Last week I attended the annual Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference in Baltimore, Maryland. I’ve attended a few conferences over the last few years and have noticed a few trends coming through.
 
Firstly, usability is in hot demand. There is no doubt about it, this field is booming. Usability makes more sense than ever, thanks to the:  
•    Success of consumer products and services like the iPod and Netflix
•    Growth of self-service (and its ability to decrease the cost to serve each customer)
•    Improved ability to track the benefits of usability thanks to more pervasive, robust measurement systems
However, we still need to do a better job of selling ourselves. We need to be known for more than just usability - we must get involved right at the beginning of the design lifecycle. Understanding users is vitally important in product development and customer experience strategy, and we need to get better at understanding how organisations work, and the flow-on effects of what we do.
 
As a result of usability being a hot button, skilled usability practitioners are in high demand. In a June 4 report entitled User Experience Salaries Are on the Rise, Kerry Bodine from Forrester says "While demand for UX work is up, capacity is not. Universities continue to pump out new crops of practitioners from their design and human-computer interaction programs, but this influx still can’t keep up with the US’s surging appetite for UX work. This imbalance will continue to create enormous headaches for hiring managers: For the past several years, every agency exec we’ve talked to has reported that hiring and retention is a top priority."
 
You see this every year at UPA, as the job board gets quickly filled up with dozens and dozens of jobs. Jakob Nielsen thinks that we’ll need 500,000 usability professionals over the next 20 years, and that we currently have about 50,000. That’s a big gap.
 
We are also seeing a trend of usability practitioners becoming more and more specialised. Susan Dray commented in a UPA panel discussion entitled ‘The Future of User Experience: Niche or Not?’ that this is only natural. "Showing value means selling ourselves - so we must differentiate ourselves from other functions, people, and disciplines". In particular, I’ve seen three areas of specialisation:
 
1.    New technologies
Usability is moving beyond the web, and organisations are really starting to care about the cross-channel experience. At Optimal Usability we are seeing more and more of this as we look at things like the retail store experience, kiosks and automated phone systems.
 
2.    New geographical markets
We also see usability becoming a global concern. Big companies want to know how customers behave in different countries, so there are more and more multi-country studies. This is mirrored by the growth of usability companies all over the world (although, interestingly, Asia continues to be grossly underserved).
 
3.    Information architecture
If I had to pick one area to watch in web usability, it would be information architecture (IA). There is more and more content on websites, so it’s getting harder to find stuff. At Optimal Usability, we are banking on this trend continuing. We have a new IA tool that allows us to validate a site’s structure (that we’ve code named Tree Hugger), and over 60,000 people have completed card sorts with our tool, Optimal Sort.
 
 
I find conferences a great way to re-energise, re-focus and re-connect. It’s only by stepping out of the day-to-day that these industry trends become obvious. One thing is for sure, we are working in a very exciting industry at a very exciting time.
 
 
P.S. If you enjoyed this, you may find the State of the UX Community article an interesting read as well.