UX is new! UX is dead!

A new skull. Midjourney.

Never a day goes by when I don’t see some Medium, Substack or twitter post saying ‘UX is dead’. The reasons for its death come in more diverse and imaginative forms than a good horror movie.

At the same time, another thing I hear is that UX is new, just evolving, still in its teens. Are we looking at something that shines bright only to be found lifeless after a night of extreme debauchery?

I’ll start with the new.

UX is new?

Let’s start with some History. The term User Experience was coined by Don Norman at Apple sometime in the early-mid 90’s — around the time I was studying ‘Interactive System Design’ at University. The term took hold in about 1999 and replaced other terms/job titles.

The title UX could be said to be in its early mid-twenties. BUT the actual role is much older and went under other job titles. I started to use User Experience in my job title in 2000. Previously I was an information architect. How different was being an IA than being a UX — not very. In theory, Information Architects do more… well… information architecting, but in reality, it included functionality, wireframes and design.

And before there where Information Architects, there were other titles such as Usability Specialists, Interaction Designer and Product Designer. All these roles where similar. All involved the conventional ‘design thinking’ approach of researching, thinking, making something and then seeing if that something worked (effectively back to researching. It’s a process as old as the hills.

So surely then UX only existed when the Internet existed? Kind of — it was the Web that made it took off BUT before that we where designing Kiosks, CD Roms and software. If you want to go back, Parc had a graphical interface up and running in the 70s. Doug Englebart presented a multimedia computer experience at his ‘Mother of all Demos’ in 1968 (including the introduction of the Mouse and a chorded keyboard). The concept of Hypertext goes back to 1945, and a bunch of ideas we now use came from the Cybernetic movement of the 1950s.

But is UX mature? It might be over fifty years old but has it grown up? For all the changes I’d say it’s been mature for years. It will always be the case that it takes ‘new’ industries to discover the old techniques. Watch an architect like Frank Gehry work, and you’ll see the same processes, the creation of prototypes to test ideas, the research into the customers and users. He had the same issues we have with the management hierarchy and getting to be at the table. So how mature UX is in your organisation is not to do with the maturity of UX — it’s old!

UX is dying?

So UX is over fifty — older if you go beyond digital media. But is it o? If you take what has happened before it’s safe to say UX will not die, BUT the name will change — and is changing.

We’re already seeing the rise of people using the term ‘Product Designer’ — although old school physical product designers are not always happy about this and most UXers have no product design training. Plus many of the things we make are not products but services.

Then there is the prediction that UX will merge with Product Management by some including Jared M. Spool

. If you’ve read ‘Inspired’ by Marty Cagan, then it becomes reasonably clear that, unless it’s a small project for a small company, doing both the PM and UX roles at the same time is too much for a mere mortal. We’re heading into Unicorn territory here.

So what other predictions of demise are there out there? Could we be replaced by AI? Hardly. Could all interfaces just become standard so no UX is needed? Have you seen the mess Google makes of things like Google Photos? UX is still required even when Material design or Bootstrap exists. And some articles have a peculiar idea that there was a golden age of UX!

But maybe UX, as a discipline, never existed at all.

Peter Merholz wrote in 2014 that there is no such thing as UX Design. Perhaps everyone is a designer? Except that most engineers are terrible designers! If you are thinking of the solution from a technical point of view, you will find the path of least resistance technically — and that is usually not the best path for the user.

Long live UX!

UX is not going away. Sure it might go under different titles, and previously it was HCI and Information architecture. Still, the role of user experience as taking the needs of Users first and then, through an iterative process, shaping and creating an end solution is something we will always need.

So if you work in UX — your job is safe. It’s just that everything you are designing for and the tools you use will change. Design is never done.