Using Futures Thinking for a more impactful UX strategy
How to make your org more profitable, proactive, and passionate about the possibilities
User research is a powerful tool in any innovator’s toolkit. Done well, it can unearth new insights to help product and marketing teams create winning strategies that build loyalty and satisfaction. It can help engineering teams gain new empathy for users, and direct efforts to fix their most burning pain points, or create moments of delight. It can also help solve user problems upstream and remove strain from overloaded CS teams, opening up bandwidth to provide a higher-quality user experience across the board.
But the practice of UX research is evolving. While traditional user research is great at evaluating what’s already been done, it is terrible at helping us imagine what future opportunities or possibilities could be. Hindsight becomes 20/20, and foresight becomes blurry at best. The last few years have taught us (among other things) that rapid change and complexity are here to stay, and that for organisations to thrive, they need to be able to envision, validate, and test those possibilities more clearly, and earlier on. Enter: Futures thinking.
As a researcher, innovator or UX strategist, leveraging this mindset is a way to help your organisation see not only what has worked in the past, but what the future might look like, and how to best position yourself to be ready for it. More than that, it’s actually a (proven!) way to bring more profitability, proactivity, and passion for change into your organisation.
Below I’ll share some key reasons why orgs can benefit (read: profit) from incorporating Futures thinking into their UX strategy, and share some practical ways this mindset can be incorporated into your work.
Futures Thinking has serious ROI
If evaluative research is about understanding what worked and why, and generative research is about more deeply understanding the users’ context and needs in order to build for them, Futures thinking takes UX research a step further by considering both internal & external trends and factors that may impact the future of the user experience in a meaningful way.
Drawing from the field of Strategic Foresight, Futures thinking is a term that can be more loosely applied to describe a proactive vs. a reactive approach to change and innovation. I like this quote from Maree Conway’s Foresight-Infused Strategy:
“Thinking systematically about the future is not about trying to get it right through prediction, but rather ensuring you don’t get it wrong.”
There are four BIG reasons why Futures thinking is an important part of any organisation’s UX strategy toolkit:
- Organisations that practice Futures thinking are more profitable. According to research, ‘Companies that recognize that the future might change the very foundation of their business, that prepare for it and change their course of action accordingly, are 33% more profitable than companies on average. In addition, these vigilant companies have achieved a 200% higher growth rate than the average company’ (Rohrbeck and Kum, 2018).
- Orgs that practice Futures thinking are proactive about opportunities rather than reactionary to problems. Uncover insights that shape the future of your product, service or even industry, rather than playing catch up or being forced to respond to other internal / external changes.
- Orgs that practice Futures thinking make decisions from leading indicators, rather than just lagging ones. Evaluating or validating what’s already been done is like looking through the rearview mirror while driving; Futures thinking allows you to keep your eyes on the road ahead to determine what’s coming up and gives you time to consider how you might respond.
- Orgs that practice Futures thinking thrive in complexity & ambiguity. Complexity is here to stay; a Futures mindset can help us to consistently understand a shifting problem space, and be agile enough to build the right solutions. Even better, collaborating and building alignment in this area across stakeholders or teams builds our immunity to and capacity for change over time.
When it comes to UX, the more that researchers can be focused on unearthing not only human needs, but business needs and future trends, the more your insights will drive impact — they will be grounded not only in what the business is prioritising resources towards, but what will help them to best orient themselves to thrive in a range of possible futures.
Good news: we are all futurists!
At this point you might be thinking, “I care about improving our customers’ UX, but I’m not a sci-fi buff or fortune teller. What business do I have practising Futures thinking?”. The reality is that we are all futurists in our own lives. You’ve probably invested in stocks based on what trusted experts say will perform well, or booked a vacation months in advance to time it when the weather was best, or because of a fun event you were looking forward to. You’ve probably written down some 2023 goals, and in the process maybe revisited your 3, 5, or 10 year plan.
We all regularly imagine different ways our lives might play out (for good or for bad) — we run through scenarios in our head, and we make decisions today to get us to our ideal vision of that future. We all have the capacity to be Futures thinkers.
To apply this mindset to UX research, all it takes is a little bit of curiosity, optimism, and the right toolkit.
What a Futures Thinking lens looks like in UX
Rather than a single step in a process, you can think of Futures thinking as a lens through which to approach UX challenges — it’s a way to open up the conversation and breathe new life into the full cycle of a project through a cornucopia of methods and approaches.
For now, I won’t dive deep into methods (that will be in the next article, and feel free to comment down below with anything in particular you’d like to see).
To keep it simple, let’s look at a scenario — say we’re leveraging the double diamond process to run a qualitative research study with a product team. How might applying a Futures mindset manifest in the Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver phases? Take a look below:
1 / Discover (Understand the problem space)
Traditionally, you might ask: “What stakeholder assumptions exist about our user needs / challenges?” And the result might be: a clear understanding of product-level questions to answer.
Add Futures thinking, and you might now be asking: “What external UX trends and drivers are shaping our product landscape / industry? What is the product team’s vision for 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?” And the end result might be: A clearer understanding of trends affecting the evolving problem landscape, or closer alignment with the vision for the product team’s ideal future.
A range of Futures methods can be layered in throughout the Discover phase. For instance, you might conduct a trend scan to uncover signals of change in customer expectations or behaviour, or visioning workshops with product leads to understand how technical dependancies or business objectives might inform the short & long term roadmap.
Let’s look at Define, Develop & Deliver:
2 / Define (Ways to answer the question)
Traditionally, you might ask, “What type of users do we need to speak with? Should we use quant or qual methods, or both?” And the end result might be: a solid, mixed-methods research methodology to answer key questions defined.
Add Futures thinking, and now you might be asking something like, “What could we learn from co-designing new concepts with users? What futures themes or concepts is the product team planning that we can gather user reactions to now?”. And the end result might be something closer to: an inclusive methodology that is both current & futures-focused, setting yourself up to deliver insights for the short, medium & long term product prioritization.
3 / Develop (Insights through user research)
Traditionally, you might ask: “What are key user needs & pain points? What gaps exist in the current UX?” And the outcome might be: a clear understanding of the user experience & key gaps.
Add Futures thinking, and now you might be asking, “What can we learn from user reactions to concepts that don’t currently exist? What type of value does a user expect now, and in the future? What would a user hope to be true of their ideal solution?” And the outcome might be: A clearer understanding of which product opportunities make sense to pursue vs. not.
4 / Deliver (Key findings & recommendations)
Traditionally, you might answer the question, “What are users’ current behaviours, expectations, and pain points?” and the outcome might be that the product team now has clear answers to their questions about the user experience.
Add Futures thinking, and you might now be answering “What concept areas were users most excited about that aligns to our key business objectives? What emergent trends came out of the research that the product team should monitor or test in the future?” And the impact might be that you can provide strategic recommendations by short, medium & long term time horizons, or requirements for a proof of concept in order to inform an MVP or future testing.
While there are lots of ways to apply Futures thinking in UX strategy, you can see how layering in questions that take traditional research approaches a level deeper can yield outsized outcomes when it comes to providing actionable direction and strategic partnership to the teams you’re working with (in this case, Product).
Upcoming articles will dive deeper into the methods & building blocks of Futures & Foresight thinking, as well as share some more tactical examples of how my team and I have practically applied these methods to UX challenges with clients like The Weather Network, Spotify, Mozilla, and others.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts below on what resonated or didn’t from this article, as well as what you’d love to see next!
References:
- Conway, M. (2022, December 6). Foresight Resources. Foresight in the Present. Retrieved January 15, 2023, from https://www.foresightpresent.foresightfutures.net/foresight-resources/
- Design Council. (2022, June 8). Framework for Innovation: Design Council’s evolved double diamond. Design Council — Design for Planet. Retrieved January 15, 2023, from https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-work/skills-learning/tools-frameworks/framework-for-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond/
- Prosser, Z., & Basra, S. (2019, April 29). Futures thinking: A mind-set, not a method. Medium. Retrieved January 20, 2023, from https://medium.com/touchpoint/futures-thinking-a-mind-set-not-a-method-64c9b5f9da37
- Rohrbeck, R., & Kum, M. (2018). Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Retrieved January 15, 2023, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517302287
- Spool, J. M. (2020, February 26). What proactive UX Research looks like. Medium. Retrieved January 15, 2023, from https://medium.com/creating-a-ux-strategy-playbook/what-proactive-ux-research-looks-like-bd1c5772c569
