Different stages of technology maturity impact user attitude, expectation, and motivation to try, adopt, and integrate technologies into their lives and workflows. As UX Researchers, we play a crucial role in keeping a pulse on these shifts and tuning into how humans perceive, accept, and incorporate emerging technologies into their daily lives at each stage.

The initial novelty of new tech often fades quickly, leading users to question the real value. To help accelerate mainstream adoption and commercialization, it's critical for researchers to adapt methods and approaches as technologies mature in order to uncover and prioritize opportunities, use cases, and contexts in which the technology can deliver real value to end-users or businesses.

I see UXR practitioners in the emerging tech space as innovation catalysts who can not only evangelize a healthy combination of research-informed and human-centered innovation that prioritizes human well-being but also drive habit and attitude-based behavior change intervention strategies. Once established, habitized behavior can become resilient under stress, fatigue, or diminished willpower. Lasting habits are the key to accelerating lifestyle changes that can result in healthier, safer, or more sustainable societies.