Don’t think about your UX career in 2023 as a career in research or design or digital, and certainly don’t think of it in terms of your favourite tools.
As a career there is little that compares to UX: a job who’s purpose empowers the UXer to make the world a better place. You are limited only by how hard you're willing to learn and work. But it's not easy and it's not for everyone. You have to be able to really DO UX for this to work.
And that's because problems are not 2 dimensional, they are not singular - they are 3 dimensional holistic integrated physical and digital challenges that require research, learning, hypothesis, prototyping and testing. They require you to think about every touch point, physical and digital, every element of the environment, user, technology, business and process. Some of these might be well outside your comfort zone at the moment.
But, no one EVER solved a problem by thinking and working 2 dimensionally, by thinking in terms of limits and boundaries, tools and design - problems don’t work that way. Pigs and lipstick do.
Research alone, design alone, digital alone will NEVER solve them. So if you don't fill that tool box and broaden your knowledge you will be frustrated by the actions of others and feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled as a problem solver. Others will force you to fail and that is incredibly demotivating and depressing. Not to mention unnecessary.
There’s a reason that UX takes a long time to truly learn and be senior at. Anyone can do it, but it takes time and effort, patience and learning well outside your comfort zone - the scope of a problem is often outside of your initial comfort zone, but it’s totally worth every minute and ounce of effort in learning and solving.
Be holistic, think holistically - learn and work holistically.
I don’t mean abdicate your role or democratise your responsibilities - that’s BS for apathetic wanna-be-not-wanna-do UXers, and I also don't mean "do everyone else's job".
I mean:
Refuse to recognise arbitrary boundaries of superficial limitations placed on you by others this year
Learn and do what ever it takes to solve problems this year. “Ask for forgiveness, not permission” as I always tell my teams
Grow to meet the challenge of being a true UX problem solver and deliverer of UX, business, user and social value - where ever that takes you this year.
Learn from and work with the best seniors in each discipline (development, account managers, systems architects etc) - these are the people we need to collaborate with. Collaboration is about making the best outcomes, not about being besties and trying not to hurt their feelings - practice honest, professional, responsible, mutually respectful collaboration this year.
If your research is poor, improve it this year.
If your functional architecture is poor, improve your prototyping and usability testing this year (with a tool that actually allows you to create a working prototype - Axure).
If your understanding of business processes and drivers is poor, improve your business knowledge and Service Design this year.
If your understanding of how to deliver your UX outputs to development teams is poor, study Agile, user stories and basic coding principles this year.
If your understanding of data is poor, study information architecture, database architecture and data formats this year.
If your understanding of technology, communication protocols and networks is poor, study basic systems and network architecture principles, TCP/IP this year.
Understand how all these things work, not just on their own but when they integrate, because that’s exactly how they work in the real world and that’s what you’ll need to understand, holistically, to be a great problem solver, a great value adder and a great UXer.
You’ll have enough to learn from every new project, sector, industry and physical environment, so give yourself the edge (and the ability to truly solve real problems) by having a holistic skill set that’s up to any challenge.
You’ll be the most valuable asset a company has and you’ll feel fulfilled by your job (and frustrated by the apathy of others - sorry) every day.
Even if you don’t always feel appreciated, your value will be appreciable and good businesses will notice. Bad businesses won't notice and that's a good sign to consider a new strategy or move to a company that does.
Alternatively
Sadly the alternative is to just ask a few questions, colour some shit in and go home unfulfilled and frustrated every day until cognitive dissonance and Stockholm syndrome kick in and you start posting on LinkedIn about how great Figma is, asking the unwashed masses to judge between two equally vacuous visual designs and passively aggressively tell the UX community that anyone who claims to do all of UX together is a ‘generalist’, but anyone who does UX and UI (two totally different jobs) together is cool - let’s not aim for that this year ;)
So...
Make holistic UX education and improvement your New Years resolution. Remember that it takes time to learn and get the experience to be better (that never stops, not even for seniors). Be patient and studious. Seniors are not 'gate-keeping' people because they insist on knowledge and experience, they are being responsible and truly helping those who will go on to become the next generation of great UX leaders. We all want that.
And who knows, by next New Year we’ll have a lot more incredible, world changing, well paid problem solving UXers making industry, society and the world a better place. Maybe we'll even solve Covid, Russia and the economy ;)
Happy New Year to U(X) all - see what I did there…?
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