Welcome back to Key Lime’s Influential Voices in UX! This series highlights the individuals shaping the future of user experience.
In this edition, we’re featuring Clara Kuo, a UX leader with more than a decade of experience in mixed-methods research. Clara’s passion for fostering curiosity and belonging within teams, combined with her expertise in quantitative survey design, remote usability testing, and generative research, has made a lasting impact on some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Apple, T-Mobile, and UPS.
In this Q&A, Clara shares her perspective on the evolving role of UX, the biggest challenges facing teams today, and why a human-centered approach is more critical than ever. Her insights are unedited, offering a raw and authentic look into the mind of a true UX visionary.
📣 Q&A with Clara Kuo
What is one emerging trend in UX you’re most excited about right now, and why does it matter?
The future of UX is human. While many people are trying to find solutions for using AI, I’m a big believer that insights (quant & qual) to solve human needs is core to what we do. AI can generate your reports for you, but it’s not going to be able to understand your stakeholder’s quirks or the decisions that they’re going to make. It’s possible that we are still using AI in a smart way across UX research processes (and it is being done right now), but that doesn’t replace all of the other parts of what it takes to be an emotionally intelligent and empathetic researcher.
Ideally, we come to a time and place in the world where AI is not so much a trend, but rather, there’s value in the human intelligence that we bring to product and design development.
What is the biggest challenge or pain point you see UX teams facing today?
We are in an interesting time right now, where the team and the organization’s collective UX skills and attitudes and how they may profit the business is considered more valuable than perhaps improving the overall usability of an outdated product using a UX design process.
For example, stakeholders used to gravitate towards the traditional design thinking framework, with key processes, such as brainstorming, prototyping or interviewing customers. But that is changing rapidly and simply offering a generic framework is no longer sufficient to solve an org’s problems.
In addition, those skills that were attributed to UX are no longer exclusive to the UX community. There’s also a debate going on right now about whether it is important to be rigid with UX research methods to ensure better results or more important to influence decision making. I tend to think that the answer is somewhere in between.
It’s no longer enough to simply teach cross-disciplinary teams the value of brainstorming or prototyping. If we did only that, we would not be differentiated from other roles in marketing, operations or product, where they are becoming savvier at using those skills, but they don’t call it UX. That fluidity of functional roles is a different kind of challenge.
How do you see UX evolving over the next few years, and what advice would you give teams to stay ahead?
Businesses exist to solve problems and deliver value to customers. In the early days of the internet, the problem was fairly clear for the UX discipline.
More than ever, it’s about how we can directly speak to our stakeholders and their direct pain points, whether that’s helping them to create the right marketing content or to drive success of a new product launch. I think we’re certainly at an interesting crossroads of how we improve on the traditional ideas of how UX research methods should work. The hope is that we can make UX work something that is predictable to stakeholders and where our business value as a profession is increased.
We are at a crossroads where there will be more conversations about how might we offer human-centered research, while still addressing the needs of the business.
The ethics, trust, and privacy of the solution is an untapped area, which I would hope will address the needs of the next generation (Gen A).
Nominate Your Next UX Visionary
Who do you believe is shaping the future of UX? We’re eager to hear from you! Nominate individuals whose perspectives you’d love to see featured in an upcoming post. Please send your nominations, along with a brief explanation of why you think they’d be a great fit, to marketing@keylimeinteractive.com. We look forward to your suggestions!