2015: The Year UX Ended

I admit that the title is a terrible clickbait, but I truly hope that UX has finally come to its end. At least the kind of UX we all knew. The times are gone when the UX designer used to be the lonely design evangelist preaching for the user’s satisfaction. UX designers are no longer the lone knights of arts and humanities in the techie world of IT.

Nowadays, it goes without saying that UX is crucial and we no longer need to explain how important it is. There are lots of buzzwords out there: user experience, customer experience or even human experience (can there be anything more vague? anything so vague that no one really knows what it actually is that you do?), client-centricity and, finally, design thinking. Everyone loves the buzzwords, even companies’ board members, who have nothing to do with design, but they do know that those words are important. Sadly enough, due to their vagueness, those words have often been downgraded to empty slogans (“The strategy of our organisation is aimed at increasing client-centricity through improving customer experience in the spirit of design thinking”) ;) On top of that, many people believe that projects are born out of research, while they are actually born out of the ideas, work and experience of designers. Many can do great research, but they often fail at the design and delivery stages.

Over the past 18 months, I have gradually lost my interest in the UX industry. I don’t really care for UX conferences anymore (you just forget most of the talks the morning after the conference). Many a time have I read a UX blog offering an easy answer to every question you might have. Their authors seriously believe that you can create a perfect process. Whenever I read a blog like this, I feel I have nothing in common with the people who write them. Most of the things about design that get published these days are essentially content marketing. Their sole purpose is to attract clicks — people don’t really write them because they truly need to share something interesting with others. It’s an endless stream of dull and repetitive titles:

• What is UX? (apparently, no one has figured that out so far)
• UX vs. CX (ignotum per ignotum)
• What’s the difference between UX design and UI design? (one of the most pressing first-world problems)