Hyper! Hyper!! How to deal with trends, fads and constant change

1. How to deal with trends, fads and constant change in UX Design Rupert Platz | @r000pert | #uxce17 | Berlin Hyper! Hyper!!
2. 2000: Discomfort.
3. „ForgetHTML.WAPisthefuture!!“
4. 2007: Excitement.
5. „Everybodycantageverything!!“
6. Hypesandchange.
7. Hypes: There‘salwaysabigfussaboutsomenew bigthing.
8. Today: Artificial Intelligence! Chatbots! Anticipatory Design! Proto.io! Flat 2.0! Social VR! Machine Learning! Conversational Commerce! Augmented Reality! Design Sprints! Everybody is a designer!
9. Yesterday: Microinteractions! Beacons! Lean Startup! Kanban! Google Glass! Dual Track Agile! Jobs-to-be-done! Flat vs. Skeumorphic! IoT & Wearables! Sketch & InVision! Designers should code!
10. The day before yesterday: Parallax Effect! QR Codes! HTML5! SmartTV! Scrum! Design Thinking! Storytelling! NUI vs. GUI! Quantified Self! Gamification! Native vs. Web!
11. The day before the day before yesterday: Social Media! Web.TV! Podcasts! Wikis! Ecosystems! Social Tagging! Gamification! Perpetual Beta! Second Life! Mental Models! RSS Aggregation!
12. Realchange: Thingsdokeepshiftingallthetime.
13. Project Waterfall Build & Test Org Silos ? Product Agile Rapid Prototyping Digital Teams Process and organisation
14. Information Architect Concept developer Digital Art Director User Researcher Project Manager UX/UI Designer UX Strategist Product Manager Product Owner Data Scientist ? Roles and job titles
15. Websites Software Apps ? Multi-touchpoint journeys Design systems Design objects
16. Breadcrumb Nav Teaser Carousels Mega-Flyouts Hamburger Icon Skeumorphic Design ? NUI Microinteractions Cards / Material Bold typography Flat / Flat 2.0 UI Patterns
17. Personas Card Sorting Design Studio Journey Mapping Usability Lab Tests ? Biz Model Canvas Remote User Testing Value Prop Design Lean UX Experiments Jobs-to-be-done Design Sprints UX Methods
18. Omnigraffle Axure Fireworks † Photoshop Confluence / Jira Adobe Xd? Proto.io? UXPin? Origami? Pixate? Framer? Zeplin? Macaw? Principle? Atomic? Smaply? Mural? Asana? Sketch InVision Slack Trello Tools
19. Agency E-Commerce Startup Corporate Digital Unit Innovation Lab Employers ?
20. Thechallenge: Hotodealwithhypesandchange.
21. Whatwillreallybecomeimportant? What‘sjustbeinghypedup? WhatshouldIbepreparedfor? WhatcanIignore? WhenisitOKtojustwaitandsee?
22. HowlongwillIdotheworkIdotoday? HowwillIworktomorrow? WheredoIwanttogo?
23. (Andbytheway: WhatarealltheAdobeFlashdesigners doingtoday?)
24. Reactingtohypes.
25. Psycho test: What‘s hype reaction type are you? ExcitedUnsettled Sceptic
26. „Cool! I want to do that too!“ „I always want to be at the forefront of things.“ Excited:
27. Risk Lose focus Waste time / money Latest solution instead of best solution Dismiss established concepts too early Opportunity Healthy openness! Experiment & learn Get first mover advantage (Have fun!)
28. Blindexcitementleadsto HypeSolutionism.
29. (Rupert‘sLaw: GivesomeUXDesignersaproblemto ideatefreelyupon,andthey‘llalways comeupwithsometrendyhype solution.)
30. In love with shiny objects: „Then her Apple Watch will tell her she has a new task.“ „Some Artificial Intelligence will tell him which product he needs.“ „She then aks her voice assistant to change her status .“ „When he enters the store, he‘s greeted via a beacon.“
31. Unsettled „Do we need to do this too?“ „Are we lagging behind?“
32. Risk Fear of missing out Reactive thinking Blind actionism (Feel bad) Opportunity Healthy vigilance! Threats of change are real Always question your practice
33. PerceivedBackwardness: Uneasinessabouthypesandchange maymakeyoufeelmoreoutdatedthan youactuallyare.
34. Z.B: Agile, Sketch: Vieles ist heute noch gar nicht so Mainstream wie man denkt. „My name is Carl, and I‘m still doing website wireframes with Axure.“
35. Uneasinessabouthypesmayleadto aimlessactionism.
36. „We need the Next Big Thing. Quick, please.“
37. Sceptic „Nobody will need this.“ „It will disappear eventually.“ „We‘re doing this right.“
38. Risk Miss chances Get stuck in routine Become outdated (Boring!) Opportunity Healthy calmness! Realism Critical thinking
39. Rigidscepticismleads to misjudgements.
40. Being wrong about hypes is easy. 2006: AJAX? „Irrelevant programming tricks.“ 2007: The iPhone? „Haha, it doesn‘t even have a keyboard!“ 2007: Twitter? „Who needs this 140 characters crap??“
41. Ingredientsofahealthyattitudetowards change:
42. OpenVigilant Critical+ +
43. Enthusiasmforthenew...
44. ...combinedwiththeseven-stage HypeBullshitDetector.
45. 1.Knowhypefromactualchange.
46. Hype vs. Change = Talking vs. Doing. Attention in industry media Adaption in practice
47. The Gartner Hype Cycle Peak of Inflated Expectations Valley of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment Jackie Fenn: The Microsoft System Software Hype Cycle Strikes Again, 1995 Plateau of Productivity Time Attention
48. Example: The Hamburger Menu debate
49. The Adaption curve: Things dont change overnight Everett M. Rogers: Diffusion of innovations (1962) 10% early adoptors 40% early majority 40% late majority 10% laggards Time Adaption
50. „The future‘s already here, it‘s just not evenly distributed“. You are here. Responsive Web Chatbots?? InVision Prototyping? Design Sprints? Time Adaption
51. Some things aren‘t even as mainstream as we think.
52. Hypes make excited proclamations ... Attention „X is the new thing that will change the game!“
53. ... that may eventually lead to mainstream adaption. Adaption X slowly becomes a thing that actually changes the game. Attention „X is the new thing that changes the game!“
54. (Do we still need to discuss Responsive Design?)
55. Examples Mobile Web Social Media Responsive Design
56. Other hypes just die away. „Nope.“ „X is the new thing that changes the game!“
57. Examples Google Wave Second Life WebTV Portals
58. Mostly, hyped topics are here to stay but dont keep their promises. Zeit X becomes just another thing. Makes sense and works, but not for everyone and everything. „X is the new thing that changes the game!“
59. Zeit Examples Blogs Gamification QR Codes
60. Some hypes are like volcanoes: They quake from time to time – and might just erupt the next time. Hype 1 Hype 2 Hype 3
61. Example: Mobile Web 2000 WAP / imode 2005 Symbian 2008 iPhone/Flatrate
62. Social Virtual Reality? 1999 Cycosmos 2005 Second Life 2017 Facebook Spaces ...?
63. Augmented Reality? 2010 AR Apps 2013 Google Glass 2016/17 Pokemon Go, World Lenses, Hololens ...?
64. Virtual (voice) assistants? 2010 Website avatars 2011 Siri 2016 Chatbots? Voice Assistants? Since 80ies: Phone dialogue systems(IVR)
65. 2.Understandtherhetoricofhypes.
66. TheeternalSilverBulletpromise: „TheNextBigThingwillblowaway everythingelse.Itwillbethesolesolutionfor allproblemswehavetoday.“
67. HypeClickbait: Dramaticbinarystatements Lifeordeath. Winnerorloser. Neworobsolete.
68. If you‘re not mobile friendly, you‘re dead. „You‘re in danger.“
69. „What you know and do is dead.“
70. „What you know and do is broken / over.“
71. „What you know is dead, the New Thing is the boss now.“
72. „The New Thing is the new old thing.“
73. „All of you should do something more.“
74. 3.Knowmotivationsbehindhype proclamation.
75. Whofuelsthehypefire–andwhy?
76. Consulting companies: Push the hype to sell your knowledge advance
77. (Aspiring) thought leaders / influencers: Join the hype to be seen and grow a reputation.
78. Originators and subject domain experts: Sell books, conference talks, workshops, webinars, tools, ...
79. Big brands and their agencies: Do hot new experimental stuff and look innovative.
80. Stock corporations: News of digital innovations drives shareholder value
81. 4.Clarifyterms.
82. Buzzwords: Doeseverybodyunderstandandmeanthe samewhenusingthem? Neverbeashamedtoask!
83. ... Self-learning system? ... Minimalistic? ... Material Design? ... Design System? ... Microinteractions? ... Chatbot? What exactly do you mean by ...? ... Prototype? ... Lean? ... MVP? ... Anticipatory Design? ... Rapid User Testing? ... Innovation?
84. ... AI / Artificial Intelligence? ... Machine Learning? ... Deep Learning? ... Neuronal Networks? ... Anticipatory Design? What‘s the difference between those to you? ... Chatbots? ... Conversational Interfaces? ... Virtual Assistants? ... Voice Assistants? ... Agentive Systems?
85. 4.Askfornumbers.
86. How many Amazon Echos has Amazon sold in Germany yet? How many people actually download and use smartwatch apps? Who uses SIRI or „OK Google“ commands on their smartphone regularily? How many active users does Proto.io have by now? How many employers actually demand UX designers who can code? Cool stuff, but what I‘d be interested to know:
87. What do the numbers behind the numbers look like? „They already have a million users!“ „Usage numbers have doubled!“ „[Big Brand X] also does it!“ ... in China and South Korea. ... from 1% to 2%. ... with their 20 million $ innovation budget. „[X] is becoming increasingly popular“ ... I don‘t have numbers. Just a personal feeling.
88. 5.Don‘tforgetreality.
89. „Watchyoungmothers,notgeeks. Theydon‘thavetimeforanythingthat isn‘tuseful.“ Clay Shirky (?)
90. Example: Conversational Banking on WeChat (China)
91. Reality Check for German banking customers today: Does it solve a known problem in a new, better way? Do our customers have the problem? Does it fit their culture and media usage patterns? Yes: It‘s faster and more convenient than opening a banking app, logging in, etc. Yes: Checking balance and transferring money are top tasks for them Are they as keen as us to try & adapt new things? How about German data protection Angst? Do they chat? Is there sth. like WeChat in Germay? OK, Whatsapp is no 1 here – do they have a dev platform for bots?
92. OK,sothiswontbeakillersolutionfor Germanbankingcustomersfornow. Buttomorrow...?
93. 6.Knowyourmotivationand expectation.
94. Why try new routes? I want to create actual business & user value here and now. I want to try new things and become ready for the future. I want to be perceived as innovative by others. Caution: Will the new hot thing be the best solution for the biggest impact? That‘s a great side effect (and a buy-in strategy) – but shouldn‘t be an end in itself. Experimentation leads to failure, learning and higher flexibility! Your investment will bear fruit some day.
95. 7.Rememberwhatalwayscountsinthe end.
96. Despitehypes,thingsareconstantly changing. Isthereanythingconstanttosticktoas designer?
97. Wedesignforpeopleandtheirneeds. Peopledon‘tchangeasfastastechnology anddesigntrends.
98. Weuseaprocessthathelpsusunderstand aproblembeforesolvingit.
99. Wehavetwobrainhalvesandwe‘reable tousethemboth. CREATIVITY IMAGINATION HOLISTIC THINKING FEELING INTUITION LOGIC ANALYSIS FACTS LINEAR LANGUAGE
100. Weourselvesarealsoactorsofchange.By design,weinfluencetheexperienceand valueofnewthings.
101. Changeisnotachallengetoourjob,but oneofitsconstantcharacteristics. Resilienceisacorecompetence.
102. resilience: „The capacity of a person system to maintain its core purpose in the face of changed circumstances.“
103. „Resilience is an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility. It means to stay on your path while expanding the range of alternatives that you can embrace if you need to.“
104. Danke! @r000pert xing.com/profile/rupert_platz linkedin.com/in/rupertplatz

Editor's Notes

In the year 2000, I went to CeBit, the worlds largest Computer expo, to find myself my first real job after college.
It was the middle of the dotcom bubble back then, ad I met a lot of startup people who were all excited about the future and how they were about to make it real big. And they were all crazy about WAP.

Two of them told me: „So you know HTML? Hey, HTML is dead! Tomorrow, we‘ll all go online on our mobile phones with WAP!“
(WAP was a new technical standard to surf the web on a mobile device)
That guy really made me anxious. „Oh shucks. So all my HTML skills are obsolete? I gotta learn this new WAP thing really fast!“
And I bought WAP books and went to WAP meetups and so on.
Turned out later WAP was a complete failure – it was ugly, slow and expensive, and it was only 8 years later that the mobile web really took off. And all the craze about WAP had unsettled me for nothing.

In 2007, I worked for an agency, and we had this large corporation client that needed a Intranet Main Portal for their about 200 internal applications. A that time, everyone was going crazy about Web2.0, and one of its aspects that I was super exited about as an information archictect was Social Tagging.

So I did a huge presentation where I told them that their portal didn‘t need any predefined navigation structure or sitemap.
Instead, all the employees should simply tag all the information they found across the intranet and these tags would be aggregated automatically in the Main Portal. That was the way that trendy Web2.0 services like Flickr or Delicious worked, and it was just so cool.

But it turned out soon that the concept would never work within that organisation. They had this extremely hierarchical top-down culture where people didn‘t think independently and just did what they were told. Bottom-up tagging of information was something nobody would have done.
I could have seen it, but I was too much in love with that trendy hype concept of Social Tagging, I just WANTED it to be the right solution for the problem.

Then there‘s hypes.
Hypes are things that everybody agrees to be all excited about for a certain time.

You remember Scooter? One of Germanys worst cultural export products since Modern Talking and the Scorpions.
They had this hit single back then called „Hyper Hyper“
and when I try to catch up on Twitter, Linkedin, Blogs and so on, it sometimes feels like listening to a Scooter Track:

There‘s always some monotone, nervous beat pounding in the background, and somone‘s always yelling some incoherent stuff at you in a horrible german accent.
Today it‘s ...

Gestern wars genauso, da waren die Buzzwords bloß andere

Now it‘s easy to make fun of hypes and be all sceptical,
but on the other hand, there‘s real, actual change.

The challenge for you and me as designers ...

If you‘re the easily excited type, you‘re probably subscribed to 12 different prototyping tools and have never used the same UX method twice, and you alredy own a Google Home device before it‘s officially sold in Europe.

Now this attitude has ist downsides. The overly excited type tends to ...
But being excited also has a healthy side. Being excited means being open towards the future.

Du bist aber vielleicht auch eher der nervöse Typ, den das alles eher beunruhigt und schlechtes Gewissen macht.

The unsettled type feels bad for not keeping up.
He feels that hypes and change is some force of nature that comes over him.

Upside of feeling discomfort is vigilance.
Its good not to feel too much at ease.

You‘re not necessarily a bad designer if you do wireframes – it depends on your project context.
You‘re not necessarily a bad designer if you work with a tool that‘s not considered hot. It depends on what you want to achieve with it.
And you‘re definitely not a bad designer if you do websites.

Decision makers get anxious when they read about the latest innovations from the States and China.
They feel they need to catch up as soon as possible somehow and dont think about what kind of problem they might want to solve with it.

Der skeptische Typ bleibt cool, hat er alles schon gesehen.

Exaggerated Scepticism

Now all of us designers are mostly enthusiasic types and love to run after hypes, so I‘m focussing on the shades now. So theres a sceptical bias in what I‘m saying, but I must admit that after 15 years in the industry, you do tend to develop a „seen it all“ attitude.

Basically, Hypes are people talking about things and change is people doing things.

I guess most of you also know this model:
At first, everybody is all excited about the new thing
Then the exaggereted expectations aren‘t met and it becomes trendy to dismiss and critizise it.
Eventually, a differentiated view of the topic becomes possible and the debate evens out on a normal level.

Here‘s how the Hamburger Menu hype debate went:
First it‘s hamburgers are super cool
Then its Hamburgers are all evil
Then its „it depends“

The Rogers Innovation Adaption Curve:
You know the deal: When something new comes up, only a minority of trend-savvy people will embrace it first
And it takes TIME before a trend becomes mainstream - if it ever does is the first place.

Quote: William Gibson

Reality is not binary. Theres a permanently evolving coexistence of old and new. While some freaks are busy buiding some cool next level shit today, some laggards are starting to get their website responsive. It all happens simultaneously.

Cap Gemini survey among german CIOs: Only 23% say they use agile software development methods
How sure are we that Sketch is actually the market leader tool for UI designers?

Now heres the combination of both curves:

Zuerst machen es wenige, und viele reden drüber.
Dann ist es umgekehrt. Dinge werden selbstverständlich und nur noch detailliert und weiterentwickelt.

Wer redet heute noch von ... :

Wird nicht so heiß gegessen wies gekocht wird

Long term perspective

Es war von Anfang an klar, dass mobiles Internet ein Riesen Thema wird, aber es hat ewig gedauert

Ausbrecher: Aug 2010, Dez 2011 = AR Apps // Google Glass 2013/14 nicht als Begriff verwendet drin // Juli 2016 – Pokemon Go

Es sind immer ähnliche rhetorische Aussagemuster:

Especially designers: Lot of hypes around what we should do & what our skills should be

Consultanting business model is to sell their knowledge advance of what‘s next and what their client doesnt know or cannot do yet.
And to sell the next thing, it better look really huge, dramatic and impactful.
So puching the hype is their form of marketing

Everybody wants to join the party of cool people talking about the new thing. On Twitter, Linkedin, Medium, on Conferences, Meetups
I guess by now there must be more Articles about Chatbots on Medium than there‘s Chatbots out there.

The goal of every aspiring thought leader is to be able to make money from their expertise instead from doing project or product work.
So if you‘ve managed to make yourself a name in the industry, you have something to sell.
If what you got is is hot, you better not sell it cheaply.
Joining a two day workshop with Jake Knapp, co-author of the design sprint book, in Berlin this monday, costs about 2500 EUR
Same goes for a Business Model Canvas Workshop with Alex Osterwalder.

Brands with a lot of money can invest into new sexy things that will ony reach a very small number of early adopters, but will make the brand seem ahead of their time to all the others.
Such innovation projects often have much more impact on brand perception than on actuall business KPIs.
But everybody goes „Loo, whoah shit, Coca Cola or Starbucks or Nike are doing it, it‘s becoming mainstream, we must do it too“

Same goes for stock corporations. Getting abourd the hype train can drive up your company‘s share pices and satisfy investors.
If a big listed corporation like Comdirect annonces to launch an Alexa skill, Financial Journalists will be happy to pick up the topic and Analists may give investment recommendations for your company because your‘e doing something innovative.

So many people are just using these terms without really knowing what the mean, and if they do, somebody else may mean something different.

Oftentimes, Buzzwords are used as new terms for familiar concepts just to sound cool and up to date, like saying „Anticipatory Design“ when you only mean plain good old profile-based personalisation.

So many buzzwords are strongly related and have overlaps, and theres a high risk of misunderstanding and confusion.

Amazon Echo is avaliable in Germany since Oktober 26

Conversational Banking

If you understand human needs, human psychology, hman behavior, if you have have empathy for people other than you and your filter bubble, you have an essential quality that will be required way beyong the point when User interfaces may eventually become irrelevant.

Exploring a problem from the customer perspective before exploring the solution will always be a good thing to do, ans ist still suprinsing how rarely its done unless a designer comes in, because it seems such an obvious thing to do.

Nobodys going to take those two slimey nuts from you

QBE 1999
Plus: We are not only subjects to change.

And change itself is a constant – so love it or leave it.

I stumbled upon a quote from a book called resilience – resilience is a term that perfectly sums up what I‘m talking about here and what I am constantly striving for myself.

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Hyper! Hyper!! How to deal with trends, fads and constant change

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