The high-impact UX design areas of 2022-2030

What can we learn from recent years about big emerging UX design problems to solve in the near and the far future?

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

If you work in UX and like big questions, you probably asked yourself at some point the question of “what will be some high-impact areas for UX in the future?”. It’s a good question to ask, since after all, our field is relatively young, and we all want to use our UX skills in interesting projects.

After reflecting on the events of recent years (2020–2022), I came up with a collection of new interesting problems the UX community will likely tackle in the rest of the 2020s.

What things do they all have in common?

Mainly, these three things:

1. Focus on backend technology — These are all problems that have emerging solutions, but the focus of these solutions is still on improving the technology that powers them. UX designers will have to work hard to make these solutions usable by everyone.
2. Low market concentration — these problems occur in areas that have a relatively low market concentration and lots of emerging competitors, so UX can be a differentiating factor. Also, that’s why you won’t see VR and the Metaverse in this article. It’s hard to compete against the giants like Microsoft and Meta that are expected to lead in VR.
3. Government regulation — the solutions to these problems need regulation to increase consumer trust to use them. Only once trust increases, broader adoption will happen, and good UX can help communicate the legal boundaries and build this trust.

Now it’s your turn to explore

No matter what you do in UX, you are likely to have an opportunity to help improve the usability of these solutions. They all need good interactions, visuals, and content to be fully adopted, and the work can happen in consulting companies, governments, startups, or big corporates.

Feel free to skip to the areas of this article that are the most interesting for you based on your UX specialty, your interests, and where you work (or would like to work). If anything resonated with you in particular, leave a comment and say why. It helps the UX…