Taking back control of UX and research: An interview with Shift UX curator Jemma Ahmed

Jemma Ahmed has been working for two decades in the space where consumer, design, product, marketing and cultural insight meet. A mixed methods insight practitioner, her work focuses on how technology can empower minority Global communities. With expertise in data science, market research and user research, she has delivered projects at scale which have had significant business and societal impact.

We sat down with her to ask why she believes this conference is essential for all UXers—regardless of whether they have “UX” in their titles.

Why is Shift UX needed right now?

I could tell you everything that every other conference is talking about right now.

I could tell you that you need to think about the skills that are needed as we march forward in an AI-mediated environment.

I could talk to you about the importance of coming together when the social contract of work is changing. I could talk to you about the importance of community and agency.

That would all be true. And I hope that anyone who attends the conference will walk away with those things.

But for me, Shift UX is so important right now because it is a space that will cut through the noise with honesty.

In a world where everyone is an AI or LinkedIn influencer and everyone and their mother with a blue tick is offering a perspective, there is just so much noise and clutter and—often AI generated—opinion going on out there. And that doesn’t help anyone.

A curated conference like Shift UX is trusted because everyone who steps on that stage has researched their topic and is a deep expert in what they are talking about and has worked with other people with deep expertise.

What you’re hearing from the speakers is about as accurate a signal as any of us can give right now. And in a world that is just so cluttered and noisy, making decisions off information that you can trust really matters right now.

Is UX dead?

Absolutely categorically not.

UX, when you kind of slip it all back, is about figuring out what a human need is and building something which helps that human and reduces harm to them. That skill has been going on since the days when we were trying to figure out like why a wheel is round and not square. That is a perennial skill and it’s not going anywhere. The shape of it might shift, the job title might shift, the spaces it’s practiced in might shift, but that fundamental isn’t dead and it isn’t going anywhere.

If we need UX more than ever, why is it so freaking hard to get a job right now?

I am job hunting and I have got all the feels for this question. From my vantage point and the people that I’ve spoken to and the people that I conducted research with going into Shift UX is that…Yeah, in some spaces there is a downturn of traditional UX jobs.

But that doesn’t mean that they are going away.

Some of them require different skills. A lot of them are going under different job titles, like in research. You might not be being called user researchers anymore. You might be called strategists. Your work might be sitting in policy teams, but the work is still going on, perhaps in different places with different titles and different spaces than it has been before.

What are you most excited about from the Research As Strategy track at Shift UX?

We are actually completely decoupling research as a profession and research as a skill. If anything, I’m going to ban the word research because we’re not living through that anymore.

Organisations are functioning as a knowledge economy. From very, very rigorous research being conducted by specialised teams, all the way through to lived experience, AI generated lit reviews, and everything in between, we have got more insight or sometimes insight-shaped things than ever. But how you function in a knowledge economy is very, very different. And I’m excited to get into this.

I’m excited to help people understand how you collate that volume of information and signal and yet stop people becoming data blind. Identify those hinge questions.

I’m curious about helping people understand the different spaces and places and consequences of working in a knowledge economy means for a researcher and their role, and how people who are doing research contribute back up to that knowledge economy.

I’m ready to dig into what it actually means to help an organisation metabolise the knowledge that is collecting. That is not having a seat at the table, my friends. That is using relational power when you might not have those institutional power markers anymore to make your voice heard.

I’m also really curious to dive into what the skills are that are needed to actually help organizations consume and ingest knowledge well. Often those conversations can be hard-hitting and difficult. That’s often the role of knowledge: to add friction and to have difficult conversations. That’s predicated on psychological safety on non-suppression of voices and we are going to be understanding how to have those conversations.

Regardless of whether you’re a researcher or a person who does research… these matter. I don’t care whether you are a user researcher, a market researcher, a data analyst, whether you are working in-house as a consultant or a contractor or you are an agency.

This space, regardless of whether you have got UX in your title or not, is for you.

If you work in spaces where you are creating and designing for humans, this conference is for you. I hope it will help you learn some of the fundamental shifts in skills that we’re seeing: how you metabolize knowledge, how you stop seeing operations as admin and start seeing it as strategic orchestration, and how you actually go about working with sense-making. These are skills that—regardless of whether your title is UX or not— if you are building human-centered things, matter moving forward.

What worries you if user experience designers and researchers (UXers) as a field don’t get on top of what’s happening right now?

So I think there has been a very, very human toll of the changes that we’ve seen in our field. I have friends, peers, mentors who’ve been long-term unemployed as a result of the shifts that we’re seeing. I don’t want that for them. I don’t want that for you.

Equally, I have seen people feel devalued, feel like this is being something that is done to them, that their career is not in their hands anymore. And let’s face it, if you get into this work, it’s because you more often than not care about the human at the end of it.

I want, if nothing else, for people to walk away with a sense of agency.

I want our field to start having agency and start making the decisions that affect us rather than it being a thing done to us.

So, what worries me is that if we don’t get our handle on this, there is a very, very human cost—to jobs, to worth, to identity. I hope Shift UX gives us a space to really start taking back control.