The Future of Global User Experience – UX from the Outside
In my last blog post, I presented a future scenario where organisations sourced all their UX products and service requirements from a digital supply chain. In this post, I present 3 scenarios of what that digital supply chain would mean to UX professionals.
Scenario 1
Elisa is a registered member of the non profit group ‘UX for a Better World’. The non profit group charges a membership fee and in return uses digital marketing campaigns to make its presence felt as an online UX store. All its members contribute UX ‘products’ that are then put up for sale by the store. They run various seasonal campaigns where the seasons are based on UX related developments such as the lean UX season, the UX for Big Data season, the UX for remote teams season, etc.
The ‘products’ are sold with or without additional customization support by its creator/s. 75% of the money earned from any sale is given to the creator and 25% is kept by the store.
Elisa was a highly respected UX professional who ran her small consulting operation. However, she found that she was spending more and more time on sales and marketing rather than the actual consulting work she loved. Just as she was contemplating joining the UX team of a large corporate or retraining to become a technical writer, she heard of a new trend …that of the digital UX supply chain. She researched this a bit and found that there was several supply hubs that were listed. She selected the supply hub called ‘UX for a Better World’ and began to familiarize herself with the options she had of earning money by supplying various UX products.
Elisa had never been happier! She created UX products based on what ‘customers’ seemed to want and just uploaded it on the store. The store took care of everything and she got her money!
Scenario 2
Exclusive UX had been in business as a global UX professionals’ collective for just about 2 years now. Riding on the wave of the multi employment (most UX professionals now preferred to hold multiple jobs with different employers spread around the world) and UX digital supply chain trends, this collective was formed to enable multi employed UX professionals be part of large global projects along with fellow multi employed UX professionals.
Exclusive UX used advanced technology for onboarding, remote collaboration and project management to make it an attractive proposition for UX professionals as well as clients.
This collective was indeed very exclusive, both in terms of the quality and expertise of the professionals who they took on as members of the collective as well as in terms of the scale and global reach of their clients and projects they worked on.
UX professionals with a high level of specialization loved to be able to participate in complex, global projects as and when they felt interested. They were also able to buy a host of interesting UX methods, insights, training and tools from the Exclusive UX hub that was only accessible to those who worked on Exclusive UX projects. These UX products helped Exclusive UX members upskill themselves, thereby allowing them to provide even more differentiated skills for future projects.
Organisations were now increasingly looking for partners like Exclusive UX who had the expertise to deliver large, global UX projects by sourcing local UX professionals, methods, tools and templates from every location that the project needed to target. In addition, they were very good at making sure that the ensemble cast and props worked seamlessly together to keep the overall project goals in mind.
Every large project was handled like an exclusive UX team being set up for just the duration of the project. Once the project was over, the team dispersed. The organisation benefited by not having to employ people with specialized skills (localization skills, for example) since that expertise was not always needed. Neither did they have to go to UX consulting companies that carried large overheads (and hence were exorbitantly expensive) for permanently employing UX professionals with the required specialized skills.
Exclusive UX was a real win win for all and had changed the entire consulting paradigm for ever!
Scenario 3
Global Cyborg Corporation Inc. was conducting its annual sale of UX products that they did not need any longer. With the pace of technology led changes accelerating all the time, their client requirements changed all the time too. This meant that the ‘nano lean’ UX method was really popular and so they were constantly having to clear their knowledge repository and archives of UX personas, scenarios, insights, design patterns, styleguides and tools that no longer needed to be confidential.
They had taken this ‘sale of UX products’ as a way to fulfill their corporate social responsibility. After all, inequality in the digital space was a real challenge with so many digital have nots who could not afford the latest patented UX products.
Hence, Global Cyborg Corporation’s annual sale was one of the most anticipated events in the global digital ecosystem. Individual UX professionals, small businesses that needed to improve their UX, non profits, students all waited with bated breath to see what UX products would be up for sale every year.
Hackers wrote advanced code to hack in and get hold of the most ‘wanted’ UX products before anyone could. And of course, there was a flourishing black market and resale space for Global Cyborg’s UX products!
Some things never change, do they!