As an Interaction Designer, what even is my role anymore?
The future of the Interaction Designer role isn’t one to be fearful of, but is instead one that we need to grasp with both hands
The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a design tool is gaining momentum, and with it, more experimental tools and ideas for further automation. We’re seeing tasks that were once the bread and butter of an Interaction Designer, be shared across other design disciplines and beyond. A shift towards Outcome-Oriented Design paired with projects that focus on internal services, mean that our daily tasks are evolving as fast as the technology available does.
This blog post holds a collection of my thoughts from the last 12 months. Where do I think our present role sits within a multidisciplinary team, and how influential do I think modern tools will be to our evolving work streams?
A role that is maturing with the times
Our role is evolving quickly. Our peers may not have changed their expectations of us, but the tasks we’re assigned more frequently require a slightly altered way of thinking and working. This, with a growing need to adapt quickly to new, modern tools means that we’ve become very reactive to the changes around us.
Since the Service Standard was launched by the Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2014, our focus has been on creating consistency across hundreds of services. Standardising common patterns, re-using components and focussing on maintaining a level of consistency has led to experiences that feel seamless and just work. If we continue on in the same way, we run the risk of reinventing a pretty solid wheel. Whilst improvements can always be made through iteration, our time is much better used elsewhere.
Recent projects at dxw have presented more opportunities for improvement in back-end, behind the scenes internal work. For example, working with the Ministry of Justice to develop their digital services for prison and probation staff and help them better manage their intervention programmes nationwide.
Easy upskilling
Barriers against “specialist” tools like the GOV.UK Prototype kit are gradually being lowered, as more beginner friendly documentation is created and a knowledgeable community grows. Though a recent decision to no longer actively expand the Prototype kit suggests it may not be seen as a desired, specialist skill for an Interaction Designer much longer.
New tools like GOV.UK Forms aim to provide a way for civil servants – or anybody – to quickly spin up a simple digital form to be used in a production environment, with little to no technical expertise. Soon the days will be gone where basic HTML and CSS skill is needed to set up a radio button.
Together with a basic understanding of the GOV.UK Design System and its subsidiaries, these new tools and resources mean that most of the usual tasks an Interaction Designer would be called upon for, are no longer there, or no longer require us explicitly. Our colleagues in other design disciplines are becoming more inquisitive/explorative and open to learning the basics of GitHub, occasionally going so far as to opening Pull Requests (PRs) to add new components into production environments.
This has me thinking; what is it that I, as an Interaction Designer, can offer that differentiates me from my UCD colleagues?
Automating away design
Upskilling still requires a human and we’re at the dawn of a new age of automation. Tools like the above either automate mundane jobs, or make it easier for others to take on more interesting tasks.
Last year, Jakob Nielsen (co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group) wrote about the existing UI Paradigms, including “Command-Based Interaction Design”. This paradigm is essentially the foundation of all interactions that we design and build. A user issues a command and waits for the computer to action it – and sometimes, vice versa. At the point of each command, the user has the option to assess their action and the outcome, considering their next move to achieve the desired end result.
Designing interactions and journeys to be intuitive, user friendly and accessible in this way has been our focus for a while – possibly for even longer than 60 years as Nielsen suggests. However, slimming down the time taken to refine smaller interactions by embracing tools like AI, allows for even more time to consider the bigger picture (potentially, crossing over into service design).
For example, the dxw team have recently worked on projects that have opportunities to integrate with other systems, bringing in what is essentially an infinite amount of data into a service. We used existing components to display this data, and followed standardised design patterns to allow the user to interact with it. Automating this traditional fact-finding task meant that our time was better spent on problems that required more critical thinking, which a machine could never do.
What do we see our role becoming?
So the question is, should these tools make us feel threatened about our jobs? What even is our role? And what is it becoming?
Our role has changed a lot from years gone by and continues to do so. Good design patterns haven’t changed in the last 5 years, leaving much more work open for automation and folk without a design background to get stuck in. Our foundations are now so stable that the gains to be made from minor improvements are minimal.
We’re finding ourselves working on the bleeding edge of new problems more often. Recent project work at dxw has been focussed on internal services for in-house teams involving more complex interactions, rather than digitising basic forms for the wider public. We’re being asked to create patterns for interactions that don’t exist.
In the future, our role will have a stronger focus on unpicking legacy systems, or bringing multiple data points together. We will need to get our heads around APIs and Cloud Systems, whilst maintaining our empathetic approach to solve a whole problem for users. Our role is becoming one which is less focussed on the end user, and more on productivity and efficiency on a larger scale.
As our role evolves, we need to learn to accommodate change and be open to adapting the ways that we work to utilise new, modern tools. But we need to proceed with caution; we must retain the characteristics that make us good User Centred Designers; an empathetic approach, an open mind and a desire to learn.
We need to remember that automated tools and AI are not redactive. They cannot take a content first approach based on a basic prompt, and they cannot empathise with the end user in a way that comes naturally to us. We need to be the guard rails that embrace these tools, using them to design with, based on the constraints that we provide.
The future of the Interaction Designer role isn’t one to be fearful of, but is instead one that we need to grasp with both hands and shape into what our industry needs of us right now. Our expertise and specialist skills may change as the tools and contexts in which they are required change, but our fundamentals will always remain.