2024 in Review
Reflecting on UX Research in the Wild's Second Year
Summary: 2024's most read articles, and predictions for 2025.
As 2024 comes to a close, it’s clear that UX Research in the Wild has hit its stride. This year was all about digging deeper with multi-part series that offered step-by-step guidance on everything from mastering R for UX research to rethinking core industry concepts.
Looking ahead to 2025, I’m feeling optimistic (with a healthy dose of skepticism) about where the UX profession is headed. From AI's growing role in our work to the long-overdue return of qualitative methods, 2025 promises to be full of shifts, challenges, and no doubt a surprise or two. Here are some 2024 highlights and a glimpse of what might be coming next.
Article Groupings
2024 was the year of the article series for UX Research in the Wild. The most growth and success I saw in reader engagement was around these 3 series:
Series #1: R for UX Researchers
Here are the 12 tutorials that make up the "R for UX Researchers Series." I encourage you to start with tutorial one and go through the rest sequentially. Readers have told me they don't take long to get through and are pretty easy to follow.
Product Bundling and Recommendation Engines with Market Basket Analysis
Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning with Random Forest Modeling
Prioritizing Features with MaxDiff Analysis (Reader Requested)
Real-World Data Cleaning (Reader Requested)
Creating Reports with RMarkdown (Reader Requested)
Series #2: Reframing Common UX Research Ideas
Here are the 5 articles that make up the "Reframing Series." Each one takes a familiar concept in UX and flips it on its head, offering a fresh perspective you probably haven’t seen before. Readers have said these are thought-provoking, practical, and sometimes a little uncomfortable, but in a good way I hope.
Series #3: Survey Writing Best Practices
Here are the 2 articles that make up the "Survey Writing Best Practices" series. Each one is packed with practical advice to help you write better surveys that actually deliver useful insights. You'll learn how to test your questions before launch and master the four essential question types. These articles give you the tools to avoid common pitfalls and design smarter surveys.
Top 5 Articles of 2024
Even though the 3 series have been hits, a few articles really broke through and sparked the most engagement. Here are the standouts that prompted the most conversions from the UX research community.
Speaking Without Words: My Son's Tech-Enabled Voice - A personal story about the transformative power of assistive technology. I share how my nonverbal son's use of a speech-generating app changed our communication and improved his quality of life. I also explore how that experience reshaped my approach to UX research, highlighting the critical link between accessibility and usability.
Descriptive Statistics in UX Research - A how-to guide for running descriptive statistics in Excel and Google Sheets to better understand large datasets. People seemed to appreciate the real-world examples that illustrate key concepts and the included template for applying them in day-to-day UX research work.
4 UX Ideas That Do More Harm Than Good - A critical look at four popular UX design strategies. This article examines nudging, the aesthetic-usability effect, UI animations, and gamification, breaking down how these tactics can sometimes hurt the user experience more than they help.
Graduating From T-tests to ANOVA - A guide to using ANOVA for understanding complex user interactions. This article breaks down the importance of ANOVA analysis with real-world scenarios and wraps up with a step-by-step tutorial you can apply right away.
Fixing Rank Data in RStudio - A step-by-step guide for cleaning up forced ranking data using RStudio. Learn how to avoid misleading results from simple averages or weighted scores with clear instructions and practical examples you can apply in your own research.
2025 Predictions
It’s become a tradition for me to make ill-thought-out predictions each year. hahahaha. Here are my thoughts for 2025. I’m cautiously optimistic that the UX profession will fall into some exciting (and maybe weird) new norms. Here are a few predictions I’ve been thinking about lately:
AI will actually start pulling its weight in UX research - AI’s already everywhere, but 2025 is when UXers will finally stop side-eyeing it and start putting it to work. We’ll see AI tools that help speed up research processes and unlock new ways to analyze data. But, let’s be clear, "assist" is the keyword here. Full automation of UX research? Not happening.
The 10 usability heuristics will keep proving their worth - AR, VR, AI, it doesn’t matter. These principles continue to hold up. Expect to see them applied more often as we recognize that much of the success of new tech, like AI tools, happens in spite of their usability, not because of it.
Smaller tech companies will realize one great senior UXer beats five entry-level hires - The "stack 'em deep" approach to hiring junior UXers will continue to fade away. Companies that "get it" will opt for a single, experienced senior UXer who can deliver more impact, faster. Five entry-level UXers might look good on a team slide, but one solid senior UXer can change the direction of an entire company.
UX hiring will be survival of the fittest - The UX job market will stay tough, but the silver lining is that it’ll expose the charlatans. People who know their stuff will rise, while folks who’ve been skating by on buzzwords won’t make it through. Harsh? Maybe. But necessary.
Job market recovery will be slow, and salaries will stall (unless you’re senior-level) - Don’t expect the job market to bounce back to 2022 levels. Hiring will slowly improve, but salary growth will be sluggish for most roles. Senior-level folks at companies with strong UX maturity will see some pay bumps, but it’s not going to be "tech boom" money.
Everyone will be talking about AI prototyping tools (but they’ll mostly be bad) - AI-driven prototyping tools will flood the market. Some will claim to "design your whole app in 30 seconds!" Spoiler: They won’t. A genuinely useful prompt-based prototyping tool is probably still 5 years out, but that’s not going to stop the marketing hype machine from spinning.
Quantum computers will remain irrelevant to UX in 2025 - Despite the hype, UXers won’t be leveraging the power of quantum computing just yet. It’s still wayyyyyyyyy too soon for that I think.
AI won't replace UX experts for heuristic reviews - Heuristic reviews are too complex for AI to handle properly. These tools still miss the context, nuance, and understanding of how humans actually behave in the real world. AI might be able to flag obvious heuristic breaches, but it’s not replacing Baymard Institute-level analysis anytime soon.
UX experts will start building their own niche tools - Forget waiting on a third-party tool to "maybe" solve your problem. UXers will start creating their own lightweight, highly specific tools tailored to their team’s exact needs. These won’t be full-on products, more like "micro-tools" that make life easier for internal workflows.
Qualitative methods will (hopefully) make a comeback - We’ve been way too quant-heavy lately. It’s great for dashboards and stakeholders, but true innovation comes from behavioral insights. I’m hopeful that 2025 will mark a shift back to good, old-fashioned qual research.
What do you think of these predictions? Agree, disagree, or have a different take? Drop a comment below or send me a DM to keep the discussion going.
Conclusion
2024 was a year of growth, experimentation, and a few surprises for UX Research in the Wild. The introduction of article series like R for UX Researchers, Reframing UX Concepts, and Survey Writing Best Practices marked a shift toward more structured, in-depth content. These series not only boosted engagement but also gave readers a clear, step-by-step path for learning complex concepts. Meanwhile, standout articles like Speaking Without Words and 4 UX Ideas That Do More Harm Than Good demonstrated the power of storytelling and critical analysis to drive meaningful conversations in the UX community.
Thank you for following along this year! I’m looking forward to sharing more about the UX topics that have been popping up in my day-to-day work. Wishing you a happy holiday season and a user-centered, insightful 2025!