What has been your journey to current position?

My journey to running MUXL has been an interesting one. Many years back I wanted to build a mobile first site and I noticed that not enough people were designing with a mobile first mentality. With this in mind, I decided to start Mobile UX London to help promote this important area of design. 

Initially through monthly events, we soon started an annual conference partnering with UCL, the annual Mobile UX London conference. This can be a tricky subject, with so many things to consider when creating and designing for different devices. We therefore thought our conference could help communicate these challenges and ideas. 

What are some of the major challenges facing the industry that your company overcomes?

The future for UX Design is very bright and has changed rapidly. Now that people are always designing for mobile in mind, our talks no longer need to discuss mobile exclusively. Instead our talks cover a range of important emerging mobile technologies such Voice, VR, AR, Bots and more. In most recent years, the importance of a UX design mentality has grown to become an essential role is every organisation. 

Hardware has become much smaller, much cheaper and much more efficient. This has then made software capable of a lot more. The UX Design world is here to stay and will only expand further as the years go on. 

Where do you see the future of the market heading?

Technology is changing which is changing the way we as humans behave and our expectations are changing with this. We now discuss virtual reality, voice controls, chatbots, kinetic cars -the list is endless. UX is becoming a part of the everyday. Look at Alexa- it is appearing in more and more peoples homes and a lot of families rely heavily on this. 

I believe in the next few years automation will take over. Product like Amazon Alexa, Google home are going to make changes. People are going to expect homes to respond to touch, voice and even by just being in the room. 

What do you feel are the biggest obstacles facing the industry?

I can, however, see some obstacles within the industry. There are so many new technologies being designed and I believe there isn’t enough consideration given to the user experience. People aren’t focusing on the user aspect of the design and this is a very important factor. For example they are only focusing on build but this alone isn’t enough.It needs to be user friendly. People are designing with not enough experience to consider these needs. 

How do you plan to overcome those obstacles?

Here, at Mobile UX, we will ensure that we are providing a high level of training to our clients so they are aware of how the world of UXD is changing. And we focus on how they can keep up to date with what they should know and they should be doing. 

Overcoming the challenges when it comes to design is an important factor more people need to consider. Figuring out what those challenges are will not only help people when it comes to designing but will also help them figure out how much development time they need. As Mobile UX London conference expands, so will our training courses so we are able to provide people with all the skills and knowledge they are going to need when it comes to UX Design and the future of UXD. 

At MUXL, we are a dedicated team looking to help push UX forward. We have been running our Annual Conference every November for the last 3 years and this year we will be holding our 4th. We run regular meet-ups throughout the year on various topics such as Accessibility and Service Design just to name a few. We also have our very own UX Academy where we put on three different training programmes (Foundation, Intermediate and Voice Design). 

You can meet the MUXL community and 250+ UX designers this November at Mobile UX London, on 21 November. The focus for 2018 is User-Centred Design and how new technologies are going to change the way we design for these new modes of interaction. Confirmed speakers include Adobe, BBC, Facebook, Google, Liquid Studio by Accenture Technologies, Orange and more! Find out more and book your ticket here