UX Professionals Expect AI to Be an Important Trend in Coming Years

October 18, 2019

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Customer Experience | Customer-Centric

More enterprise organizations are seeing the value in user experience (UX): about one-third (32%) of these organizations perceive UX’s value to be high this year, compared to 23% last year. This is in part due to 7 in 10 CEOs now believing that UX is a competitive differentiator, per a report [download page] from UserZoom.

The report is based on more than 200 experience professionals from global, enterprise-level companies with more than 1,000 employees. So what trends do these professionals believe will affect UX in the next 5 years?

Fully 80% feel that AI will be one of the most important trends that will affect UX in the coming years, followed by voice interfaces (64%), automation (47%), IoT (46%) and omnichannel experiences (46%).

A similar report from two years ago also cites these same trends having a future effect on the future of UX, although respondents seem more confident of AI’s contribution to UX now than back then. The same goes for voice interaction, which moved from being fourth on the list to second.

While enterprise experience professionals are looking at trends that will affect UX in the future, it’s clear that change is already happening. For about two-thirds of respondents the demand for UX research has increased slightly (31%) or significantly (34%) in the last 12 months. Even so, despite the increase of demand, one-third (32%) of budgets have remained the same, with the same percentage increasing slightly (19%) or significantly (13%).

Budgets are an issue, as half (49%) of the respondents say that securing resources or budget is one of the key challenges they are facing. Luckily, handling increased demand while working within a stagnant budget is not considered the biggest challenge. Instead, some 64% of respondents say that a key challenge they face is being included within the product development process. Other challenges include sourcing the right participants (50%) and getting executive buy-in about UX research (49%).

Moreover, for more than half (55%) of the UX professionals surveyed, gaining executive support/involvement is the most challenging phase in their team’s research process. The next most challenging stage for respondents is recruiting participants (43%) and identifying actionable insights (31%).

Here are a few more interesting findings from the survey:

  • Enterprise organizations conduct UX research relatively regularly, with about one-third (34%) saying they do so at least weekly.
  • Websites (66%) and mobile apps (58%) were the channels where UX research was used most in the past year.
  • More than one-third (35%) of UX professionals update their executive team with insights from UX research at least monthly, while another one-third (33%) do so as needed.

The full report can be downloaded here.

About the data: Findings are based on a survey of 222 global experience professionals from enterprise-level organizations representing a range of major industries.

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