Is UX Dead?

Like, really dead this time?

Not “we’re overrun by bootcamp grads” dead?

Not “we’re being turned into UI engineers” dead?

Not “no one is doing research” dead?

Not “we’re not winning the hearts and minds” dead?

Not “no one respects their design elders” dead?

Not “we are too wrapped up trying to prove business value to deliver use value” dead?

Not “no one is hiring REAL designers” dead?

Like, really, actually, for sure, this is the end of the era, everyone left in “UX” is just cleaning up and shutting things down, time to find another career, you don’t have to go but you can’t stay here, D-E-A-D dead?

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We’ve been calling the death of UX for a couple decades now. At least, someone in a blog post or a social media thread is, probably for da clickz.

This time, it’s AI, or really, the facile and shortsighted fad to make everything “AI.” Doesn’t matter that actual users hate getting deluged in AI features they never asked for, it’s in the product because… shareholder value?

And we know this AI bubble is going to burst and burst badly soon. When Microsoft stops reporting AI revenue, and overall we’ve seen nearly a trillion dollars of venture capital get burned through in the process, with zero sign of any real profit for anyone not named Nvidia… this bubble can’t last much longer.

Meanwhile, these companies are firing product design and research people left and right. First it was the middle managers, now it’s the researchers. All while the collapse in government outlays (thanks, DOGE) gut spending and jobs for everyone from universities to clean energy to healthcare.

Now, there are two things we know to be true: 1. The problems that user experience design solve haven’t gone away, and 2. AI as it currently exists cannot replace user experience design.

But we also know one other thing: Businesses don’t care, at least until they have to care.

At the top levels of business, people are widgets. They’re resources that ingest money and produce outputs. Replacing them with AI makes perfect sense — more outputs, less health care costs! At least, until they discover the real costs.

Generative AI is like caulk. It fills a hole (we need content!), but it’s bland and lifeless. It doesn’t matter what caulk tastes like — no one is eating it (well, not yet, give us a few years of recession and we’ll see). But content, well, that has taste. It has a voice and tone, a point of view, clear outcomes it’s looking to deliver on.

During this job search I used AI to help me generate cover letters. I hate writing cover letters. When I read them, though, they don’t feel like me. Yes, they’re my cover letters, so the words are right. But there’s no life, no soul there. Even when I try to pep them up with my own voice, they still feel flavorless.

Imagine there’s 200 applicants for the position and everyone created a cover letter with AI. 200 letters of fungible, nearly identical chunks of copy. All that power and water wasted on a constant refrain of filler.

It’s all caulk and not one bit of value. And caulk is what design is supposed to not be.

But the business world wants caulk. They want outputs. The outcomes aren’t important (until they are.)

UX can’t survive in this world. Like public health, it isn’t a thing you care about until you don’t have it at the most crucial moments. But we’re still trying to fight this last war where we needed to prove value against decades of slop. Now they like the slop.

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You can embrace AI as a designer, or refuse it. (And let’s be honest, you’re not getting a job right now if you don’t embrace it.) But no matter what, you’re dealing with a large language model that is going to do the most average, most banal response based on how the tokens fall. And average and banal is good enough for the business. In a business world like this, where is the room for a user experience that is not average and banal? Where’s the room for tools to help users accomplish their tasks easier. Where is (and I really hate saying this word) the delight?

Maybe UX is dead. But if so, AI didn’t kill it. The endless, constant grind to prove design’s value in a hyper-capitalist system did. A 55% accurate creator of mediocrity doesn’t ask for raises, doesn’t need health insurance, and doesn’t talk back. And given the choice of “good enough” banality and the bottom line hit of having humans that push and strive for “better”, they’ll take “good enough.”

Dylan Wilbanks is a web roustabout, raconteur, and curmudgeon currently practicing as a user experience designer in Seattle. He’s spent nearly 20 years designing, building, and perfecting online experiences, and every once in a while does a good job. Occasionally, he speaks at conferences like SXSW and Webvisions. He created one of the first Twitter accounts used in higher education, but that was an accident, and he’s really sorry about it. With Kyle Weems, he co-hosts Squirrel And Moose, a podcast about designing and building the web, when they remember to talk about it. He likes nectarines. You can read his tweets at @dylanw and learn more at dylanwilbanks.com. View all posts by Dylan Wilbanks