User Experience and Emerging Technologies in Southeast Asia 2019
An affinity mapping of sorts, of insights, themes, and trends from the UXSEA Summit 2018
The UXSEA Summit 2018 was a three-day event (a one-day workshop and a two-day conference) held in Singapore at Level 3, Mapletree Business City. The chosen venue at Pasir Panjang is an exciting startup and tech enclave and the location of the Asia Pacific headquarters of the tech giant, Google.
Under this backdrop, this second-installation (renamed from CoDe (Co-Design) Summit 2017, due to the confusion with the coding language) was of a larger scale than the year before. This year’s event was attended by over 300+ regional participants with a huge line-up of 28 local and international presenters. The theme for this year’s summit was ‘User Experience and Emerging Tech’. As this year’s final major UX event, the key themes identified below may reflect the UX scene in Southeast Asia in 2019.
#1 Designing for Emerging Tech
Dueling neural networks. Babel-Fish Earbuds. AI in the cloud. How might we design experiences for breakthrough technologies that we may not have heard about before?
In October 2018, Dyson, known for its sleek bladeless fans, announced that Singapore will be where it will build its new electric cars. While Singapore may provide the expertise to develop these cars, it potentially benefits the Southeast Asia region with new jobs creation. With the new vehicles on the road, how might we design experiences for a potentially innovative concept from Dyson?
One way to do so is through the Wizard of Oz Prototyping technique highlighted by several presenters at the UXSEA conference.
Wizard of Oz Prototyping (WOZ Prototyping)
Wizard of Oz prototyping is a design method used to simulate the conditions of the technology through role-playing and observations of how users interact with a prototype. The method is named after a scene from The Wizard of Oz movie, in which Toto the dog exposes the wizard as an ordinary man who is flipping switches and pulling levers behind the curtains.
Base on the method, a designer who is designing for a driverless car, may simulate the scenario with an existing car driven by a driver in a ‘seat costume’. Sensors and cameras may be used in the setup to capture users’ emotions, reactions, and behaviours in various test scenarios.
#2 Chatbots, Conversational UI, and Automated Conversations
From automated FAQ replies to the sophisticated AI conversations, or the hybrid machine-to-human operator — Chatbots are appearing on every organisation’s customer support page.
As companies step towards ‘digital transformation’, product teams within organisations were tasked to design more ‘smart’ chatbots. The trend will continue in 2019 as voice search and devices such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa becomes common and appears in more public spaces.
While it may seem like an exciting project on the surface, designing chatbots is a tiresome project to get the system to learn it right. To capture requests beyond a typical ‘happy flow’, a conversation tree may branch to more varied user questions.
Conversation Tree for Automated Conversations
A conversation tree is the same as a user flow where different questions and replies were planned out to cover different use cases. These questions and replies become a script and refined as the project progresses through testing. New scenarios are added over time to capture more unique questions. A fall-back question is included in the script as a default reply when the bot does not understand a user’s question.
Creating a personality and a Tone-of-Voice
A robot should look like a robot.
While chatbots should take on a human personality, such as being spontaneous, energetic and enthusiastic (an ESFP according to Myers-Briggs 16 personality types), they should look more like a robot.
Having a human personality helps to define how the chatbot reacts and replies a user. However, giving it a face of a human may confuse users about who they are speaking to. This observation is known as the ‘uncanny valley’.
The uncanny valley is a common unsettling feeling people experience when robots and audio/visual simulations closely match that of a human but are not convincingly realistic.
#3 FinTech, InsurTech, PropTech, & E-commerce
As the region’s financial hub, Singapore, which recently concluded the Singapore FinTech Festival 2018 (11–15 Nov), has developed an exciting FinTech scene. Many of the presenters at the UXSEA event comes from a financial and investment-related institution or startup, including from DBS, MoneySmart, and PropertyGuru. Various head of design/product from e-commerce unicorn startups including from Carousell and Bukalapak, and gold sponsor, Lazada, were also present at the event.
In 2018, DBS was named the World’s Best Digital Bank, and leading the FinTech scene in Singapore. The government is also actively pushing for digital payment through the common SG QR Code, combining multiple e-payment solutions into one.
Similarly, while Singapore may be known for its ‘shopping paradise’, the e-commerce space is bustling with various startups fighting for market share within the region. This includes Taobao, Lazada, Redmart, Shoppee, Zalora, Q0010, Carousell, and many other players.
With a booming FinTech and e-commerce scene, organisations will continue its intense competition for the best talent within the region in 2019.
#4 Design Leadership and Building Design Teams
Design leadership and building design and ops teams were two trending topics across the globe in 2018 and will likely continue in 2019.
As organisations develop greater UX maturity and a design-driven culture, design and research teams will continue to grow. With a larger design and research team, more designers will step up as design leaders and managers. New UX beginners will continue to enter the market to fill the role of junior designers. More designers will also specialise in a particular field rather than covering the end-to-end process from research, to visuals, to writing, to interactions, and even front-end coding. This leads me to my next point,
#5 Generalist Vs Specialists
When building a design team, who do we hire? Generalist or specialists?
When we promote a designer, who do we promote? Generalist or specialists?
Several of the presenters weigh in on how a designer should be a generalist or a specialist. On one hand, gaining the ‘T-shaped’ skills can help designers to better manage the entire process of a product development; on the other, specialists have a deeper knowledge and skills in their particular field to lead teams.
‘The most compelling designers are often T-shaped. Their deep mastery of a select design skill gets them noticed.’
— The T-shaped Sweet Spot For Designers, Nick Schaden
Interestingly, the UX community is made of people from varied backgrounds; from journalists to engineers, to architects, to designers etc. With such a diversified community, UX practitioners may learn new skills to stand out among the crowd.
Honing UX Skills
Experts on the UX panel suggests getting the fundamental techniques (such as conducting a user research or a usability test) right through repetition. Once the fundamentals are in place, explore other methodologies to vary how the research is conducted. Overall, having the right mindset and attitude is necessary to get the most of these techniques.
Developing Soft Skills
An area of skills to deepen are soft skills, such as having good communication, writing skills, critical thinking, and creativity. Soft skills can help to future-proof careers, as these are areas where machines are unlikely to tackle effectively. Soft skills are also transferrable across job roles, which help in the career in the long run.
Looking Forward to 2019
The three-day UXSEA summit was a great success for the UX community in the Southeast Asia region. Various topics, themes, and trends were discussed at length during the conference and the workshop.
More Industry Representation
Looking forward, I hope to see more industries being represented at the conference; for example, HealthTech and EduTech. This will encourage more companies and UX practitioners to adopt UX to transform how businesses and organisations are run.
Discussion on Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Ethics
It was a missed opportunity to discuss issues relating to diversity, inclusiveness, and ethics.
Emerging technologies have the power to empower and include more people. For instance, voice-enabled devices can allow the blind to access the internet while allowing a parent who is carrying a baby to place orders for groceries.
Black Mirror episodes such as ‘The Entire History of You’ and ‘Nosedive’ (close to a reality) explores the dark side of technology advancement and its impact on society. While innovation may promise a bright future, it is necessary for us, especially designers, to remain critical and in constant debate about what we design.
I am looking forward to the next iteration of UXSEA Summit in 2019.
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