UX across Various Products: From VR to AI to “Gamification”
Célia Hodent · 2026
User experience (UX), as a mindset and strategy, isn&s;t being fundamentally rethought despite the continual emergence of new products and technologies because human capabilities, performance, and limitations won&s;t likely change significantly any time soon. Unless we have to deal with transhumanism in our lifetime, but that&s;s another story. However, there are trends in user interface (UI) and interaction design that do change with new technologies, which then impact people&s;s perceptions and expectations. A trend in UI is, for example, the “hamburger button”, represented by an icon with three parallel horizontal lines that allows users to access the navigation menu of a website, especially on mobile. This icon and associated collapsed menu became very popular with the explosion of smartphones around 2009, as it economized space on small screens. This popularity means that many users are now familiar with it. A trend in interaction design, for example, is the gesture to swipe on a touch screen, which was popularized with Apple&s;s iPhone. The dating app Tinder also familiarized its users with the gesture of swiping right when they liked a profile and swiping left when not. Thus, popular innovations are shaping how users expect a product to behave and how they should interact with it.