even if you’re not going to be a product

designer, thinking like a product designer—at
least for interviewing—makes a lot of sense.
You must really understand what this business needs.

What are they trying to accomplish by hiring this particular
role? And how can I align the story of my experiences,

accomplishments, and achievements to demonstrate that,

“Hey, the things that I’ve been, the things that I’ve seen,
the things that I’ve learned – I can apply those directly
to helping customers and helping the business in this
particular role.” So, if anything, I would say it’s all about
storytelling, and connecting your story of what you can
provide to the story of the business needs.
Do you think, because you said that design work is

all about the business needs, at the end of the day,
business needs are user needs? I can see more and
more demand for device-dependent designing. What
do you think about that? Do you do you think it will
be one of the top trends for 2020 as well?
By device dependent, do you mean a specific and separate

design, for example, for a mobile app? Or so somethings
else?
“Yes” to your first example.
I think it probably depends, going back to the customers,

on who is the audience. If you ask 10 designers in 10
different industries, they’re probably going to give you
10 slightly different answers to this question. So let me
take a stab at it from where I’m sitting, and thinking
about the enterprise and consumer, like web app space.
For me and for us, responsive and adaptive design still
seems like a very good strategy.

There are no immediate thoughts of needing a native

app for an experience – we’re really trying to push on
responsive design. And we’re being thoughtful with that
to make sure that we’re delivering a good experience
for people who are often switching between devices.
Sometimes people are on their smartphone, sometimes
people are on a computer. That’s our user scenario.
I could imagine in other situations where if 90 percent of

users, 90 percent of the time, are on a phone or some
other device, then there may be a stronger need to invest
resources and say, “Okay, is there something special
that we can do? We know that this is the context for the
experience. How do we really push this experience?”
I believe that focusing on each user’s specific needs

brings us to the topic of accessibility. In my opinion,
that’s a very important trend, and I think it is going to
be a very big trend. And I can’t believe that it’s a trend,
actually, because it should be like that all the time.
Yes. You’re preaching to the choir here. It’s inter-

esting, I think there is still a big challenge with
accessibility. I’m seeing it more and more on my
current team, where we’re using tools like React
and different frameworks that are kind of shadow DOM
that don’t actually directly manipulate the DOM, and it’s
very easy to do things that don’t apply to web standards.
One of the things that’s important for me and my team
is to help our engineering partners understand why

accessibility is important. And that’s usually pretty easy.

At the end of the day, we really care about our users. It’s
very easy to explain why it’s important.
We’re also starting to see, in the past couple years, more

lawsuits. So the business also is starting to get more
sensitive about making sure that we’re meeting legal
requirements in terms of accessibility and giving that
experience to everyone. I think this year it’s really going to
be a couple of things – it’s going to be making sure that
as designers, we’re championing and helping educate
people about the importance of accessibility and how we
make it happen. And also making sure we have buy-in
from the people who are prioritizing things.
It can be very easy, from a business perspective, to ask

what the benefit of doing X is. If we didn’t start with
accessibility and standards, then we have to do some
extra work to get there. How do we make the decision
to invest in that versus something else?
I think getting there, and I’m hoping to see more ex-

amples in 2020 from teams who are using modern or
cutting-edge technology in terms of their tech stack,
especially for web apps, so that it’s very easy for someone
to grab a library, or borrow this, and have the accessibility
that comes with it.
It’s becoming more and more easy, right? Some de-

signers should learn the accessibility standards. But

as you said, it’s going to be so much easier in 2020,

because of the resources that we have.
I hope so. I think it’s still important to make sure that

those are requirements.
Maybe my wish for 2020 is that

accessibility will bridge a gap from,
“Everyone agrees it’s important and
sometimes we invest in it,” to “Accessibility
is a hard requirement and we don’t
release anything until we’ve delivered an
accessible feature or functionality.”
Speaking of accessibility, especially in a UI design,

minimalism is something that most designers pursue.
At the end of the day, you want the app you design
to be understandable and usable. Not to be beautiful,
exactly. But there is a really strong trend of maximal-
ism too. Do you think it has it’s place in web design
or product design as well? Or only in, for example,
interior design or fashion?
In terms of the web, web products, and web experiences,

I would say it’s a little bit of both. Or maybe something
different – maybe more like essentialism, right? I think

that’s the goal in product design. I know that isn’t a term

or a word that we use around the team, but our behaviors
tend to demonstrate essentialism. We’re asking questions,
like what’s absolutely critical for this experience to work?
Or is there anything unnecessary? We’re always looking
for, things to potentially remove, and ways to simplify
things, which seems to tend towards minimalism.
But we’re also asking what’s essential if

we need to create a video or a PDF, or an
illustrated story? If that’s going to be the
best way to communicate information, then
doing that is cool, too. Everything doesn’t have to have
a white background and grayscale text. The key thing is
really figuring out what’s essential. In my experience, all
designers, at least in the UI space, are working towards
building apps and other things. That’s what we want to
do. We want to figure out what’s essential—the
minimal set of things—but in the right way so that
content types could be more elaborate depending on
what’s going to make the experience the best it can be.
That’s very insightful. Thank you. So, I’d like to ask you
just two more questions. One, what is your absolute
favorite emerging trend in your field of product design.
I love no code. I love the no-code movement.
Okay!

No-code tool. It’s funny, right? All these tools are built with
code. But these tools empower people who are maybe
intimidated by code, or don’t feel like they have the time
or the energy to invest in learning code. The fact that
there are increasing numbers of no-code tools that allow
people to make and design products and experiences is
super exciting. I think it helps democratize design and it
creates more opportunities for designers, because a lot
of these people are doing it without any sort of design
background, which is perfectly fine. And we have a lot
that we can share with people now, even more people
that we can potentially share with and help bring along
the journey. Now you can build things that are useful.
How do you optimize the experience? How do you take
your useful, functional idea and make it even better? I’m
really excited by the no-code movement.
I’m so happy you say that, because that’s exactly what

we’re advocating at UXPin for. It’s amazing. And my
last question for you is what are your professional goals
for 2020? Are they aligned with the trends? Or do you
have some new year’s resolutions that are completely
universal and evergreen?
Yes, a little bit of evergreen. I think the growth mindset

is something that’s fairly common on the team, and just
looking at improving the team goals that we have for this
year, and different metrics and goals that we want to hit,
and targets. So, I think for me and the design team, it’s
really about increasing our impact. How do we increase the

positive impact we’re having? How do we communicate

that even more effectively? So if you ask anyone in the
company, they can at least point to something the design
team did that made a really big difference. And then tying
those things to behaviors. Essentially what we’re doing is
this: the design team was only fully formed about a year
ago when the third designer joined. We assembled a
design team of three in about three months, from zero. So
we’re still learning and we’re still writing our own design
playbook. That’s going to be the big thing for this year.
So, fingers crossed for you.
We’ve got great people on the design team. I’m really

fortunate to work with some really great people. It’s just
a matter of being thoughtful and applying effort in the
right places. I think we’re going to be really successful.
I hope that this trend, or this mindset, never goes out

of style.
Store information
using variables
Let users go through the whole journey
when they test your prototype. Build
prototypes in which information transfers
to other screens for a life-like experience.
79 YOUR – ADAMPROCESS.
CH. 07DESIGN RUF SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
WOJTEK
ALEKSANDER
ɔ Inclusive language in UX writing
and product-making
ɔ UX language research and how it

applies to business decisions
ɔ Data-driven content strategies
ɔ Content strategy consistency as

an evergreen trend
08
UXPin In today’s interview I’m joined by Wojtek Aleksander.

Wojtek, please tell us a bit about yourself.
Wojtek Aleksander I’m a content strategist and content designer. I work cur-
rently for one of the largest banks in the Nordics, where
I’m part of the CX and design department. Together
with UX designers and content designers and service
designers, we try to figure out solutions that will make
millions of customers happy. Apart from that, I’m also a
UX writing trainer here in Poland. So, you’re free to join
my course and find out more about UX writing, which is
a discipline that is currently growing. And I’m happy to
be part of that process.
Thank you. Not to, you know, tell everyone your age.
But I know that you’ve been in this industry for a pretty
long time.
Well, almost 20 years now. I began shortly after the Y2K

crisis. So, I was happy to not worry about it at work. Since
then, I’ve been wearing a lot of hats – information archi-
tecture, technical writing, type setting, DTP, usability and
content design, and eventually account strategy.
Yes, but your career is pretty close to designers and

product makers, right? Can you tell me a little bit
about that? I am assuming you have this amazing
perspective of how content writing or UX writing is
changing. And can you tell me, what is your favorite
trend that you anticipate for 2020?
81 CH. 08 – WOJTEK ALEKSANDER

Well, my favorite trend—or a wish—is the maturation of

all of our disciplines. Because like you said, I’m going to
be moving between product managers, UX designers,
localization experts, customer support, and receiving per-
spectives from various designers. And all those disciplines
working together can transform over the years. Also the
huge writing discipline, or content design, which is getting
more and more popular. So, maturation is one of the
trends that I think will happen in many areas, especially
as far as UX writing is concerned, because we already
know that training is valuable. A lot of companies have
already discovered that, and have started to invite people
on board to help them with writing and communication
with users.
So, that already happened last year, like a bloom

of job offers. So, we already have P, and they are
basically a team of one supporting a lot, and have proven
their value. And the team of one will become a team
of many. They will be teams, or larger groups, working
together with other disciplines—researchers, designers, UI
designers, UX designers, maybe even service designers—to
provide value and be involved in different stages of the
product development process. So, that’s what I think will
happen this year and it will be very welcome.
Okay, so what you’re saying is that companies are

acknowledging the necessity of having a UX writer,
and not maybe not only one, but more diverse teams,
right? Because it’s a pretty general trend. The whole

design industry to be more conscious about what the

design is where and the design is going. Would you
say inclusive language is something that is going to
be a trend in 2020 as well?
Oh, I’m happy you mentioned that because yes, that’s

my next favorite trend or phenomenon, is being inclusive
and working on inclusive language. Webster’s Dictionary
announced that the word of the year is “they,” the personal
pronoun used for the first person to be more inclusive
and not gender biased. Inclusive language is something
that we will be working on as a discipline. There are a lot
of publications writing about it. I’ve also seen in forums,
like Slack, that there are already separate channels related
to inclusivity and accessibility. I’m really happy to see that
we’re putting words into action. Pun intended.
With language, we can build

a positive experience of people
being embraced and not excluded
from products and services,
or society in general.
That’s a great trend, and I hope I will be working on it

myself, and I will encourage everybody else to do that
as well.

I hope that it’s going to be a great trend in 2020, of

course. But on the other hand, I have this thought that
a really big number of companies still put business at
the front of everything they do. And I guess it’s one
thing to be accessible and inclusive, and on the ethi-
cal side. But on the other hand, or business side, you
have to somehow prove to the business high hats that
this is what is really important. Do you plan on doing
something like that? Or do you think that behavioral
research is something that is going to be trending in
UX writing as well?
Yes. Teams, or people, will become more mature and

aware about what they do, and if what you’re saying is
actually aligned with what we do now. At the bank, we
research together during usability tests, preparing specific
scenarios to test and to research the language, and how
language we use as a product affects people, whether
they are corporate customers, or private customers. We
look at how they are different and how to talk to them
so that they don’t feel overwhelmed or overlooked, or so
that we don’t sound condescending.
So, research will be a thing for some teams, especially

those that have capacity or the need, like the designer’s
personal need, to be more aware and to the point with
the language they use. The biggest trend that Sarah
researches within her book and speeches about company
design, is promoting awareness and using the language
that people use in real life. And a lot of writers can. We

were taught to use a totally different language and we

have to teach ourselves out of it. Understanding the
language and how it works in the real world is a thing
to help us be more precise and helpful, and to build the
experience that people expect to get. Words are a really
important part of that.
Researching, either behavioral research or usability test-

ing, will help us do that. And I hope to see more people
talking about it on the internet on forums, or publishing
papers, or giving speeches at conferences. Sometimes
you learn such unexpected things, like how specific words
or phrases work and how you, for example, thought you
were helpful, while people didn’t expect you to be helpful.
This will help us rule out assumptions, because a lot of

our writing work is still based on assumptions. We know
about readability and accessibility, and we care about it.
But we will get more data to prove our point. And we will
be able to use that data, as you said, to talk to a business
and show them how we can help reach their business
goals with language. This is not to say that the business
is wrong, but to say, “We can do this and that to match
your goal and help you and we will all be faster.” That’s
where we want to be.

I hear all the time is that design teams are all about
everything being nice and pretty. And I guess a UX
writer is like, someone who is supposed to know a
lot of words, and that’s it. But it’s good. It’s getting
closer to business, or data-influenced. So, I guess
that the perspective of language design influences
the business goals…
Because it’s not poetry.
Yes.
It’s all based and grounded on research and deep thinking.
You also mentioned that one of your goals is to not

make people overwhelmed by the language, so they
can get what they expect. But do you think similar to
the trend of minimalism? Because there’s this huge
minimalism trend in design. Actually, people are going
in either direction, minimalism or maximum. Do you
think there’s even a discussion like that in UX writing?
I think there’s no discussion. I mean, we’re

always on the minimal side, where we can try
to be concise and informative at the same
time. For example, in mobile apps or responsive apps,
we are really concerned about real estate on the screen,
and how we all align all the elements, including words.
Words or phrases become atoms in the whole design
language or design system.

So that’s probably not the case. And sometimes, obviously,

you have to be a little more eloquent and say more, and
use different UI elements to not overwhelm people but still
show that there’s enough information up front. If there’s
more, you can always reach out more. But being concise
will probably still be a thing for UX writers for some time.
UX writing is supporting people on their tasks. We’re not

there to tell them stories – we’re there to show them the
way. We’re there to help them understand something that
is maybe less obvious to them, or some explain some
peculiarities, or simply confirm that they are on the right
track. We need to be a helpful friend who is not over
talkative but gives just enough information at the right
time. So, maximalism… probably no, in the sense that we
will always say, “Less is more.”
I think usability and being user-friendly is an evergreen

trend, and it’s going to be still trending in 2020.
It will be. It’s the basis of what we do. If we don’t do

that right, then anything else that we do won’t be that
effective. The basis is the base. And there’s no running
away from that.
I think we’ve learned that some things evolve and

mature and some things shouldn’t change. Thank you
very much for your time and for joining us today.

DAVE
MALOUF
ɔ Design job landscape from the hiring
manager perspective
ɔ Our level of readiness for AR and VR

technologies adoption
ɔ Designer education models
ɔ Reimagining the design frameworks

into more holistic
09
UXPin Welcome to 2020 design trends from UXPin. Today I

am joined by Dave Malouf. Could you please tell us a
little bit about yourself?
Dave Malouf I am currently the senior director of strategy and op-

erations in the design organization at Northwestern
Mutual. Northwestern Mutual is a planning investment
and insurance organization in the United States. My role
is to help the design team run ads optimally in highest
value as possible.
Can you tell us a little bit about your education, be-

cause designers don’t usually come from a design
background.
I can confirm that statement as official. Many decades

ago, I graduated with a degree in anthropology, very
much with the spirit of going out into areas of the “other”
and exploring and doing ethnography in that way, but I
got into design accidentally. I was working as a research
editor for books about cyberspace and email. Then they
decided to turn the books into a website directory, and
suddenly I found myself doing HTML. That meant I was
a web designer. Then I just went from one web designer,
producer, UI designer, information architect, UI designer,
interaction designer role after another. So that is how I
started, and how I became a designer.
It seems like a long journey, but also kind of makes

sense to me. Because when you’re a designer, you need
89 CH. 09 – DAVE MALOUF

to have this sense of being curious about people. So

that’s anthropology.
I mean, definitely have learned to make use of it over

time, but it was not intentional.
So, could you tell me, what is your opinion of the

design job landscape for 2020? We’re supposed to be
talking about trends for the current year and maybe
the upcoming decade. Could you please tell me what
you think, because there are a lot of different opinions
of how the design job landscape will look in 2020.
I don’t see that much of a dif-

ference between 2020 and 2019.
The job landscape, I think all of
the same confusions are there
that have continued to be there
for digital designers, or UX designers, what’s a digital
product designer, what’s a visual designer, UI/UX – all these
title issues are still the same. So, from that perspective, I
see that being maintained from the perspective of more
jobs, less jobs, the kind of jobs. I don’t necessarily see a
rise or fall in either the candidate pool or the number of
opportunities. What I see is that the candidate pool has
historically been growing rapidly, especially due to the
bootcamp movement.
As a hiring manager, it’s been harder to not just get ap-

plicants but to get quality applicants. That hasn’t changed,

and I don’t see it changing. But I think like one of the

things in this time period, as opposed to a couple of
decades ago, is that hiring managers are not just filling
seats to fill seats. They are being conscientious about who
they hire. So, it’s not good enough to say, “I’m going to
go get a bootcamp and pivot and I’m ready.” You need
to demonstrate quality as a candidate, which means that
you’re going to need to do something other than just do
a 10-week bootcamp course.
If there is any trend that might be

different, I think our critical eye towards
candidates is only going to get tighter.
That’s a very interesting perspective from a hiring

point of view. You said that some things are changing
in interaction and design. You used to be a web de-
signer, so I would like to ask you now, I’ve heard that
when it comes to logos, for example, a lot is going
to change because of the way we think now and the
way we are structured in web. And maybe logos will
be more interactive or something, do you think that’s
a thing for 2020?
There have been some really interesting examples over

the last five years of organizations trying to add some
kind of dimensionality to their logos, whether that’s just
animated, or in 3d form. But I haven’t seen them take.

I know that there are examples out there, but I can’t think
of a company that has one of these richer logos. It just
hasn’t been happening. So, I don’t think anytime soon,
even in a digital space, that logos are going to become
more complex. What I have noticed is the way that some
companies have been creating the animation in a logo,
but then it’s static after that. I haven’t seen richness in
a logo. I have my load screen on my phone. And while
the loads screen is coming on, there’s an animation of
the logo, but it doesn’t feel like the logo is changing. It’s
almost akin to when we go to the movies and see the
production company’s screen. It doesn’t feel like that’s
the production company’s logo. It feels like that’s the
production company’s media.
Do you think that the technology has to catch up

somehow? Because I believe we have more VR and
AR tech coming from social media and the gaming
world. Do you think that if it becomes common for us
to use AR/VR technology in day-to-day apps, maybe
that will change the approach?
Maybe, but I also don’t. I don’t think 2020 is going to be

the year that AR/VR happens. We’re at least three years
off, if not five, before AR really happens on a regular scale.
People aren’t ready for it, and the equipment isn’t ready.
I don’t think holding up my phone and looking at it and
then seeing an augmented you on my phone is the way
to experience extra layers of information over the real
world. For gaming, when you wear a headset and you’re

doing full VR, that environment makes sense. But it just

makes me nauseous.
So I’m not going to be the first one to do it. For others, I

understand the attraction. Some of it looks kind of com-
pelling. But I think from a story perspective, it reminds
me of the shift when Dragon’s Lair came out, and laser
discs, and changing the whole interactive story. That was
awesome. It didn’t require me to wear extra equipment
to do it. But it did require me to think differently about
a game.
What does it mean to level up? And what does

it mean to do interactive storytelling? I sort
of see that for gaming. I work in a financial
institution, though, so I’m not quite seeing how I’m going
to use VR or AR or MR or XR to enhance my customers’
experiences while they’re talking about how they’re going
to create financial stability for their families after they
die. We can’t say, “Here’s an augmented reality of you
on your deathbed.” I’m not really seeing it for that. I do
think that as the form factors of AR devices like Google
Glass or HoloLens come down in price or, in the case of
HoloLens having a form factor that’s more presentable,
that’s going to change things a lot. I think what’s inter-
esting is about Alexa and what Amazon is trying to do
with their wearable stuff. Instead of thinking about AR as
a visual thing, they’re thinking about AR as a hearing, a
voice thing. One of the things that I’ve been really liking
is having my AirPod Pros on. I just love getting my text

messages into my ear. They lower my music and just play

my text message for me. And I can respond instantly to
Siri to reply. That is another version of augmentation that
I think is probably more viable and accessible than the
visual kind.
I think with the Generation Alpha rising, they’re so

connected with touch screens and everything. It’s so
normal to them that I believe that augmented reality
will be normal to them as well. Maybe not in 2020, like
you said, but in 10 years it will probably kick in.
My four-year-old is in no position to ask for anything,

though it doesn’t stop him. But he has his iPad, and he
plays with it. And that’s all well and good, but I’m not
going to get him an Oculus anytime soon. it’s not going
to happen. I happen to have two generations in my
house, a Generation Z and a Generation Alpha, because
they’re eight years apart. Generally, I would see my son
has almost no interest in VR at all, but he plays Fortnight
incessantly. That’d be awesome as a VR. But then I think
about it, and I would have to give him an entire room
to do that in. Otherwise he’s going to destroy my house.
How do you even bring a game like Fortnight into VR
without not just thinking about equipment, but space?
With Generation Alpha coming up in age, and the

landscape of technology changing, do you think
design education is ready? At the beginning of our
interview, you said that you’re looking for quality

applicants. So, do you think that maybe in like near

future we can change something about how we ed-
ucate young designers to be ready for the changes
that technology is bringing?
I think there is no one education model that is going to work

for everyone or every situation. There could be a context
where a bootcamp would be fine for somebody. I used
to teach a general assembly, and I’ve had some people I
would hire straight out of general assembly. They’re the
top 10 percent of folks, but they were awesome before
they took the class. And they were just really looking to
understand theory for the most part – they already had
the skill. There are issues with contemporary academic,
accredited education, in terms of its inflexibility and its
lack of adaptability.
However, there are some people in research institutions

and those kinds of professional schools that are way
ahead of the curve in terms of the work that they’re doing.
I had co-professors when I was at SCADS, who were at
the bleeding edge of physical computing, digital art, and
design, and teaching it to their students. But the work
wasn’t there. Sometimes it’s about being too far ahead,
and sometimes it’s about not being responsive enough to
industry needs and knowing where the right spot to be is.
A really big challenge for educational institutions is finding
the right spot. But I also think part of that problem is it’s
a moving, multi-phasing target. It could be anywhere at
any moment, depending if you are looking at Google, or

are you looking at Citibank? Or are you looking at Pepsi?

Or FedEx? What kind or Frogger?
Or idea like, what kind of design job are you looking for?
I used to tell people who would come to SCADS that we

make really good agency designers. There was maybe
5-10 percent of students who could jump on a product
team and do a really successful job, from the interaction
program that I was teaching.
And that’s great, but we need more

product designers, more people in-house
than we’ve ever needed before. It has a
different kind of feel, a different kind of
mindset, a different kind of mentality. So
how do you hit multiples at the same time?
It’s not so easy.
Yes, it will take some time to adapt to the demand of

hiring needs. I would like to ask you one more question,
Dave, because we’re talking about trends and what’s
coming up. Do you have something specific that you
are really eager to see in 2020 when it comes to design
trends?

I’ll be incredibly controversial and say that I am looking

forward to the end of Agile. It’s been 20 years that Agile
has existed. For being Agile, the manifesto itself has
not changed. And we need to rewrite it, and we need
to reevaluate it. We need to figure out what it means to
not have a delivery-based philosophy, but to have a 100
percent value-based philosophy.
We need to figure out how we deliver things and why we

deliver them. Some modern agile people say that’s what
we do. But they’re still basing what they do on the old
manifesto, and the old philosophy, the old principles. We
need to come up with new ways of doing things. And it
can’t be created by 12 developers in a resort in Colorado.
We’re all white males, and it needs to include ethics, and
it can’t be developer- or product- or design-centric – it
needs to be holistic.
So more collaboration and mindfulness of what you

are actually doing so the product is usable, but also
collective.
What’s the value for both business and users? And how
do we even understand how to achieve that. There are
plenty of useful things in how Agile works and how Lean
works in design thinking. But there’s still trying to fit all of
them into something old. And I think we need to reimagine

all of that. And not talk about scaled Agile framework, or

scrum, or all these frameworks in that kind of way. I think
we need to develop a new way of working.
Yes, so a reimagined, collaborative workflow, something

like that? I’m looking forward to that as well. Thank
you for joining us today.

CHIARA
ALIOTTA
ɔ Retro trends in branding
ɔ Trends in typography
ɔ The influence of print and classic

design on web design
ɔ Brands involvement in meaningful

causes
10
UXPin Today I’m joined by Chiara Aliotta. Chiara, tell us a bit

about yourself.
Chiara Aliotta Hello. Thank you, first of all, for inviting me. I am an Italian
designer. I define myself as a brand keeper and I work
under the name Until Sunday.
Can you share a little bit about your experience? What’s

your field of expertise?
What I mostly do is branding and brand consulting. I work

with companies and startups to help define their brands,
work on their core messages, and define their targets.
And, of course, define their image and how they need to
talk to their audience. I love typography. I love designing
logos with a purpose and I love sharing my knowledge
with other people.
I often participate in two conferences where

I talk about my life as a designer and how
design can influence everyday people, not
just designers and developers. I like making people happy,
using what I design. Actually, I found that my work is very
interesting because it has touched so many people, and
it may change their lives as well.
That’s amazing. Speaking of design trends for 2020,

you said that you like logos and you consult with new
brands on designing logos. Can you share with us what
will be hot in logo design in 2020?
100 CH. 10 – CHIARA ALIOTTA

I hope that the eighties esthetics are coming back because

I’m a millennial, so I’m moving to where my forte is. I see
successful studios like Netflix, and the shows Stranger
Things and Dark, and they are inspired by the eighties and
they brought me back to my childhood. I think if brands
want to engage more with my audience—millennials—one
way to do it is by bringing back this kind of nostalgia. I
can imagine logos to be inspired by neon lights or being
pixelated or inspired by video games like Super Mario. I
can imagine very fun logos.
Otherwise, another trend that could be very possible is

animated logos. We are slowly moving away from struc-
tured logos that are printed and always need to be that
way and never change. Right now, brands are spinning
on the screen more often, and the brand experience
actually happens on the screen of different devices. Logos
can also be very interactive and interact with the user in
different ways. Animated logos could be another trend
that could happen in 2020. I am very curious to see how
it would go. We are still in the beginning.
I’m wondering about the eighties and nineties nostal-

gia thing as well. A couple of days ago, I had this talk
with another designer and they said that they never
would have guessed that pink was going to be the next
“it” color. I think it’s because of the neon fluorescent
color. You said things change and we’re going from
the structured logo to maybe animated logos, but a
huge part of branding and logos is typography. We

had a year of Helvetica. We had a year of Comic Sans –

maybe we’ll experience the great comeback of Comic
Sans. So which fonts will be, in your opinion, popular
in the 2020s? Do you think custom typography will be
a significant trend?
This brings me back

to a talk that I gave
in 2008 about the
power of typography and the ability to be expressive with-
out using images. The title of the talk was, “You just love
me for my body.” The title was very provocative because
I was trying to ask developers to join a design talk. The
talk was about expressive typography and that was also
the year where the font Gotham was used to deliver a
message of hope, change, and freedom in Barack Obama’s
campaign. So that moment, typography was starting to
be a very strong element in design. Finally, people were
recognizing typography as being an expressive tool, and
an emotional tool.
In 2019, I saw how many websites and many applications

were using a very type-only approach. What I expect for
this year is that variable fonts will become mainstream
on the web, and custom typography for brands would be
the only viable way to deliver a message that is consistent
and to the point.
For the second time you bring up the point of shifting

from print to web, and of course it has a great value

and amazing opportunity, right? When it comes to

logos or typography.
It’s also my background, because I started as a print

designer. Whatever I knew from print I brought into the
web, when notebooks were telling you how to design for
the web. Supreme was always my reference. There will
always be this duality for me in my work.
Speaking of which, I think that design in general

changes, obviously the trends are changing, but jobs
are changing too. It is said that in about 20 years
we’re going to have 70% new jobs and positions that
we don’t even know about yet. But of course most of
them will be in the development field or engineering.
But in our environment and our industry, people are
saying the UX designer job is disappearing. Would
you agree with that? And if so, or if not, what are the
new titles that are going to be trending?
It’s funny because in 2016, the first company asked exactly

the same questions to design leaders. And four years
later we are still discussing if the UX designer job is going
to die. I think it won’t die as long as we need to create
interaction between humans and technology.

It will evolve because technology is evolving, and the words

used for this year are specialization and diversification. So
if you’re asking for new job profiles that will be listed in
2020, I already wrote a few that could be very interesting.
So let me recall. One is the drone experience designer.

The other one is emotional intelligence experience de-
signer, or human empathy experience designer. As long
as technology is going the way of VR and all these new
tools that are appearing in our lives, there will be more
of a need to create experiences that are close to the
way humans actually work, so that we can teach these
machines to actually communicate with us.
Yes, exactly. I agree with you that UX designers are

not going to be needed. They just need to specialize,
right? And maybe specialize to the technology that
they work with.
They work with, yes.
So my next question to you would be, what is your

favorite emerging trend in your field of design in 2020?
As a brand designer with a focus on branding, what I

see right now is how brands are getting more involved
in the real world we live in. And how the stories they tell
us are more real and tangible. Brands that are getting
involved in new trends like global warming, gender equality,
sustainability, and so on, will be even stronger this year.

And what I like is that these brands are trying not to be

meaningful just for you or me as individuals, but they’re
trying to be meaningful for communities, and be more
powerful.
[Brands] are starting to understand they

have power and that their message is
going to be strong enough to dictate
change.
I like that this is happening this year, and I hope they will
invest even more funds to support the causes they believe
in. This is going be a very interesting year in that sense.
We’re going to have a lot of interesting brands getting
involved and making their voices heard.
Yes, exactly. Technology is developing and that is the

reason why we need brands to be more human. That’s
why you have to have a story – not just for the sake
of the story, but for the people who engage with your
brand.
Exactly, yes. I agree. True connections.
So my last question to you would be, what are your

professional goals for 2020?

A few days ago I finished writing a very long list of solutions,

which I’m not going to share with you because time is
short, but I’m going to share just one. I hope that behind
every prediction that I just gave to you, I will be able to
actually face the unpredictable with creativity and use my
creativity to beat the odds. That’s my solution.
Yes, creativity is like the evergreen trend, isn’t it?
Yes, it is.
Thank you very much, Chiara, for joining us.

JOE
CAHILL
ɔ Changes in the design industry over the
past 20 years
ɔ Generation Alpha and the future needs

for product design
ɔ Technology versus intuition and skills in

designer work
ɔ Accessibility becoming a part of the initial

design process
ɔ A book – Mismatch: How Inclusion
11
Shapes Design by Kat Holmes

joined by Joe Cahill. Joe, could you please tell us a
Joe Cahill I have been doing design and user experience for 20 years.
I started out as a print designer. I’ve had the pleasure to
work with some great clients over the years. Most recently
with American Express, Saks Fifth Avenue, MasterCard,
and I’m probably one of the most annoyingly happy
people about doing design this whole time. I’ve never
not loved what I’ve done and you’re going to hear me
talk a lot about it.
That’s perfect because we’re going to talk about your

point of view on design trends for 2020. Since you
have 20 years of experience, what would you say about
Generation Alpha coming into the picture? These are
the kids that don’t even remember not having an
iPhone or a smartphone with a touch screen. Do you
think it’s going to change the way people design stuff?
As Generation Alpha gets older and grows into this industry,

their perspective is going to be so unique compared to
how we’ve been doing it now. We had those flash web-
sites that were super bulky and heavy, and they would
take so long to load that we created loading screens for
them. Now we’re looking at mobile devices and getting
annoyed after a three-second load. Looking for informa-
tion instantaneously is going to be a key thing with how
[Generation Alpha] interacts with devices and everything
108 CH. 11 – JOE CAHILL

that’s going to go on around them. We don’t even know

yet, and that’s the funniest part. I have a lot of friends who
have kids that are on their iPhones or iPads all the time.
[The kids] tell me what they want inside

of [their devices], and I say, “We’re not
there yet.” I like the energy, but that’s
the thing – the world is going to be their
oyster because this technology is going
to be something they’re used to. Some of
us who have been doing this for a long
time are still trying to figure out what we can do. Where
does the hardware and the software meet? And they’re
going to be apt to knowing what the software is. A lot
of them are learning coding now – it took me until I was
20 to learn coding and I was like, “What am I supposed
to do with this? Let’s build HTML sites and do MySpace
updates.” That just dated me. But they’re going to learn
coding as part of their regular curriculum.
Like people in preschool learn coding now.
Yes, they have that little toy, the Code-A-Pillar, that rides
around and little kids can direct its action. It’s amazing.
English might not even be a language anymore. Kids
will know code before they start talking, which I think is
going to be amazing.
Do you think they will talk in ones and zeros?

No, they’ll get super, super logical. They would be like,

“If this, then that. Can you give me that FFFFFF shirt
over there, please?”
So since we started talking about colors, what do

you think about Pantone’s Classic Blue for 2020 or, in
general, having a color of the year?
The funniest thing about Pantone and knowing I’m some-

body who has that Pantone book – fun fact, I’m actually
colorblind. So when I was doing print design, I memorized
the Pantone book. Any designer that’s worked with me
knows I would just yell out colors and people would be
asking, “What?” and I’d say, “You know, that red,” and
they’d go, “Okay.” But for them to pick
out that blue, they were going to have
to pick a regular color at one point. But
they did also just have a year where they
added a hundred and something new colors to their color
portfolio, and none of those could be color of the year?
I don’t know. It’s blue.
There’s a story behind it, where they said that this

specific shade of blue is very soothing and we’re living
in crazy times and everything is so hectic, so their
statement is that maybe we should all just calm down.
Every year our color should be blue then. Anybody who’s

been doing design long enough knows it’s never not
hectic. One of my favorite things when you interview with

a company is them saying, “Are you used to a fast-paced

environment?” What’s the alternative?
Are there jobs out there that are

not fast paced?
My version of fast paced is everybody else asking why

I’m working so quickly. But guess what? All my layers are
named, my files are tight. So no matter how fast we work,
we still make sure that anybody could pick it up with no
problem.
We started talking a little bit about technology and

how it’s going to change and influence the design
world – what do you think about AI coming to the
scene? Like AI technology not only helping designers,
but also designing itself.
It’s an interesting thing. So Adobe has Sensei—

they built it into Photoshop—that uses machine
learning to figure out how to better retouch
photos and take out backgrounds, which is a great addi-
tional tool for us to use. When we’re doing stuff, we can
make it even quicker. We could load it with information
about how users interact with the site. We can load it with
information about how we expect people to react to it.
But there’s always going to have to be a human element
– our influence has to be there. No matter how much AI

helps us out, there’s going to have to be a person on the

other end using their intuition.
We have to test hypotheses. If we just have AI running and

making insights, and running and making experiences,
everybody might have a unique experience, but how unique
will it really be? Granted, the machines will probably be
smarter than us and just take over. This MacBook might
just attack me at any point right now. But it’s still the idea
and we need somebody behind it. Car manufacturing
is now all automated, but there are still people in the
factories working. There’s no way that we can only have
machines doing our jobs. Except for checkout, because
those things kind of rock, and that Amazon Go store. If
you haven’t checked it out yet, you just scan a barcode,
you walk in, you walk out. It’s like stealing. It’s amazing.
Is it though?
Yes, it really is. There’s a clerk here and there, but nobody’s
bothering you, grab a water, grab a sandwich, walk out.
Look it up. It’s amazing.
That’s so cool, but on the other hand we have this

huge need for human contact or human touch when
it comes to branding, or even in fashion. I don’t know
if you noticed that, but we now could have a huge
billboard with a huge photo that is not Photoshopped,
and that’s crazy.

Who would do that to the poor photo re-touchers who

are just sitting there waiting for something to come across
their desk? Granted, our cameras are fly as hell now,
but there’s always going to be a need for somebody to
breathe life into something. You don’t have to go crazy.
You don’t have to take out all the wrinkles on my face,
but at least make me look like I’m not sick.
Going back to how the iPhone, the Galaxy, the Pixel’s

technology of taking photos has grown exponentially in
the last ten, fifteen years. If we look back to those Palm
Trios and stuff that we used to take photos with – I still got
really bad pictures from my Razr. It’s all machine learning.
It’s all software that drives the quality. And even for real
photographers, you’ll look at it and you’ll see a great
image, but it still needs a little bit more to bring out the
richness. You take a picture of a sunset, it’s never actually
what you see. It’s always a little washed out or the colors
aren’t balanced correctly. You might not get those vivid
colors that you want to get, and that’s why you give it to
a photographer to do some Photoshop and make sure
it looks as picturesque as you want it to be.
I swear to you that I’ve recently seen fashion photos

where girls had stretch marks and freckles and every-
thing, which ten years ago wouldn’t happen.
Oh no, definitely not. That stuff would definitely not

fly ten years ago, maybe even five years ago. But I’m
guaranteeing that there’s still a little retouching. They

might take out other things. It’s good for people to feel
like we’re looking at regular people, too.
That’s where all human experience comes from. It’s to

want something that you’re going to relate to. Even
from a software end with apps that really bump up the
personalization for me – when I say, “Oh man, I need
laundry detergent” and then I see an ad for Tide on my
Instagram, it’s fine because I’m going to remember to
order that, and then put it in my Amazon cart, and then
Amazon would remind me that I also need dryer sheets.
It still helps you out, like personal assistants in a way. So
when you’re saying these people look like real people,
it’s great because we can relate to it.
That’s true. So that’s a business decision, right? Because

I strongly believe that this is a reaction to the fast pace
that we live in, and technology is developing so fast
that we need to balance stuff. We need a human touch
in our life as well. So that’s why I think businesses
would choose to go that way.
That’s the nature of business. Sometimes they’ll make

moves that we might question, and then we sit back and
realize that it makes sense. We can go way back to when
Apple decided to make the move from macOS 9.2. 4 to
OS 10, which was a Unix-based system. It was the big
move to a whole new UI, a whole new experience. What
we’re used to seeing now in a Mac was brand new at one
point and developers were worried because it wasn’t in

the codebase that they were working in. It wasn’t built the
same way it used to be. Developers wondered what they
were going to do. At the time, they used QuarkXPress, a
desktop publishing tool.
Yes.
And they said, “Listen Apple, I know this is what you’re

going to do, but we’re not going to support it, so good
luck.” They disappeared, now we have InDesign. Adobe
sat back and said “Listen, our people use this software,
they’re not going to support it. So we have to carry on
with the times.” It’s a tough thing to change a code base
for any developer who’s had to migrate from old code to
a react code. It’s not easy. It’s a big haul.
Well, people are talking more and more about designers

learning to code and that maybe there’s going to be a
merge between design and development. For example,
as you explained, we have those components that
translate the design directly into HTML.
There’s always going to be a divide.
There are always going to be people who are

coders and people who are designers, but
I feel like the understanding of what these
people do will get better.

When we started out designing websites, I learned how

to code. I learned HTML, Java scripting, Flash, and jQuery,
because I felt it helped me understand how I was going to
build a design. I think it’s still true now for designers and
especially the designers that I’ve worked with. I tell them
you don’t have to be a react developer, but understand
how the component works and the parts around it. Go
grab a drink with your developer and pick their brain
about things.
They’re going to pick your brain about user expe-

rience, because despite our best efforts, people
still think UX designers are visual designers. They don’t
understand that there’s psychology that comes with it.
When we talk in a room, it’s not because we want to, it’s
because we have to. Because somebody has to think about
this. It’s cool because if you do want to do both, it’ll be
a great opportunity. But it’s tough to learn coding. You
have to be in it to win it. But having the understanding of
both ends is definitely the best part. My thing is always
design development – you’re partners in this. If we’re
using the analogy of a sports team, you guys have to
work together for us to win.
You can’t just have the quarterback take the ball back and
then look for a running back who’s over on the other side
and say, “Oh, we’re supposed to run this play together
and you’re not even here.” You have to be there next
to each other in the trenches and have that vocabulary.
Back in the day when we did print design, you would

meet with your printer and you would talk to them and
find out how the press works. How would you want your
files? Does this run a little more blue on the blacks? Do
I have to throw that in my spot colors? Just having that
relationship changes the game across what we did 20
years ago and still do what we’re doing now.
I love having developers iterate with

us because they have great ideas,
because they’re just like us. We’re all
students of UX.
That’s my favorite thing to say. All of us have phones,

all of us browse the web, unless you’re Amish and you
don’t do technology. But we’ve all downloaded an app
and said it sucks and then deleted it or played a game
and said the controls are wonky. So we have an opinion
about it and it might not be the same, like a technical
opinion from an actual UX designer, but it would still be,
“Hey, I was on this and I saw this and it didn’t work. But
this worked really well and I enjoyed it. Can we use this?”
And then it’s yes, let’s do it. Let’s figure it out. Let’s bring
it to usability testing and then have a user tell us if they
love it or hate it, you know?
Yes, and when you talk about how UX designers are

the people who have to think about stuff, and I’m

pretty sure that accessibility and inclusive design is

going to be a really strong trend in 2020. I hope it’s
not going to be a trend that comes and goes, but a
necessity in the future because we have to be inclusive
in our designs.
Yes. I think it’s actually going to become way more a part

of that initial process of design. The more we get used to
having accessibility as part of our vernacular, the easier
it’ll be for us to just build experiences effortlessly. Like
the idea of color contrast – that was never a thing until
somebody started talking about it, and now you run
everything through a plugin that checks your accessibility
and makes sure your color contrast is good. Now we’re
going audible in using screen readers, by using sound. I
just read a great article about using haptic feedback on
phones for accessibility. It’s so important.
It’s got to be a part of it and the more I’m meeting

designers, they’re all telling me about the importance
of accessibility. I just met a bunch of people last night
and their job was accessibility for UX at a big corporate
environment, and it’s when companies get sued that
they decide that they need accessibility. That’s the trigger
sometimes. People don’t know that this is really important
until something happens. We have to be an advocate
and speak up when it’s not going to pass accessibility
checks. How’s this going to work with a screen reader?
Again, educating the development end so that they’re
coding in a way that’s accessible, but is also part of our

design process. We can’t build stuff just for the sake of

building and we have to realize how everything works.
A great book is Mismatch, it’s all about inclusive design.
Cool. Thanks for the homework. I would love to talk

to you more about your views on UX design and 2020,
and what’s it going to bring us. But for now, thank you
very much, Joe.
Prototype using
real data
Fill your prototypes with auto-
generated names, cities or images.
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UXPin’s built-in data.
119 YOUR – JOE CAHILL

CH. 11 DESIGN PROCESS. SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
AGATA
ORŁOWSKA
ɔ Psychology background of being
a UX designer
ɔ How future generations will

shape the design stage
ɔ Empathy and ethical issues that

come with AI
ɔ Work-life balance while being

a designer in 2020
12
UXPin Welcome to the 2020 Design Trends by UXPin. Today

I’m joined by Agata Orlowska. Agata, would you please
tell us a little bit about yourself?
Agata Orłowska I’ve been working in the UX world for almost six years.
Professionally, I’m a senior UX designer and a UX re-
searcher. Basically, I’m a one-woman army of UX in my
company, but I’m a design technologist too, and I’m a
clinical psychologist. And what I find to be important now
is educating young UX designers and submitting them
into the English academy. And I think that it’s enough.
You can find me on LinkedIn and at a lot of UX industry
events.
You said that you’re a psychologist, so I think you

would have to say a lot about trends when it comes
to brands being more human and UX having a more
human touch. So I would like to start with not exactly
a UX question, but this is a very important trend as far
as I’m concerned. I’m seeing more real life in design.
Like real life beauty and fashion, for example, or trying
to be as human as possible, as simple as possible in
design in general. So what is your opinion on this trend,
and do you think it’s going to be taking off in 2020?
Yes, I think it’s a kind of professional deviation. It’s a huge,

huge topic and a big influence. What’s happening now is
a big influence in our lives and we don’t see it now, but
maybe our children can live in totally other worlds. And I
think that we are part of it now. Maybe you can say what
121 CH. 12 – AGATA ORŁOWSKA

you mean first about this huge topic. What is the first
part of this?
Where my thoughts come from is that we experienced

digitalization and social media stuff on one hand, and
on the other, brands want to be more human and build
communities and have this customer-first approach. So,
I think this is where this trend comes from – showing
the real human face of brands. I’m sure it’s showing
in fashion and photography. Do you think this will stay
in fashion and photography, but not in technology?
Yes. I think that this trend of real life beauty is something

new and it’s coming from artificial Instagram beau-
ty. Research shows that social media is making people
depressed. You know about it because it’s popular. We
see and we work and it’s real – it’s imperfect. This trend
will develop because more and more people need it. I
believe that this will stay and grow stronger. I believe [in
it] because I want it!
That’s the psychologist part of you.
Yes, it’s my psychologist thinking. I think that for people,

[the trend of showing the human face of brands] can be
better for them than social media.
You said that what you also anticipate is that when our
kids, or the kids of today grow up, the landscape of
design will be totally different. How will Generation

Alpha shape this design? What are their expectations?

What do you think?
New research says that 27% of adults said they asked

for their kid’s opinion before buying a new TV, laptop,
tablet, or iPhone. And of course, it’s a new landscape of
design now because the older generation are changing
the landscape of design.
For example, take Apple products.

There has been a huge change
over the last 10 years in terms of
design technology, even the size of screens. We have new
keyboards and it’s only been 10 years. And I think that the
generation born in the year of the launch of Instagram
and the iPad will expect more interaction than previous
generations. VR will be a daily reality for them. Today, we
see small children trying to touch and swipe the butterfly
on the bus window. I think that these gestures are innate
from birth. And the same situation, Generation Alpha has
a different way of thinking about interaction. When you
look at the development of home appliances, everyday
automation will be obvious for them because, in maybe
five or 10 years, you will come home and your smart home
starts your coffee and turn off everything. I hope that’s
the future.
Do you remember the cartoon, the Jetsons?
Yes, of course.

That’s what I imagined when you said that. That would

be so cool to live in their world – fingers crossed it’s
going to happen like that. Have things done by robots.
Speaking of robots and a Sci-Fi-like future, what is
your view on AI and AR/VR in design?
I think that it certainly has lots of potential and I’m glad

that we live in times that enable us to do so. I don’t think
that [AI] will take our jobs away from us – it’s common
to talk about, “[robots] are taking our jobs.” No, no. I
think that [AI] will make our jobs easier. And in this case,
for me, the best part is the possibility to transform user
interface design into HTML markup codes. AI is not our
enemy. I think that it can make things easier. AI allows
you to strengthen your search capabilities, improve visitor
interaction, and provide personalized service.
We have some successful companies using AI in design

in new ways. For example, Wix or Squarespace. But for
me, the most interesting thing is the human aspect. The
human aspect of AI, for example, is a self-driving car that
needs to make decisions during an accident, whether to
rescue an older woman or a child. And this is the difficulty
of ethical issues that we will face. The most interesting
part of AI is that it sometimes needs to make decisions
like people. But AI doesn’t have empathy, and that will
be our challenge over the next few years. It’s not that
hard to make businesses based on AI when you design
websites and stuff like that. But the most interesting part
is empathy. Because we need it to make decisions, for

example, to choose between rescuing an older woman

or a child. If you’re a mother you rescue the child, but if
someone has only parents, maybe this person thinks that
the older woman can do that. That’s interesting to me.
I strongly believe that these are the tools that we are

supposed to use, but use them wisely and learn to
maintain them or shift them into what we as humans
need them to do. So one more question to you, Agata.
What are your professional goals for 2020? Because
we talked about big trends and psychology AI, hu-
man touch and everything, but I’d like to know your
personal role in it.
My individual part, for AR, is that I’ve been working on a

mobile app for my company and now it’s my own project.
I’m at the same time a project owner and the designer for
the same project. It’s a big challenge and we want to finish
it in the first half of this year. And that’s my professional
priority at the moment, but I have to admit that my last
year was very intense for me, both professionally and
privately. This is my second job. I would like to maintain
my work-life balance and spend more time with loved
ones. And I think that those goals are on the same level.
I wish you all the balance in the world to have your

professional goals met, and also to be present with
your loved ones. Thank you very much for joining us
to share your insights.

CHERYL
COURIS
ɔ Curating a product
designer talent set
ɔ Advice for new designers from

the hiring manager point of view
ɔ Cross-team design process

democratizing
ɔ Mindful approach to designing

with new technology and
designing for good
13

joined by Cheryl Couris. Cheryl, could you please tell
us a little bit about yourself?
Cheryl Couris I am currently a UX design manager at Cisco here in

Seattle.
Could you tell me more about your work experience

or education, or maybe some other stuff that you’re
doing? Because I know you have side projects as well.
I started as a traditional sort of graphic designer. I’ve done

a lot of marketing and advertising campaigns. When I
moved to Seattle, I sort of jumped into the world of UX
because I really wanted to solve problems. Not just sell
stuff, but solve problems for users. So, I started my UX
career at Microsoft, I spent a year at Google, and now
here I am at Cisco in Seattle working on some really cool
collaboration apps in what we call “the future of how
people work.”
I know for a fact that you are so also teaching UX

in Seattle. Today we are going to talk about design
trends. Education and the landscape of design jobs
is something that is going to change for sure. So, my
question to you would be, what are the top design
education programs for starters?
I’m super passionate about teaching. I am currently a

UX instructor here at the School of Visual Concepts in
127 CH. 13 – CHERYL COURIS

Seattle. And it’s a really great program for people who

are wanting to break into design. A lot of people are
changing careers, so, coming from another field. To
your point, I think the landscape of design, and design
careers and opportunities, are changing. And I think now
more than ever we’re seeing people have a passion for
problem solving, and connecting
with people. Gone are the days that
you have to absolutely be a formally
design-trained person to be in the
field. We’re seeing folks coming
from a variety of different industries and bringing that
experience with them. That really represents user-cen-
tered design, right? I teach a lot of former accountants or
baristas, or folks with really great experience dealing with
people, and they make really great designers. And so, the
landscape is opening up, and it’s becoming more and
more available and accessible to everyone. And that’s why
I got into teaching and why I just think it’s really exciting.
Everyone has the opportunity now to

put on that human-centered design
thinking cap and start to solve problems
in that way.
Yes, it’s so much easier now than 10 years ago to get

like proper education in UX, because whenever I talk

to people in UX design who have 10 plus years’ expe-

rience, they didn’t have the opportunity to have that
education. And now we not only have tons of resources
on the internet, but also schools and teachers like you.
I think that’s what makes better products and us better

designer is that we’re all bringing different facets and
different experiences to the table. And that makes sure
that we’re designing with everyone in mind and not just
a subset of users. So yes, it’s really exciting. I already see
the landscape changing. I’m excited to see where it’s
going to go after that.
Do you think there are some jobs connected with

design or UX that just emerging in 2020 that we have
never heard of before?
On my team, I really try to curate a talent set that’s product

design as a whole. Certainly, that’s a sort of job title that
we all know. But I’m really trying to expand that beyond
just pushing the pixels, but to also include writing content
and strategy in that same way. And then what does it look
like from the website, all the way to downloading the app
to using the app to the help and support.
So, I think job titles may or may not change. It’s more
that our scope is growing.
As people expect now from beginning to end, the whole

experience, I challenge folks that I work with to think

about it in that way. Again, I think job titles come and go,
there’s probably a whole subset of them that has been
coming that I don’t even know about yet.
But for me, it’s all about that scope growing. We’re mak-
ing sure we’re thinking about it from the beginning, all
the way to how anyone would experience a brand or a
product in other ways, not just by using it.
A holistic approach to design?
Totally.
As a person who hires designers, do you have any

words of advice for new designers, or people who are
trying to find their first job?
I love this question. I’m carving this out as a specialty

because I’m so passionate about giving everyone the
opportunity to get their foot in the door. It’s really hard,
especially if you live somewhere like Seattle or in other
cities where it’s so saturated, and you really have to stand
out from the crowd. If you’re trying to get one of your first
jobs in UX, my biggest thing I preach is sort of telling a
story. And so that’s your story.
As a designer, of course. It’s not just about the work, but

it’s how you present the work and how you talk about the

problems that you’re solving and their solutions. At the end

of the day, I think the secret is that your solution almost
doesn’t matter. It’s more about how you approach the
problem, and your design thinking, and how you unpack
the problem. It’s something I work with my
students all the time. They get so focused
on whether they chose the right color for
the button, and is the design itself right. But I’m actually
more interested in how you picked apart the problem.
And did you put the user’s needs first? Tell me that story.
So I really work with folks to make sure that their portfolios

and their websites and their presentations tell a story, not
just about them, but about the users and problems. That,
to me, is the difference between just pushing pixels and
creating a holistic journey. It makes a huge difference.
I kind of observed this change in the approach of de-

signers as well, because it used to be like, the designer
is the artist. And now we’re more user centered. We
are more focused on empathy.
To be fair, that was me. I’m an artist, I’m a designer.

Now we’re starting to see design democratized and not
with my PMS and my engineers. And yes, we hold the
skillset that maybe produces the artifact to look at, like
the mockup or the wireframe. But at the end of the day
it’s truly a team effort. It’s coming from everywhere. I’m
not necessarily a formally-trained designer, that’s not my
job title. But good ideas come from anywhere, and you

tell that story as a squad. And that’s been working really

well for the team that I’m on. I hope to carry that with
me wherever I go.
We’re looking at Generation Alpha coming into the

picture, people who don’t remember a time before
touchscreens. Do you think that’s something that
young designers are ready for?
It’s crazy. So full disclosure, I had to look up gen alpha.

I am truly an elder millennial. I have two young children
and they will not remember what it’s like not to have
technology available to them. We all remember having
to sit through commercials on TV, yet my four-year-old
just wants to fast forward right through them. It’s a very
different world with technology. And what really excites
me about the next generation and that their expectations
of technology are so high and they’re also fearless.
I watch my parents interact with technology. And often-

times, they’re scared about what will happen and what
they’ll do. The next generation is not scared, they are
fearless. And they’re going to really expect technology
to take us to the next level, even beyond what we see
today. And that, to me, is like the Wild West. There are
so many opportunities, and they’re not afraid to push
it because it’s available to them. Having no boundaries
in that way is a really good thing, because I think we’re
going to push it. Also, we’re starting to see designing for
good. With ethics and changing the world, I think we’re

seeing what’s really important to everyone, but particularly

younger generations are more aware of it than we were
or our parents were. It’s really cool to think about how
design will complement changing the world for good.
That’s really exciting.
When you say fearless, I see my daughter. When she

asks me a question I don’t know, she’s like, look it up.
They have no concept of boundaries with technology.

The expectation is that it’s there and it works for you.
And they’re not scared of it. It’s really amazing to watch,
particularly when you see really young kids interact with
technology, they’re already so fluent. Can imagine how
they’re going to really push it into the future? It could be
scary if it weren’t so exciting. Actually, I’m going to go
with exciting, thinking about how I can design for good.
I think we’ll be in a really good place.
They have the basics of technology. There’s nothing

particularly new to them when it comes to technology,
so they can build on top of that, like with ethics. We
have to somehow balance the development of tech-
nology, like AI, and inclusivity in the design field, too.
Absolutely. It’s funny, I didn’t even get my first cell phone

until high school. If you’re already thinking about kids
and how they’re going to take the technology available
today, which is already amazing, and start to make it work
to make their lives better, it’s going to blow our minds.

I’m interested in seeing where that goes. We do need to

balance that ethical piece of it, and AI and all of that. My
hunch is that the younger generation already has that
in mind, with the landscape and the world today – that
idea is already out there. I think we learned as we went,
and so we had some bumps. And they will too, but it’s
really exciting.
Speaking of inclusive and accessible design, for gen

alpha kids, voice search is something obvious. But we
didn’t anticipate that when we developed it. But it’s
also making things easier for seniors as well. So that’s
the irony of going so fast forward with technology, but
also having that in mind when designing technology
to be accessible. We achieved things that we didn’t
even think of, right?
I’m glad you brought that up. At my time at Microsoft, I

was involved in some of the accessibility work, and it put
this new lens on it for me. You can think about designing
a solution for someone who maybe doesn’t have their
extremities or has only one arm. But you’re also solving
a problem for a new mom who’s holding a baby and can
only use one arm, right?
So you’re designing for one but you’re solving that

same problem for so many people in a variety of
circumstantial or permanent circumstances.

It really is amazing. That really shifted my mindset and

opened it up to thinking that this is not such a targeted
problem we’re trying to solve – this is a very common use
case in many ways. So when you solve for one and think
about it in terms of many, it’s really powerful.
Yes. I hope this particular trend is going to be an

evergreen.
I think so. I think we’re seeing inclusivity. And I would say

that across the board, everything from body positivity to
other aspects as well. Unlike when some of us grew up,
it’s very much out there and accepted and that self-love
and acceptance is very, I don’t want to say it’s on trend,
but it’s coming up as something big. That’s the norm. And
I think that’s really important. Again, that’s probably why
the younger generation is already in better shape than
we would have been, because they’re thinking about that
and how to solve for those types of things. Whereas that
was not really on our radar, until more recently.
Fingers crossed that this empowerment is going to be

trending for not only 2020, but the 2020s and beyond.

CHHAVI
SHRIVASTAVA
ɔ Creating a personal brand as
a young designer
ɔ Practical design and business-

oriented design
ɔ Building careers by merging

creative work and managing talent
ɔ Blending the skills of brand design

and product design
14

joined by Chhavi Shrivastava, all the way from Barcelona.
Chhavi, would you please tell us a little bit about
yourself?
Chhavi I’m currently working as a product designer at N26. I come

Shrivastava from India – I just moved here two months back, so I am
pretty new to the city and to this company as well. Back in
India, I was working as a UX designer with Nutanix. And
before that I was studying design. I was completing my
Bachelor of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Guwahati. So here I am.
I imagine that you bring all this new, fresh energy to

N26. Not only are you a really young designer, but
you’re new to the city and have a whole new approach.
So, good for them!
I came up with my expectations because it was a com-

pletely different culture. The design community in India
is very mature, very closely knit. All of us know each other
through somebody. So coming here, I wasn’t expecting
too much, to be honest. But I should say I’m generally
surprised, by the crowd and N26 itself.
We are, I think presently, 86 nationalities working together.

Even in our design team we have somebody from England,
Switzerland, US. So it’s like quite a different mix. So I
would say, I do not feel like an alien coming from the
other side of the world.
137 CH. 14 – CHHAVI SHRIVASTAVA

Everybody brings their own perspectives, which is very

helpful for the field that we are in, which is dealing with
banks and money. Everybody has their own perspective
on it.
Simple things that somebody might

take for granted is questioned by some
other person from a completely different
background, which I find really cool.
So that’s one thing. And another thing is that all the teams
here work quite closely with each other. We have to, we
are just dealing with money and banks. There’s nothing
else to do, so we tend to do things really well.
The team picture is very small. I work in a team that han-

dles localization for European markets. N26 is a global
product, but how can they make it more localized for
different markets? On my team, I’m the designer, and we
have some back-end developers, front-end developers,
and a product manager. We work very closely with other
teams who are in the market domain.
We all work towards a common goal, so there’s a lot of

collaboration going on. A lot of in-depth knowledge that
you gain over time. It’s a fun place to be as a designer
because it’s not just about creating mockups. It’s also

about a lot more about the product itself, the business,

the market, development constraints, all those things. It
is fun.
I’m really impressed by N26 myself. I find your designs

very, very neat. So I figured that you would have to
say a lot about fresh stuff, like really cool trends for
2020. I would like to ask you because you are a young
designer yourself. I figure that you have to build your
career still. You’re in this building mode still, right? So
what do you expect from the design market in 2020
when it comes to a designer’s personal brand?
I consider myself a junior designer. I have a lot to learn,

and that is why I was really surprised when you approached
me for this. Coming from India, I’ve seen the market
there, and there are a lot more design schools in India
now compared five years ago, so definitely the field is
opening up.
The market is also opening for roles like UX designers, UX

writers, etc. So I would say the market has matured quite
a lot in terms of roles and the value of design.
Maybe this is a naive perspective from a junior

designer, but it’s no longer about the coolest
design or in-trend design. Here at N26 we are
working with practical designing that can be
shipped out to our customers in the shortest period of
time We can’t lose out on not shipping a feature just

because we wanted to build something fancy. It should

be practical, it should be part of the market fit. And when
I say market fit, that’s when, as a designer, you have to
sit with your product managers and business people to
understand where it is coming from.
For example, when I put the current project that I’m work-
ing on in my portfolio, a lot of people will look at it and
say, “That’s nothing groundbreaking. I could have done
it in a week, it’s not that complex, it’s not something that
changes the world that much.” But the journey is taking
all these different factors and making sure that you’re
at the right tables and understanding the perspectives
of different people like developers, marketing people,
business people, and making sure that your designs are
delivered in time. That’s something lot of designers will
converge more and more towards.
You just cannot afford to work

in a silos anymore.
I think in the coming year, or next year, the role will start
working with developers and product managers closely.
I would say in future that will become a given. That’s my
prediction.
Let hope so, because when you talk about it, I envision
all these “experienced” designers, and they are very

structured in their way of thinking, and having the

design be all about the design and just nothing with
the business.
I think that’s the old school way of thinking, that design

is just supposed to be pretty and maybe usable. But
how it affects the product and the business, people
didn’t care before. So I think that’s a very mature thing
from you and it’s a very “product designer” thing to
say.
Now that you bring experienced design-

ers into perspective, I’m curious how my
career progresses as I go forward. Will I
still have the freedom to be an individual
contributor like a senior designer? Or will
moving into a leadership position be my
only way to grow?
I think this is one thing that the industry is currently

figuring out. And I think it’s like a really tricky gray area
because as a designer, you want to have a seat at the
table, but you don’t really want to attend all the meetings
because then it takes away your creative zone. But you
want a voice. So you can’t have a voice without being
at the table, and you can’t be at the table and be one
hundred percent creative.
So that’s like a sweet spot that experienced designers are

trying to figure out right now. I would be really curious

to see in the future what part I’ll have to take, or will I

get to choose?
Right now, either you like to manage people and just

know about your creative work, or be more and more
and more experienced in your specific field of creative
work. It’s either this or that, right?
Yeah. We only have my manager and the person who’s

leading the team here. He is doing some work on the
plan that we are talking about. He does have ownership
of products and features and he’s helping manage other
teams as well. But it will be interesting how the industry
matures to accommodate more and more senior designers
and how much level of freedom do we get in choosing
and carving out our roles.
I talked with different designers in different indus-

tries with different skillsets, and they all say that the
landscape of designing jobs right now is so changing
so much. A couple of years ago you would say I’m a
designer or a graphic designer, but a few years after
that, you’d say a UX designer or UI designer.
And now we have so many roles. This is a really inter-

esting thing to see. And I am really impressed how you
have this like openness and this open approach to this.
As much as I’m open to the idea of a generalist designer,

I also truly appreciate the specialist, the people who

have mastered one field of design. For example, brand

designers – this is one set of designers that I’ve recently
worked with at N26. We didn’t have this in our previous
company, it was part of marketing. But here I think they’re
closely linked to the top product design team of…we don’t
call it a product design team, we call it a design team. It
gives us the ability, as product designers, to have a certain
amount of influence on how it’s been communicated
to our users at the end. It also makes sure of things like,
the product looks all fancy, but then you see a banner
completely out of sync with the product and it doesn’t feel
like the product at all. The brand designer, I feel they are
super valuable and they have a skill set that is completely
unique to what they are doing. It’s like a mix of marketing
and advanced design skills, like After Effects or Illustrator.
And also a certain amount of voice and tone. It’s a really
unique blend of skills that they possess and something
that they are really, really good at.
Even if I find it really hard to match up to that, I’m really

happy that they’re doing their job separately, so I can do
mine. Even though we’re talking about designers who
will be a hybrid of a lot of things, I don’t think designers
will ever go out of market – they’re a really skilled and
appreciated part of the community.
Brand designers are appreciated as well because it’s

good to have someone to watch over the whole vision.
So tell me, what are your professional goals for 2020?
Do you have list of things that you want to accomplish?

To be honest, last year was really heavy for professional

goals, because I was thinking about what was next, and
took this job and then moved here. So, this year I thought,
“Now that I’m here, how can I add value to where I am
and add more skills?” So I would say my goals are not
only professional, like updating my website or create an
advertisement on my own. I think I’ve decided like give
it a pause this year and focus more on myself.
I was reading a tweet the other day and it said
that if all the designers are going to Tokyo,
following the same leaders on Twitter, and reading the
same books, where will new ideas come from? As a
design community, we are becoming more and more
lean, but we also need to retain our individuality even
more now.
And I thought that was interesting. What do I have as a

standout hobby or skill that I really like, which if I go out
into the market no other designer will have? It seems like
a lot of us have common interests, which is good, but it’s
also something that scares me because everybody’s liking
this on Twitter, reading the books I read, etc.
So this year I’ve decided that I will go out of my comfort

zone and try out new things completely unrelated to my
work. It cannot include writing or reading. I started with
something really tiny. In January I got like thousand-piece
puzzle, and I’m trying to solve it, but it’s really impossible
so far, but that’s what my goal is. To slowly find different
things. I don’t know, maybe crocheting, but I’m going to

try different things that are not related to my work. And

maybe at the end of the year, I can go back and say that
I tried out 5 or 6 things, and it was really nice to like get
out of my zone.
Tell the story of your

design with user flows
Show conditional flow logic, create
flow diagrams, and build and present
beautiful user flows that tell the story
of your work.
145 YOUR – CHHAVI

CH. 14 DESIGN PROCESS.
SHRIVASTAVA
SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
LEE SEAN
HUANG
ɔ The change in the role of UX and
Product Designer
ɔ Retro revival in current web and

graphic design
ɔ Design as a pendulum between

the digital world and reality
ɔ The importance of building design

communities
ɔ His new podcast: Design Future Now
15
UXPin Welcome to 2020 design trends by UXPin. Today I’m

joined by Lee Sean Huang. Lee, please tell us a bit
about your experience.
Lee Sean Huang I am a designer based in New York City. And I split my time
three ways between my own practice at a service design
firm I started called Foossa. And I’m also an educator. So
I teach part time at the School of Visual Arts here in New
York, as well as at New York University and the Parsons
School of Design. And then I’m also involved in the design
community. I work with AIGA, which is the professional
association for design here in the US. And I’m involved
with the design podcast with AIGA and also supporting
our community of design educators.
Because I knew that you’re in design education, I would

like to ask you about trends for design education.
I think we’re talking about the next year coming up. But
just to give a little bit of broader context, specific tools and
technologies are changing all the time. I finished grad
school myself 10 years ago and a lot of the things I learned
are obsolete. I actually used to teach Flash animation and
ActionScript five or six years ago, and now I like barely
remember any of that stuff. It’s like I never learned it at
all. And it seems like ancient history.
There are still a lot of basic fundamentals that are un-

changed, that are still the backbone of the web and
mobile. I teach an intro class at New York University in
147 CH. 15 – LEE SEAN HUANG

web design – introduction and fundamentals. It’s basic

HTML and CSS. Stuff like that, especially for beginners,
is not really going to change that much. But in terms of
trends, I think more and more we’re seeing this con-
vergence of designers going over to the coding side.
But also, with design systems, we have more and more
engineers essentially doing the work of design, even
if these systems have been created by designers. The
simple answer would be this kind of convergence in the
middle. And we’re still trying to figure it out in terms of
in organizations, in teams, politically, how we deal with
roles – because the tools themselves have become more
democratic, in both ways.
I’ve had a lot of discussions about the landscape

of jobs in design. And some people say that the UX
designer job is like disappearing and new roles are
going to be to start appearing on the stage. What are
your views on that?
UX as a job title, and as a field, is really broad and expansive.

I don’t know exactly about the data to know if UX jobs
are really disappearing or not. But anecdotally, I do see
more and more designers working and being identified as
product designers, for example. Product design certainly
involves UX, but it also has more responsibilities on the
business model side of things. But I think we see two
things. One is hyper-specialization, and the other is the
need for generalists.

The fundamentals that you get as a generalist in UX or

product design is looking at the whole scope of complexity
of software and tech products today. But there’s also hy-
per-specialization, as I mentioned in my previous answer,
where the tech is moving so quickly that you also see a
lot of jobs—especially entry-level and specialists—that are
looking for very specific software programs or very specific
frameworks, for example. So you kind of see a little bit of
both. But the more senior you get, as a designer, there
are demands to be more of a generalist, whatever that
job title might be.
I like that you said that your approach to education

is changing with time. And of course, there are some
basics that we all have to know, or that designers have
to know. But there are new things popping up all the
time, right? And I have a vision of how Generation Alpha
is going to change the design approach to products,
or just the world in general.
Generation Alpha is still definitely still coming up in the

world. From my perspective, just looking at my nieces
and nephews, my nephew in particular who’s only three-
and-a-half or four years old, he has been able to figure
out an iPad by himself and watch YouTube videos. And
he has this expectation that all screens are touchscreens.
At what point will a TV where you can’t touch the screen
is going to seem weird? I’m old enough to have had a
landline phone. And that was the phone. And now like a
landline is kind of weird and old fashioned. We have this

mobile-first kind of mindset. With Generation Alpha, there

are going to be certain things that are just defaults for
them, in terms of touchscreens or even voice interfaces,
talking to Siri or Alexa.
I think this is more with Gen Z, because I see this with

my undergraduate students – I’ll introduce them to com-
mand lines or file paths, and things like that are kind of
a struggle for them because they’ve grown up with GUI,
these graphical user interfaces. They’ve grown up being
able to search for anything. The idea of a structured path
or command line is not natural for them, so they have
to go back and learn it. I started with DOS with my first
computer. It’s something I grew up with and not something
that I had to learn, as old technology. The starting points
are different, but there are tradeoffs there.
I just get so histologic when you say DOS, or you

know, Mario Bros, etc. But there’s a strong trend of
vintage and retro stuff. Do you think that’s going to
be something for 2020 as well?
Definitely. I think we’re already seeing stuff like that. I had

this realization as we got into 2020 that the 1990s were
20, almost 30, years ago, if you go back to the early 90s.
It’s kind of the same perspective as being a teenager
in the 90s thinking about the 70s. There was a 70s retro
revival in the 90s. I think that’s the equivalent, and I see
it happening again, and not just with design aesthetic.
Certainly, we see these GeoCities-inspired sites like the

Captain Marvel movie website, which had this 1990s retro

aesthetic. Well, we see this in fashion as well. Some of my
undergrads dress kind of like how we dressed in the 90s.
Except they have cell phones and some other accessories

that are different, but fashion-wise, it’s pretty much a
lot of 90s throwback stuff. So, especially as web design
and app design becomes more structured with design
systems, and with “best practices,” I think there’s this retro
aesthetic as a way of looking back at the GeoCities and
MySpace era when the web was just weirder. And there
was some room for quirkier expression. I think there’s
definitely space for that as a reaction against this sort
of hyper-structured form of designing that’s optimized.
You said something about the duality in education

and trends, and you touched on fashion as well. I just
started to realize that even in fashion, we are just
trying to reach more real-life beauty. In my opinion,
it’s the reaction to the digitalization of the world. So,
on one hand we are like, everything is digital. But on
the other hand, we need it to be real.
Yes. I think that’s a really interesting observation in terms

of this pendulum that we see. Looking at Instagram, es-
pecially just doing some ethnography and seeing where
some of these visual aesthetics are and how people are
framing their photos, it’s almost a democratization of these
tools like beauty filters and Facetune, because almost
everyone has access to that now. And it almost makes the

pendulum swing the other way because anyone can be a

digital beauty, so people are valuing natural beauty more.
Also there is backlash against some of this stuff. I was

reading about these trends in South Korea where these
influencers, on their equivalent of YouTube, are taking off
their makeup to show that, yes, this is artifice. But there’s
still a kind of natural authenticity behind it. I think this is
a term that’s been going on a trend for a while—authen-
ticity—and how you live your life. So, it seems natural to
see that reflected in visual aesthetics.
Yes. Authenticity. But I think there’s something about

communities around brands which comes from the need
for realness and human touch in our digitized lives.
Do you think this is something that will be trending
in 2020 as well, design communities?
Yes, definitely, I think in both digital and physical and

hybrid as well. It’s easier than ever to start your own
Slack group or Facebook group and connect with people
that you’ve never met in person about shared interests,
often in terms of having arguments with people online.
But I think that’s important as well, especially in a lot of
design teams, where you’re so focused on producing
and shipping, where you’re very much head-down a lot
of the time. I think there’s a need. It’s also related to the
rise in remote work, as more and more teams are remote,
you don’t have that same water cooler, coffee break time.

So maybe we’re looking for that outside of our immediate

coworkers and teams. People are also going to design
events and meetups in their cities, or even traveling to
conferences. I don’t think that’s going to change necessarily.
But I’m thinking about it as a hybrid kind of thing; rather,
you’ll meet somebody online, and then you’ll meet them
in person at a local event or national conference.
And also vice versa. You’re going to a confer-

ence, but you have a back channel on Twitter
or a Slack group. That’s a way of continuing
the conversation, and that part is exciting. It’s
a great equalizer for people who may be less
extroverted and have a harder time introducing themselves
to somebody, but you can say to them, “Hey, I like your
tweet, let’s meet up at the coffee break.” Things like that,
I think are making these events and communities more
inclusive, which I think is a good thing.
My last question to you because I know that you are

with AIGA and we talked a little bit about communities.
What are your career plans or resolutions for 2020?
I mentioned this at the top of the interview, but with AIGA

I’m producing and hosting a podcast called Design Future
Now. We are really looking at these conversations about
designing the future and the future of design. And so,
my aspiration for that is to just build that out, and bring
in more diverse voices, maybe designers working in fields
that are less obvious. Maybe not so super tech-focused

in the broader sense. And also bringing in voices that are

less represented.
I think my other aspiration, personally in my own work

and my own practice, is getting more into other forms of
storytelling and film. Whether it’s exploring and playing
with VR/AR storytelling, or even just working in traditional
film and video, which I had a background in, back in the
day, and kind of moved away from. But as I’m getting
older, it’s kind of a return to roots in a way rather than
actually just helping a friend with designing the credit
sequence for his movie. Things like that, where I can take
my design skills and my creative skills and bring them
into some of these other media as well.
Share a single
preview link
Share the results of your work using a single
link that’s always up to date. Let your team
and stakeholders review your prototypes –
leave no room for misunderstandings.
154 YOUR – LEE SEAN

CH. 15 DESIGN PROCESS.
HUANGSIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
TORREY
PODMAJERSKY
ɔ Decreasing the cognitive burden for
the users with inclusive language
ɔ The importance of localization in

product design
ɔ AI technology helping to design at scale

(still with a need of human touch)
ɔ Usability of the design decisions
ɔ Her book: Strategic Writing for UX
16
UXPin Welcome to UXPin 2020 Design Trends. Today I’m joined

by Torrey Podmajersky. Torrey, could you please tell
us a little bit about yourself?
Torrey I am a UX writer at Google at the moment, and I have

Podmajersky worked at Xbox, Microsoft Education, ended offer I have
been a UX writer for about 10 years now, and that builds
on my physics degree and my teaching background in a
number of bizarre ways. It led me to write a book called
Strategic Writing for UX that came out last year from
O’Reilly. It has been a nontraditional path, but I find
that’s actually extremely common among UX writers and
people who got into UX design 15 to 20 years ago. There
didn’t used to be degrees for this and there didn’t used
to be specific training. So we had to come into it from
wherever we were.
But I would say that with your teaching background,

writing a book was just the right thing to do, wasn’t it?
Because with your educational background, and the
landscape of education of UX and UX writers – there
are hardly any schools for that.
Yeah, it’s hard to get training in it, although there are

more and more available online and in person. I was
trained as a UX writer. I got my first UX writing job
because I had been a teacher, and the Xbox writing
manager said, “You’ve explained things to teenagers
in ways that they were successful with, and you were a
chemistry teacher so you had to explain really abstract
156 CH. 16 – TORREY PODMA JERSKY

concepts that they had to take tests on. So come work

for me at Xbox.”
And I did, and it was wonderful, but it was not scalable.

I joined a terrific team of people who knew their jobs
and helped me learn the craft. When I had been working
there for a few years, another UX writer I worked with
said, there should be a class in Seattle.
We started a class at the Seattle School for Visual Concepts

and built the curriculum. After teaching for a few years
and learning more about how to shape the argument
for, and the descriptions of, the various tasks and how
to integrate into design teams and product and engi-
neering teams. I then went to a conference in 2018 and
I realized, oh my God, people are making up this field
all by themselves in all of these little isolated ways.
These poor people – there

should be a book!
I went back to my friend who had talked

me into teaching, and I said there should
be a book, and she told me to go write it.
So here we are.
So, you experienced the changing of how the UX

writing field was shaped previously, but could you

tell me what would be your favorite emerging trend

in your field, for 2020 or the 2020s in general?
My favorite thing is that more and more people are recog-

nizing the importance of words in interfaces, and that we
actually design them and it’s not just down to the gut feel
of the people in the room, whether that’s the engineers
or the PMs or the designers. There can be a science and
an art to it that we can learn and apply best practices to,
and really develop it as its own discipline and do research
around it. And we can have that skill integrated into the
mix with visual design, with interaction design, with the
prototyping skills, with all of those other skills.
So the trend I’m really looking forward to is UX being

thought of less as strictly UX design and graphic design
and coming from a visual place, and more keeping the
visual aspect but adding to it—the interaction, the writ-
ing, the research, the engineering—to make a full stack
UX. I think it mirrors the evolution of computer science,
computer engineering, and software engineering, where
it used to be for “serious people only.”
We’ve gone past that, and we have what we call full stack
software engineers who are comfortable with back end and
front end and all the different ways. And we have people
who specialize. There’s plenty of room in the industry
for people who specialize and say they are a fantastic
visual designer and have opinions about colors. Great,
hallelujah, because I don’t! The generalists and leaders

in this space understand they don’t have to come from

a visual background but can come from research and
engineering and writing. So I’m looking forward to that.
I’m so happy that you said that, because I’m really

looking forward to design in general being perceived
more as a strategic field, not just drawing pretty things
or writing. UX writing is not only about gut feelings,
like you said.
It’s not about the gut feeling or having good grammar.

It’s about getting the job done. Here’s the way I see it:
the strategic purpose is to bring the people and the
people’s behaviors together with software, so that people
are doing what they’re in the software to do. That’s the
whole reason the business exists.
The software engineers do all this work to get all of the

silicon in the right places and all the electrons flying in
the right way so that the right pretty things appear on
the screens. But if they’re not working on getting the
computer to do the right thing, and we’re not working on
getting the people to do the right things, then it doesn’t
come together. We in UX get to work on enticing people,
enabling people, unlocking those experiences so that
they can really succeed. And that’s just super exciting.
Exactly. I think one of the most important goals of UX

writing, to me at least, is to really speak the language
of the people you are addressing it to. So one of the

most exciting trends in UX writing would be inclusive

writing as a part of inclusive design, or accessible
design in general. Would you say that you’re looking
forward to it as well?
I am so looking forward to it. There are so many inter-

faces that have been built using the “gut feelings” of the
developers and product owners who are very smart and
very focused. And they think that sometimes simplifying
language is like dumbing it down, but that’s not what we’re
doing at all. What we’re doing when we’re making people
deal with extremely formal and complex language (and
sometimes complex concepts that they don’t even need
to deal with at that moment) is slowing them down and
creating a cognitive burden, and they don’t need that.
We need to do the work to be clear. When we use the

same language that the user or customer would use, we
are speaking directly to their hind brain, right? We’re
bypassing the reading centers. They don’t have to feel
like they’re reading, they can just understand it, and then
it feels easy.
The Holy Grail of accessibility

and inclusive design is reaching
people where they are, no
matter who they are.

That means doing a great job on localization and inter-

nationalization. If we’re making products that are going
to be used by people who have a native language other
than our development language, then it’s on us to reach
them where they are, not to make them try to understand
us. Why can’t we just translate every word? That is not
going to work, not even for the languages that English
borrowed very heavily from. I’m referring to German
mostly, but it just doesn’t work that way. Sometimes we
have to speak in local idioms because that’s how people
would say things. Our localization professionals might
come in and say, the automated translation says this, but
no person using this language would ever say it that way.
We need to talk to them the way they are.
At the end of the day, people are not supposed to

feel like they’re speaking with an interface, right?
There’s someone out there, so empathize with them
and consider them when you design and develop the
whole thing.
That’s exactly what we need to be doing, and I think about

it all the time. I’ve studied several languages and I speak
all of them very poorly. It’s bad. And I get confused like,
“Wait, I need the number 14, wait, that’s it in Chinese.
I needed in French. Nope. That was Italian, wait, that
happens with my French.” I believe your first language
is Polish, is that correct?
Yes.

Thank you for conducting this interview in English. I really

appreciate it.
It’s my pleasure.
The attitude we should all have is that we are in this together

and as UXers, we are reaching out to people wherever
they are in their context. In the 2020s and beyond, I’m
really looking forward to having AI models able to do that
better and easier, because it’s not easy to scale, like one
to one, the interfaces.
But AI only gets us so far, and then we still need that

human empathy and the human approach. And we
need to know what it’s like in that context and how it’s
different than our gut assumptions, being wherever we
are. I’m in Seattle, Washington. There are different cultural
expectations here, for example, of what colors I can dye
my hair, than there are elsewhere.
I’m happy that you mentioned AI and the human touch,

and how we should control technology. I’m sensing that
there’s this duality in the technology field in general,
where one part goes straight to the technology and
wants to make everything AI. But we also need real-life
humans, whether they’re in brand communications or
design. And I’m so happy to see more and more, for
example, fashion posters being less photoshopped.
Would you say that this is something that we can call
a trend for 2020 as well?

I don’t know anything about fashion posters and those

kinds of visual design and marketing elements other than
as a consumer of them, and a person with very reactive
opinions about them. But as a designer of the text that
sometimes goes with such things, I’d follow the same
idea of wanting to represent people as their beautiful,
flawed, wonderful selves.
So we talked about grammar a little bit before, and it’s

a little bit facetious, right? I care quite a bit about the
grammar, but I care not that it’s the correct grammar of
my third grade teacher, but that it’s the grammar that
will be easiest to understand and use in that moment
and really make the person feel like they are part of that
conversation.
The best way to do that, of course, is to include the peo-

ple intended to use the products in the design process,
listen deeply to the language they use, and make sure
that’s the language reflected in the product, even if it’s
ungrammatical as heck.
Because that’s real. We don’t need to dress that up. We

don’t need to make it fancy or formal or airbrush the
language away. I go back to the Mismatch book by Kat
Holmes that outlines the idea of inclusive design as in-
cluding the people that it’s for, whether it’s people with
disabilities or temporary abilities, because all we get in
this world is temporary abilities. And someday they’re all
going to go away and that’s the best-case scenario. So

sometimes I get tired, or I’m in an altered state. And I have

to ask, “Wait, could you say that more slowly?” Maybe I
just have a bad headache.
And I say, “This is hard for me to understand, can you

simplify it for me? Can you make it easier for me to do
the right thing?” That’s what we’re here for as UXers – for
people, whether they’re having a good day or a bad day,
whether they are cognitively on tap or they’re distracted,
to be successful doing what they need to do with our
products.
So when we can include people,

even when they’re having a bad day,
that’s the best.
I’m happy that you mentioned simplifying stuff, be-

cause whenever I talked to UXers about the huge battle
between minimalism and maximalism, they always
want to make everything minimal. I’m sensing that
you’re not exactly of this party, am I right?
One of the really important ways to make text usable is to

make it concise and not include a bunch of stuff that isn’t
needed there. So in that sense, Roy West says short beats
good. Except when clarity beats short. So really, instead
of minimalism or maximalism, I’m all about utilitarianism.
Does it work? When I get to the point where it’s working,

then we can play with whether it still works when there’s

a little bit less. Or does it work a bit better when there’s a
little more? Sometimes you can change the entire feeling
of a thing. We want to inspire good feelings about our
products usually, and if we could change the entire feeling
with one little adjective or adverb, maybe we should.
And other times, we shouldn’t. But that’s where the de-

sign comes in. We are not going to reduce those design
positions or creative decisions. We can inform them with
research or with AI modeling, but we’re not going to
eliminate how rapidly trained humans can make those
decisions, and make those decisions well.

CHRISTIAN
TRYLLER
ɔ Roles and responsibilities between
different design titles
ɔ New technologies and tools

for designers and the difference
they bring
ɔ Privacy and data management

as an app designing and
development issue
ɔ Collaboration within bigger

product-makers teams
17

joined by Christian Tryller. Christian, could you please
tell us about yourself, your career, experience, and
why you’re a designer?
Christian Tryller I have about 18 years’ worth of design experience. I started

in the early 2000s with traditional design work, graphic
design, branding design, and marketing design. And then
in the late 2000s I made the transition to focus on UX
and UI design. Specifically what caught my eye was the
psychology behind the designs and analytics, and how
the designs are really influenced by data. From there I just
kept practicing and learning more about it, and taking
different jobs, different roles, and different freelance
opportunities. And then I was working with large organi-
zations. I have worked with a number of different larger
organizations, from healthcare organizations to product
organizations. My last stint was with IBM for a number of
years. Recently I made the transition to a biotechnology
company based out of San Francisco.
You probably have to say a lot about trends in the

job field of designer jobs, like UX designer, product
designer. Because like whenever I talk to designers
they have different opinions on how the field will like
change. So do you think there’s any specific trends?
What’s your vision of hiring?
It’s important that organizations have a clear roadmap

for designers and design practice within organizations.
167 CH. 17 – CHRISTIAN TRYLLER

Whether organizations are hiring people as contractors or

full-time employees, they should at least sort of groom or
have conversations with designers in order to see where
junior designers, mid-level designers, and even senior
designers want to go. Specifically, whether they want to
continue to be individual contributors and follow that
roadmap for themselves because they’re the type that
want to always be designing and have their hands on
projects, or they are designers that want to take on more
of a leadership role from a management perspective.
In either case, either designer roadmap is essentially a

leadership role. It just depends on what your focal area is
going to be. I believe that it’s important that organizations
give designers those roadmaps and have conversations
with them, rather than taking designers into organizations
and then putting them in a production-work life.
So you wouldn’t say that there’s going to be a very

specific shift in the design job landscape, but in more
of an organizational approach?
Yes, and I think between UX research, UX design, infor-

mation architecture, UI design, and prototyping—being a
product designer, specifically—the roles and responsibilities
between the different titles that are out there are going
to eventually become very blurred. And you’ll see that
over the next five years, as teams are growing from two
or three people to teams of 2000 designers, roles and
responsibilities will shift. A typical designer who may get

hired to do UX research may end up doing some UX/UI

design as well because of the needs of the organization.
As designers, we’re always learning

and we should always just be open
to problem solving, whatever that
opportunity may be.
There are new technologies coming into the design

world, new tools that we can use. For example, in
UX research, I’d say that AI is going to make a huge
difference.
I think AI is going to be a helpful tool. I don’t think it will

replace UX research, because with UX research having
that human touch and being able to be empathetic to
individuals, actually understand their viewpoint, and having
the same sort of tone and experiences of the individuals
that you’re interviewing is immensely important. I think
we’ll have tools that help expedite that actual process
and help crunch that data as well. So it’ll definitely be
a useful asset along the way, but I don’t foresee it fully
replacing the job of the UX researcher.
Like you said, you were like kind of mesmerized by the

psychology behind the UX job. So it’s not something
that computers can do, right?

At this point. I mean, who knows what may happen within

the next 10 years. But today I don’t think AI is at the point
where it can completely replace UX research.
It’s a huge help still, right? It helps to iterate and

compute the data and stuff like that.
Yes. But let’s think about it. We’re an individual team of

UX researchers. Let’s say there are three UX researchers
within a team and they split up a day of interviewing indi-
viduals. They interview anywhere from 15 to 20 individuals
within a day. An AI system set up properly could probably
interview a hundred individuals within that same day. The
gathering of data can be expedited by using AI tools. So
it’s definitely there to help along the way.
But there still has to be a human who draws the con-

clusions, right?
Yes, definitely.
While we’re speaking about technology trends, do

you have a favorite trend or something that you are
really looking forward to in the design field in 2020?
Yes, actually I’m looking past 2020 and over the next 10
years. Within this past decade, one of the big items that has
come up is privacy and data. While we haven’t completely
solved the social media aspect of things, with people
sharing their personal information and family photos and

stuff, I think within the next decade we’re going to see

another issue concerning privacy, privatization, and data
being shared within the healthcare system, and how that
problem’s going to get solved. So an individual goes to,
for example, get DNA testing. The results of that actual
DNA testing – where’s that information saved, where’s it
shared? How is it stored? Within the United States, I don’t
think we’ve solved that completely yet. I know Europe
has handled that in a couple of different ways, but I think
overall that’s a bigger problem that we’re going to see
come along the way. That’s going to be fun to try to solve
with data and AI.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about the 10-year challenge

on social media. But I heard that they like started it
only to get data on faces of people and how it changes
in order to train AI, so it’s gathering data. Maybe not
violating, but playing with privacy.
Yes, I’ve heard that as well. I don’t know how much truth
there is to that, but you know, only time will tell.
And I think it’s a huge issue, so designers or product

makers have to approach that issue as well.
It’s going to be a large design issue that we’re going to

have to try to solve across the board, but it’s going to
take everybody from engineering to product owners, to
everybody involved from the top to the bottom to help
solve that larger issue.

When I speak to designers in our interviews, I’m

hearing that some of them like to be acknowledged
as contributors to the business as well. So I think that
collaborative workflows are going to be trending as
well in 2020. Do you think so?
Yes, I do think so. It’s important for designers, whether

it be a freelance designer or a designer working within a
larger organization, to establish relationships with their
peers on teams. Once you’re brought on board and you
start to emerge onto a project, you’ve got to establish that
conversation with the engineers. Establish that conver-
sation with the content writers and the product owners
and pull them to the side, have a one-on-one or go get
a cup of coffee with them, and figure out how they like
to work. Because from one designer to another, each
designer works differently. That applies to all the other
team members within organizations. So once you’ve had
those conversations and established relationships with
those individuals, that makes for a better product flow.
Exactly. And I think that resonates with what you said

about blurred lines in job roles.
In my personal experience, I’ve had to learn how to

become a content writer to a certain degree. Become a
front end or back end developer and you’ll have to read
the language and understand the output and also be a
project manager to make sure the project moves along.
You have to wear a bunch of different hats. If you’re

invested in a project and a product, and you want it to

be successful, you have to do all these additional steps.
It comes naturally to the individuals that are invested in
these types of projects, so I don’t think we’re asking a
lot of people.
Since we’re talking about how you changed the course

of your career, could you share your personal goals
for 2020? Are they aligned with any specific trend in
design? Or maybe not, maybe you’re going evergreen.
What are your goals?
I recently joined a new team, as I was saying earlier. I’m

working in a new organization and that organization is
starting to scale up and realize the importance of design
within the organization. So my professional goal for
design in 2020 is to work with this smaller team and help
them grow, and help my team members out, but also
help out the engineers and figure out how to work in a
larger scale. I have experience, obviously. coming from
a larger organization. So I have experience on how to
juggle multiple projects and how to make sure that all
those different projects have the right components to be
successful. So I’m really looking to step into a leadership
role within the organization for 2020.
Good for you. Fingers crossed!

ALEKS
SAFAROVA
ɔ Trending titles and roles in the
design field
ɔ Hiring and empowering young

designers as a leader
ɔ Accessibility as a requirement
not a trend
ɔ More open and collaborative

design processes
18
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends for UXPin. Today I’m

joined by Aleks Safarova from KAYAK. Aleks, please
tell us a bit about yourself.
Aleks Safarova I’m director of product design here at KAYAK. I started

in traditional graphic design. I went to school at the
Maryland Institute College of Art for branding, and then
over the years moved into product design. I’ve been at
KAYAK for about five years, then I left and came back as
the director of product design.
The company must be awesome if you went back.
Yes. I love the challenges that we’re solving. You know,

being an international myself, travel is close to my heart,
and the culture here is very invigorating. I guess a lot of
people actually come back. I’m not the first boomerang,
we call ourselves, to come back to KAYAK.
Today we will discuss your use of design trends for 2020,

or the 2020s because you’re entering a new decade,
after all. You said that you started with branding and
traditional graphic design. What would you say about
the design job landscape right now? Because people
are saying funny things, that UX designer jobs are
disappearing or inventing design wizard jobs.
I think UX designer is a broad role. And while I feel it’s not

disappearing, I think it will be breaking down into a more
specialized field. Right now, if you think about UX design,
175 CH. 18 – ALEKS SAFAROVA

that covers a wide range of skillsets including qualitative,

quantitative, behavioral research, user mapping, flows,
facilitation scales—the list could go on—interaction design.
So I think what we’ll start seeing is these responsibilities
unbundle and become much more niche in the field of
design.
Okay. Do you have any specific wishes that, as a leader,

you’re probably hiring for a very specific thing in mind?
At KAYAK, the way we approach roles and titles is we try

to observe our designers and what they’re interested in,
and try to empower them to be more innovative and
creative and use their skillsets as they see fit.
So honestly your title and your role could

have a huge impact on the design of KAYAK;
for example, on the front door, the price
graph was designed by an intern, and it’s one of our
most successful features. So you know, titles are titles,
but I don’t think they should limit you or box you into
something. Also, with new members coming in that are
straight out of school or new to the industry, we actually
prefer to give the title of designer and let them kind of
see how they grow into a specific domain knowledge
versus trying to pigeonhole them into UX design or brand
design or product design.
Thank you for sharing, that’s awesome. I would like to

ask you one thing, because you’re specifically product

design and close to technology, and I believe that you

have a lot of smart things to say about that that area.
My question is, because we have a whole digitalize/
social media thing going on in 2020, and AR/VR is a
hot topic because I think it’s going more from a social
media and gaming world into more basic products.
Would you say so?
I would say it’s definitely moving towards that direction,

but I will say personally, or as the brand KAYAK, we don’t
just innovate for the sake of innovation, just like we don’t
follow trends for the sake of trends. So we want to make
sure that the features we’re designing—if we are embracing
technology—is actually useful for the users; for example,
in 2019, we did actually release an AR bag measuring
tool to help travelers understand if their luggage meets
the overhead bin requirements across various airlines.
That was a huge shift in a few years, helping passengers
know whether you carry on, and if you have to pay extra,
do you have to check in. So we did use that technology.
But we didn’t just say, “Okay, what can we do?” It really
came from trying to figure out how to solve a problem.
Then we used the AR application in iOS to do this. So I
would say, we didn’t do it just for the sake of it. Also, if you
think about it, AR and VR are still pretty new and there
are some accessibility challenges in education. VR does
require additional hardware that not everyone has access
to. So I think you need to know your users and whether
it is something that they would have access to, whether
or not you should invest in VR.

AR is still a very new technology, and we

didn’t grow up with it, and we’re still trying
to learn how to use it. I do think that’s going
to really shift for the younger generation
ahead. It will become their go-to behavior.
You’re already seeing kids using Snapchat and Instagram,
and little kids using AR technology and the filters. It’s quite
fascinating. They get it. So I see that changing actually
quite a lot.
I see that too. I think Generation Alpha is rising up.

It’s amazing how we will have to change mindsets to
make things usable for them.
Yes, for sure.
While we are talking about mobile devices and social

media and Snapchat filters, I can see that there’s a
huge demand for device-dependent design. Would
you say so?
I would say definitely, and again you really have to know

what platforms your users are using and spending the
most time on. For us, we’re always looking for ways to
make travel planning easier on the platforms that they
spend the most time on. So when new platforms are
introduced, KAYAK tries to consistently be among the
early adapters. But again, you are looking at the use
cases and the need. So for us, in 2017, we were the first
company to introduce booking a hotel via voice, which

was pretty cool. Then in 2018 we enabled Siri shortcuts

for travelers so they could pull up their travel information
on their upcoming trip. And in September we were one
of the first to do dark mode.
But again, you have to see where it makes

sense to do it and ask yourself if it’s actually
going to be useful for your users embracing
new technology on the platform and following
the platform’s specific design patterns.
Exactly. Well, at the end of the day, you are designing

for the users. Always. No matter the trends. Is it new
technology, or old technology? Never mind that, right?
For sure. I feel like you really have to look at new platforms
and the new patterns. As designers working on technology,
it’s important for us to tailor the new user experience
while also communicating our brand values in a unified
way, without disrupting the platform-specific patterns that
users are getting more and more used to. Like you said,
Generation Alpha is going to be even more dependent
on that in the future.
While we’re talking about usability and patterns that

the users are taking and are getting used to while
we are designing, I’m sensing that we are becoming

more inclusive in this approach. So we talk about

accessibility or inclusive design more and more, and
I strongly believe and I really hope that this is going
to be a serious trend in 2020. Would you agree with
me on that?
I would take it even one step farther and say it will not
be treated as a trend or even an afterthought, but it
will be a requirement that will just need to be met. And
actually it’s going to be like a tool that helps designers
to design for people. So it’s not an afterthought, it’s
not just something you need, but it is a tool to help you
design from the beginning of the process rather than
investing in time in it later. Also, both accessible and
inclusive designs are critical to creating great products
for the greatest number of people and we do see more
and more brands embracing it, which is I think amazing.
I really hope that continues.
Yes, exactly. You said that you can kind of say some-
thing about your company culture with the design,
and it says a lot.
Yes, for sure. And not only your company culture – it’s
more than just laws and compliances Isn’t it just human
to make sure that our products can be more widely used?
I think that’s really key. Not just the business goal, but
do you want to reach a wider variety of audiences and
users. That’s it.

Me being in the design tool industry, I’m sensing that

we, the design tool providers, are trying to make it
more and more easy for the designers to design in
that way.
Even in browsers like Google Chrome, you

can easily see the contrast ratio now in code.
If you click in spec mode, and then all these
plugins that are both in Sketch and Figma,
like the stark plugin for example, more and more tooling
is available now to make it as seamless and part of the
process as possible. But I think also, as a company, you
need to really embrace inclusive design and shift your
paradigm and the way you approach new feature devel-
opment. It is an ongoing practice that draws from a full
range of human diversity and emotional qualities. So to
aid the shift, for example, we developed guidelines for
our product managers and designers, from our engineers
and quality assurance, making it a team responsibility.
Everyone is accountable for it, rather than at the end of
the process, for example, a QA catches it, or designers
are like, “Oh wait, we forgot this.”
Yeah, that wouldn’t be a good process.
I know there are companies that have teams dedicated

to just doing accessibility, but I believe there’s going to
be a shift. Everyone is going to be responsible for it, not
just a team dedicated to this specific role.

Yes, fingers crossed. Aleks, would you share with us a

trend for 2020 that you are really looking forward to,
or your plans for 2020?
My favorite trend for 2020, and I think a lot of designers are

already starting to talk about this, is less about anything
specific to design and more about the design process.
I’m super excited for the design process really opening
up to the rest of the team so designers are not the only
ones that own the design process or the final outcome.
With tools like Figma and even Abstract, you can see
the process throughout and I’m excited that more and
more teams are embracing it. You’re problem-solving
together rather than being isolated, with just designers
owning it and that’s it. I’m really seeing that as a huge
trend, and because of the new technology coming out,
it’s becoming easier and easier. It’s restructuring the way
that we are already working. Just thinking about when
I first joined KAYAK to how it is now, it’s so much more
collaborative. And as our team grew it was important to
keep people more aligned with what’s going on. So I’m
really excited for that trend of opening up the design
process and designers becoming more facilitators and
aligning in strategy rather than just pixel-perfect mocks
or small interactions. It’s becoming a different role, which
I think is amazing, actually.
Thank you for mentioning that. As far as I remember,

UXPin was one of the first design tools that actually
had the collaborative feature, and we are really going

to look more into that in 2020. So that’s a really good

insight from you.
There were Google Docs, Google Drive and early pro-

cesses that started pushing that collaboration in note
taking or decks, and now it’s opening up to other tools
embracing this. I think it’s amazing actually. I think you’re
getting better ideas. The quality of work is improving as
more people are embracing the feedback loop early in
the process. So I think it’s really cool to see this and I’m
excited to see what UXPin will come out with that drives
collaboration.
Collaborate in
real-time
UXPin gives you the power to build
products as a team. When working
together on a project, you’ll see who’s
on the same prototype with you.
183 YOUR – ALEKSPROCESS.

CH. 18 DESIGN SAFAROVASIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.
KIM
LENOX
ɔ Emerging trends in design jobs from
the leadership perspective
ɔ Hiring talented designers and setting

them up for success
ɔ How creative leadership roles mature

in innovative organizations like
Zendesk
ɔ Product design and brand design

being under one umbrella
19
ɔ Designing with data and based on
user experience research
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends by UXPin, today I’m

joined by Kim Lenox. Kim, could you please tell us a
Kim Lenox I lead a product design, user research, and content strategy
team as well as design systems at Zendesk. We have teams
in nine offices, in eight countries, on four continents – we
definitely have a globally-distributed team. I’ve been
here for two years. Before this, I was at LinkedIn and did
a little bit of design consulting at Adaptive Path and Lunar.
I worked at POM, so I’ve gone back and forth in-house
and consulting.
Because we’re talking about 2020 design trends, as a

leader could you tell me what emerging career trends
for designers are coming up in 2020?
What I’m seeing are a couple of different things. Design

operations has always been around, but I think they’re
finally wrangling what they are and what they do and
how they can support designers, and those are coming
up in different flavors.
You will see that even five years ago there wasn’t a design
operations conference, for example, and now there is
and we rely heavily on them to be the glue. I think that
that’s an emerging trend. To be in that practice you
could be coming from program management or project
management, but also designers are moving in to make
sure things run smoothly. That’s an important part of
185 CH. 19 – KIM LENOX

how you can actually enjoy what you do and also ship
the products that you want to ship. So I think that’s one
big trend – design operations.
When I began my career we didn’t have VPs of product

design, so a growing trend is seeing design executives.
It’s no longer just directors reporting into product or a
director of design reporting into engineering – there’s a
much bigger practice of design executives. The challenge
is that there aren’t many design MBA programs out
there that are executive level. How does an executive in
design have a conversation with the finance team and
the global team, who are figuring out where our offices
are placed, and things like that? It’s a new muscle for
design executives.
I report into the chief creative officer and Zendesk is

very much ahead of the curve in having a chief creative
officer and having a VP of product design. We also have
an executive creative director of brand. So I think it’s
very nascent right now, but I’m starting to see more
companies invest in product design and brand design
being under one umbrella. We’ve been doing it for a
while, from the very beginning. But what I’m seeing is
that when the customer and the customer experience is
wedded to the brand, then user experience also matters.
You have to get them working together. Instead of brand
being under marketing, and product design being under
product or engineering, we have one discipline. That’s
actually worked really well for Zendesk and I’m starting

to see more companies doing that, but not necessarily at

the scale that we’re at. There are a few bigger companies
that are doing it, but generally it doesn’t happen.
I think it’s going to happen more. That’s

another trend that’s coming up. From an
individual practice perspective, it depends
on the maturity of the business. Small
companies will have generalists that do product design,
user experience research, content strategy. They’ll do it
all. As the company matures, they will start breaking out
practices, and so when I arrived, I had a bunch of generalists
for product designers. Some were better at visual, some
were better at UX. Some were better at product strategy.
Nobody was really exceptional with content strategy, so
we hired in a practice of content strategy.
That’s another emerging trend. I think you’ll start seeing

a lot more entire content strategy practices within groups.
And user research has been around forever, but it’s always
been in another department, and a lot of companies
have user research attached to product design. But in
the case of Zendesk, we were talking to customers all
the time – product management, customer success,
sales, product design – but we didn’t have a standard
way of doing it. So I’ve also built out the user research
practice at Zendesk – that’s not trending new, that’s us
catching up, frankly. But that grouping of content strategy
and design systems and user research, we call that our
central design team. They work horizontally across all the

different practices. So I think that as companies mature,

they shift their designers from generalists to specialists. So
that’s where we are now. We have a number of different
specialists.
Because sometimes you get the whole design view and

experience with marketing materials, and then you go
into the product and it’s entirely different, right? So
you’re keeping things consistent with the design ops
and horizontal collaboration through whole creative
departments.
Yes, exactly. And being able to have our brand designers

and our product designers working together. We have a
big conference coming up in March called Relate and it’s
in Miami this year. For all of the demos that our brand
team is working on for this event, they’re working directly
with our product designers to make sure that they are
representing the products correctly. I think that’s really
important. The reasons I joined Zendesk were that they
had a chief creative officer, and that brand and product
worked closely together.
But one of my reasons was that when I was at POM, we

were acquired by HP. I was in charge of every single
piece of software on the HP touchpad, which was a failed
product. But at the time, we were going to launch and
I’m walking down Market Street in San Francisco, and I
see an ad on the bus shelter for my product with software
that my team didn’t design. Somebody in marketing at

HP thought it’d be a great idea to market this stuff, and

somebody else at HP thought that they could just hire
a design consulting firm to do the software, and I was
terrified. I photographed it and brought it to my CTO and
asked what was going on. It turns out that HP had hired
somebody to do a bunch of music software, which makes
sense. You want to have a music player on your tablet.
But it didn’t work. They never talked to us. They never

talked to the engineering team. They never talked to
the design team, and so ultimately, it failed. There was a
disconnect between POM and HP product and marketing
and product design. The product failed because they
weren’t talking. I mean, there were a lot of other reasons
that it failed, but from that very visceral moment on the
streets of San Francisco, seeing that bus shelter showing
this ad that I had no control over…from that moment on
I sought out teams that had brand and product design
working as one.
You said something about user experience being

more drawn into decision-making with design teams,
and that a few years ago business leaders thought
designers were for painting and choosing colors. But

now as designers get a more solid seat at the table,

I think designing with user data and user research is
getting more and more important, right?
Absolutely. Because we have the data now, we can access it.
It’s really important to be designing with

data and that’s something that my team
is continuously looking at.
Zendesk does customer support software, so for example

you send an email or maybe a tweet to a product that you
want to have a conversation with. Maybe you’re trying to
return something, maybe a delivery didn’t happen. We
provide that software for a lot of major brands. So when
you send that information, the agent needs to know who
you are, where you live, is the return happening or not,
where the product is, if it’s actually something that’s being
delivered, where is it in the delivery process.
They need that data, and then we need to design that data
in a way that is easy for them to digest. That’s one way
that we are designing with data – so that CRM is where
Zendesk is headed, to provide a content management
solution for all of our customers. The designer’s job is
representing the data in a meaningful way, and that’s
when it gets really interesting because you’ve got all
these data points, but how do you distill it down to the

right information at the right time for the right audience?

That’s the fun part.
Yes. As you said with the HP product, you have got to

know your end user really well to anticipate what they
need and what they want, right?
Yes, exactly.
From the leadership point of view, I think that’s a pretty

huge challenge, to maintain everything under one um-
brella, but also business-wise and management-wise.
It’s definitely a challenge. I was saying before we started

recording that my job is less designing products and more
designing the organization so that the product teams
are in a good position to build great products. I’ve got
these nine offices, so my job is figuring out where the
engineers are and our product partners are, and then
placing designers, researchers, content strategists, and
design systems folks so that we can actually do really
good work.
I also have to consider careers for each and every person

on my team. I want them to have a thoughtful career
here and set them up for success for the next thing. So
figuring out budgets, locations, levels of skills, product
vision, and what’s the right skill set that we need to get that
done – that’s what I do. I’m designing the organization.

That’s a huge challenge. Do you have specific skills

for the designer jobs at your company? What you are
looking for in a designer? Can you give us some advice
for people who are looking?
The best advice that I can offer for

getting into product design is being
adaptable, embracing ambiguity, and
that fuzzy front end of, “We’ve got this
problem that we need to solve for.”
And we’re not quite sure what that is. This came from a
previous manager of mine, but I hire for the how and
less for the what. The what is trainable in that you will be
an expert in some tool or some particular skill, and then
it will evolve. I was an expert at Flash. Totally irrelevant
now, right? What does not matter? I don’t put Flash on
my resume anymore. The what is constantly evolving.
The how, though, is the hardest part of the job. How you
show up, how you present yourself, how you tell stories,
how you persuade others to see your vision, not a chip on
your shoulder, angry at the universe because engineering
won’t listen to you, but helping them see what you see.
And then hiring for that, and grooming that.
The emotional intelligence piece is really important. I

personally try to hire for the how, and then train up on

the what, because the what is just going to change. When

I left using hands-on design tools, we were using Adobe
Creative Suite. All the other tools I haven’t touched at
all – I have viewer licenses. The what changes. I spend a
lot of time in Spreadsheets and Google Suite because
that’s where I’m at now.
Well, I think that’s the perfect conclusion for a talk

about trends, because some things are just in for a
minute and some things are evergreen. I sincerely hope
that all the design leaders are hiring like you, not for
the what, but for the how. Having said that, thank you
very much for your insights.

RAMSÉS
CABELLO
ɔ Titles and responsibilities in product
design and development
ɔ Curating the culture of customer

experience in organizations
ɔ Product design being closer to

the real life of the user
ɔ Accessibility-first product building
ɔ Intentional design: challenging

the complexity of apps
20
UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends with UXPin. Our guest

today is Ramsés Cabello. Ramsés, can you tell us a bit
about yourself, such as your work experience? What
is your field of design?
Ramsés Cabello I work at GAN Integrity in Copenhagen. My role in the

company is UI engineer, but I mostly work throughout
the whole design process. My main focus is prototyping
ideas and concepts so that we can interact with them and
validate them with the customers. So I’ve been working
in design industry for around seven or eight years now.
I’ve hardly ever heard of your role, UI engineer. Can

you tell us a little bit about it because I know you are
a designer or product designer, and engineering is
usually separate, right?
I feel this whole title thing is very

difficult. For some companies,
the same title might mean one
thing and for other companies it
means something else. I feel like
a UI engineer is mostly related to
working closely with the development team, and making
sure that the designs and the prototypes you create are
implemented as close to the design as possible. It’s kind
of interesting that you talk about this topic because I’ve
felt for a while that we’ve been struggling to find out what
my role and title are.
195 CH. 20 – RAMSÉS CABELLO

I think it changes a lot. Let’s talk about the 2020

trends right now. I’ve heard that some jobs are going
to disappear or evolve into something else. While we
are speaking about your title—which is really rare—
could you tell me your thoughts on the idea that UX
designer jobs will be disappearing and new jobs will
be emerging in 2020?
I think for a long time, as designers,

we have been wearing too many hats.
I do this role, but in the end I also kind of do everything

throughout the process. So I feel that as more specific
roles will be appearing, I also sense that they will be
sounding more like a “UX culture curator” in the company.
Somebody who is responsible for all those different people.
There’s something about “curation,” and I don’t like the
words “management” or “manager,” but I feel designers
have this responsibility to ensure that everybody in an
organization knows that UX is everyone’s responsibility.
This is a feeling of curating the UX community within the
organization. So I see the need for more roles like that.
So it’s not going to be just speaking about users or

talking about user experience, but actually going
through the whole process, from making it the smooth-
est you can get—like throughout the whole organiza-
tion—and making sure to collaborate each time.

I think there’s a big need for curation and helping every-

one in the organization understand that the UX designer
can shape the design of the experience as an interactive
point of view or service point of view. But at the end of the
day, how sales sell their product, or how every different
part of the company speaks about the product and how
the customer and organization interact, there must be
somebody curating these experiences. So I don’t know,
it sounds like a “design culture curator” or something
related to that kind of concept, you know?
Yes. There’s this whole new field of business called

customer experience. But now people in business
or marketing roles are expected to know a lot about
customer experience, because I think we are switch-
ing the focus from brand and product to real people,
and the more real the brand is the more authentic
the relationship with the customer or user is, right?
So I strongly believe that it’s in the design as well,
for example in photographs, real life beauty… it’s no
longer one type of model. But people are not pho-
toshopping pictures as much. Do you think that this
trend is like really holistic, like from the business side
to the customer side, to real life people?
I love photography and I love street photography and

for me, street photography is about capturing all these
daily interactions in a very lighthearted way. I think also
in this trend that you mentioned, of real life, how can
we apply that to products, for example, or UX. It kind of

reduces the intermediaries between the product and the

real people that are going to use it. For example, in the
field I work, I would say that the most important thing is
that people get to the data as soon as possible. So we try
to cut all these things in between—how can we reduce
that? How can we make the product more real and avoid
putting in filters? I think it’s about reducing complexity.
Photoshop, at the end of the day, is like selling an idea
that’s not real; it’s like retouching reality to fit a specific
mindset, but there are several mindsets. There are too
many. It must be diverse.
So I feel like if you put it out there and

you don’t sugarcoat it, if you don’t put
filters on it, then people can relate easily.
It doesn’t look like it’s out of their reach.
And speaking of more diverse, I think especially UI

design is shifting towards being more open to all kinds
of people. It’s not like, okay, this is the typical user
and we are only focused on them. From what I gather,
accessibility is a huge trend. It’s not supposed to be
a trend, but a must in our times. So I’m really hoping
that in 2020, it will be a must—what do you think?
For a very long time, I’ve had these ideas how trends, like
mobile first, all come and go. But there has never been

something like accessibility first. There has never been

this whole idea of putting accessibility in the first row of
this story. So I feel this year—and not only this year, but
forever and ever—we should just have accessibility on
top of everything. And I also get the feeling that when
we think about accessibility, we tend to think it’s kind of
like so out of our everyday, right? So we don’t tend to
relate very much to it as a designer, but I think industries
that have never thought that accessibility will be relevant
are now suffering the pains of not having thought about
that before.
For example, I am also very close to the video game

industry and many video games are struggling because
they did not think about problems with eyesight. Some
users with eyesight problems will be playing games where
the subtitles or the text or the UI is very complex. Last
year, I had to drop so many games because I could not
play due to the text being very small. I hope that means
more industries will wake up and see that accessibility is
not just a trend—we have to be accessible. But it’s also
more about opening your product or whatever you’re
building to as many people as possible.
I was going to say that speaking from a design tool

point of view, I think technology is making it so much
easier for designers to really be able to design real life
experience, or be accessible. Do you have an experi-
ence of how you would build this real life experience
in your work?

Yes. Again, we’re using UXPin and for me it’s the tool that
I use constantly, because it allows me to take accessibility
on the go. Over the past year there was implementation
of new features to check accessibility, like the tags, the
textbook, the size of the text and the color contrast, and
stuff like that. Because of all the small features that allow
us to build a very high-fidelity prototypes, whatever we
display to customers or colleagues is always as close to
reality as possible. I see people in my company clicking
around and, by mistake, they forget that this is not the
real thing. Sometimes you need to remind them that this
is just the prototype. Especially regarding accessibility,
I would like to see tools and implementing, in context,
accessibility tools. Very often for developers, you see
plugins or consoles where you can check the accessibility
of the site, but very rarely do we see design tools also
take this approach.
I think we have a few features to come in 2020. So

while we are speaking about your point of view and
your experience, what will be your favorite emerging
trend for 2020?
Maybe this is a little bit controversial, but I think during

this year we need to take a minimalist approach. What
do we actually need? And during this year, we’re going
to have to try to fix a lot of the mess we’ve created in the
last decade. We’ve been making too many apps, too
many products and just too many things or creating too
complex designs in general. This year I would really like

to see more designers and product people taking new

approaches. Do we actually need that thing?
I would love intentional design to be

a trend. Why are we designing this?
That’s a really good trend that I would like to see as

well, because I think the design is not a good design
unless it’s usable. But the more we dive into business
and money is taking part in it, the more we kind of
drift off of the how—how are they supposed to use it
and is it really necessary.
In my field, which is a compliance solution, it’s kind of

strict because it’s regulated by law. But enterprise software
has a very interesting take on design because until now,
it has been enough to have a long list of features. We
take the enterprise software, because we can do more or
you can do less. But at the end of the day, the consumer
products are getting better. They have good design, they
are being exposed to really, really good applications
or really good websites. So I don’t feel it’s enough for
enterprise software to have a ‘good list’ of features. That
is not enough. So I see enterprise software embracing
design more into their everyday.
So even customers will pick one product or the other,

even if some of the features are not available yet but the

design and the experience is nicer. They’d think, “I might

pick that one. Maybe I can do a little bit less, but this
one can do it and perform it better and easier.” That is
something to think about this year in enterprise software.
You can also see that thought process coming from a
long time with Atlassian or others—they are embracing
design a little bit more.
Fingers crossed that it is going to happen. You’ve

given us some amazing insights on 2020 trends, and
thank you very much for joining me today. I hope we
can engage in this discussion with our community.

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Create the real Keep your team Gather feedback

CH. 02 – BENJAMIN HERSH  15

CH. 03 – SCOTT RILEY  24

CH. 04 – PIOTR MAKAREWICZ  36

CH. 05 – ADAM FERCH  47

CH. 06 – BREE WALTER  58

CH. 08 – WOJTEK ALEKSANDER  80

CH. 10 – CHIARA ALIOTTA  99

CH. 13 – CHERYL COURIS  126

CH. 14 – CHHAVI SHRIVASTAVA  136

CH. 15 – LEE SEAN HUANG  146

CH. 16 – TORREY PODMAJERSKY  155

CH. 18 – ALEKS SAFAROVA  174

CH. 20 – RAMSÉS CABELLO  194

Interviews have been conducted

ɔ Minimalism versus maximalism in UX design

ɔ Business-oriented design: how design can

UXPin Welcome to 2020 Design Trends for UXPin. We’re here

Grace Brewer Hello, my name is Grace Brewer. I lead a small design

And then as far as usability testing we use some other tools

Because you work for the healthcare industry, I would

Yes, definitely. I think being in healthcare software we

7 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

on it, even for things that we might not have necessar-

I read something a couple of days that had me think-

Yes. I think it goes beyond a change in mindset. If you go

8 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

Do you think that 2020 is going to be the year that

Goodness, it’s so hard to say because every

More designers are advocating for accessibility, so

I don’t know. Once again, I think it’s kind of hard to say

For us, we are a little bit more on the side of minimalism.

9 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

doing our jobs well. We’re not trying to compete in a

So it’s not whether it sparks joy like Marie Kondo said,

Exactly. So my next question to you would be, I assumed

I don’t know. It’s always hard to compete with blue.

10 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

when Material Design happened, nobody expected that

There’s this whole psychology of colors,

Something that I find particularly

In recent years there’s been a lot of teaching business

11 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

But I do think it is becoming more prevalent because for

Because for so long we were really having to fight for just

Usually designers are considered artistic souls who

I completely agree. For so many years it was really easy

So you think design thinking is one of the ways to

12 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

I agree completely. So my last question is what are

I have a passion for the way businesses are run. So I think

13 CH. 01 – GRACE BREWER

understanding, and really making it known throughout

I’m also very excited to see what UXPin has to offer

Work faster with

14 YOUR DESIGN PROCESS. SIMPLIFIED. TRY FOR FREE.

CH. 02 – BENJAMIN HERSH 15

CH. 03 – SCOTT RILEY 24

CH. 04 – PIOTR MAKAREWICZ 36

CH. 05 – ADAM FERCH 47

CH. 06 – BREE WALTER 58

CH. 08 – WOJTEK ALEKSANDER 80

CH. 10 – CHIARA ALIOTTA 99

CH. 13 – CHERYL COURIS 126

CH. 14 – CHHAVI SHRIVASTAVA 136

CH. 15 – LEE SEAN HUANG 146

CH. 16 – TORREY PODMAJERSKY 155

CH. 18 – ALEKS SAFAROVA 174

CH. 20 – RAMSÉS CABELLO 194