The UX industry is having a breakdown, and we did it to ourselves.
For fifteen years, we fought to get a “seat at the table.” We evangelized design thinking. We published case studies proving ROI. We convinced executives that UX wasn’t just making things pretty—it was strategic, essential, transformative. We won awards for our influence. We built empires on LinkedIn teaching others how to “speak the language of business.”
We got everything we wanted. UX became important.
And in the process, we destroyed what made it valuable in the first place.
The Seat at the Table We Should Have Refused
I’ve been in those rooms. The strategy meetings where designers present research findings to executives who nod along while checking their phones. The quarterly reviews where UX metrics sit alongside revenue projections and nobody can explain why one matters more than the other. The stakeholder alignment sessions that consume entire weeks before a single pixel gets pushed.
We wanted influence. We got bureaucracy.
Look at what actually happens when UX “has a seat at the table”: Designers spend 60-70% of their time in meetings that have nothing to do with design. They create decks justifying decisions that should be obvious. They defend research methodologies to people who’ve already decided what they want to build. They optimize for executive performance reviews instead of user outcomes.
This isn’t elevating design. It’s administrative capture.
The cruel irony is that the more “strategic” UX became, the less actual designing got done. We traded craft for PowerPoint. We swapped prototyping for stakeholder management. We gave up the work we loved to prove we deserved respect—and by the time we got that respect, we’d forgotten how to earn it through great work.
The Metrics Trap We Built for Ourselves
Here’s an uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to say out loud: UX became indistinguishable from growth hacking the moment we started measuring success in clicks instead of clarity.
We did this to ourselves. We needed to prove value in language executives understood, so we adopted their metrics. Conversion rates. Engagement time. Click-through percentages. Monthly active users. We became fluent in the numbers that get budget approved.
And then something insidious happened: We started optimizing for those numbers instead of actual user experience.
Dark patterns aren’t created by evil product managers forcing designers to do unethical work. They’re created by designers who’ve been taught that a 2.3% increase in email capture is “impact” and a streamlined checkout flow that doesn’t manipulate users is “leaving money on the table.”
Every modal that interrupts your reading? A designer tested it and it “performed well.” Every notification permission request before you’ve used an app? Someone A/B tested the timing and this version had the highest acceptance rate. Every subscription cancellation flow that requires calling customer service? A UX team “optimized the retention funnel.”
We convinced ourselves this was strategic thinking. It’s actually just optimization for organizational goals dressed up in user-centered language.
The State of UX 2025 report nails this: “We’re handing our design systems to growth teams so they can squeeze every last penny out of customers. We’re optimizing our flows for clicks, not clarity. We stopped building tools and started building engagement traps.”
When did we collectively decide that making users do what benefits the company is the same as designing good experiences?
AI Didn’t Steal Our Jobs—We Gave Them Away
The design community is panicking about AI. Galileo generates wireframes in seconds. ChatGPT writes UX copy. Midjourney creates mockups. Figma’s AI features turn sketches into production-ready components.
But AI isn’t the threat. The threat is that we’ve reduced our expertise to tasks that AI can replicate.
If your value proposition as a UX designer is “I make screens that look nice and work okay,” then yes, you should be worried. Because AI can do that now. It can generate user flows. It can create design systems. It can even run basic usability tests and synthesize findings.
What AI can’t do—yet—is the messy, human, strategic work we abandoned when we decided to be “serious professionals”:
- Understanding unspoken user needs through deep observation
- Challenging business assumptions when they conflict with actual user behavior
- Designing for edge cases that don’t show up in analytics
- Fighting for the right solution when it’s not the profitable one
- Creating experiences that build long-term trust instead of short-term engagement
We stopped doing that work years ago because it was hard to measure, difficult to defend in meetings, and didn’t translate well to LinkedIn posts about “impact.”
So we standardized. We templatized. We adopted frameworks that made our work more legible to stakeholders—and in doing so, made it more legible to algorithms too.
One designer put it perfectly in a recent survey: “I should feel secure in my knowledge. Instead, I’m experiencing what feels like a professional version of the Dunning-Kruger effect.”
That’s not imposter syndrome. That’s the accurate realization that we’ve been doing work that doesn’t actually require the expertise we thought it did.
The LinkedIn Industrial Complex Destroyed Nuance
Open LinkedIn right now. Scroll through your feed. Count how many posts are:
- “10 UX principles every designer should know”
- “How I 10x’d conversion with this one weird trick”
- “The future of UX is [insert buzzword]”
- “Are designers still relevant in 2025?”
The UX field has become a content mill optimizing for engagement, not insight. We’ve created an entire ecosystem of influencers who’ve never shipped a product teaching other people how to get hired for jobs designing products they’ll never ship.
The Nielsen Norman Group’s research found that this “proliferation of tools and templates” combined with “shallow, scammy content” has degraded the field’s intellectual integrity. Design thinking—a legitimately useful framework when applied correctly—became a paint-by-numbers formula that promised to “change the world” if you just followed the six steps.
When was the last time you saw a UX case study that said “We tried this approach, it failed completely, here’s what we learned”? Instead we get endless portfolio pieces showing Spotify redesigns and fintech app concepts that were never built, never tested, never used by actual humans.
This isn’t knowledge sharing. It’s performative expertise designed to generate likes from people who are also performing expertise to generate likes. It’s an ouroboros of credibility signaling.
And it’s made us worse at our jobs.
Because real UX work is messy. It involves failed experiments. Compromised solutions. Designs that work but aren’t beautiful. Outcomes that can’t be easily attributed to any single decision. None of that fits into a carousel post with a satisfying ending.
We Optimized for Prestige Instead of Craft
Remember when designers actually cared about craft? When the conversation was about interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, information architecture, usability principles?
Now the conversation is about getting promoted to “Principal Designer” and learning to “speak the language of business” and “building your personal brand” and “future-proofing your career.”
We’ve become obsessed with the meta-game of being a designer instead of actually designing.
Design used to attract people who wanted to make things. Now it attracts people who want the job title, salary, and status of working at a tech company. They learn Figma the way MBAs learn Excel—as a tool for career advancement, not mastery.
The result is a field flooded with people who can execute a design system but can’t create one. Who can run a usability test but can’t interpret ambiguous results. Who can make something “on brand” but have no opinion about whether the brand itself is good.
This isn’t a critique of junior designers—everyone starts somewhere. This is a critique of an industry that’s optimized for credentialing over competence, for following best practices over developing judgment, for shipping fast over shipping well.
As one frustrated designer wrote: “Products are launched because someone needs a promotion. Timelines are built around someone’s performance review or company reports.”
When career advancement matters more than user outcomes, you get UX that serves organizational politics, not people.
The Part Where I Tell You What to Do About This (Just Kidding)
I’m not going to end this with “10 ways to save UX” or “How to stay relevant in 2025.” That’s the same pattern that got us here—reducing complex problems to actionable lists that feel productive but change nothing.
The truth is I don’t know how to fix this. Maybe it can’t be fixed. Maybe UX has permanently shifted from craft to corporate function, and those of us who miss the old version are just nostalgic for a time that wasn’t actually that great anyway.
But I do know this: The path forward isn’t more strategy, more metrics, more stakeholder alignment, or more AI tools. Those are all symptoms of the disease, not the cure.
If there’s any hope for UX, it’s in designers who are willing to:
Reject the pressure to prove ROI for everything. Some work matters because it’s right, not because it moves a number. If you can’t defend a design decision without a dashboard, your judgment has atrophied.
Stop optimizing for engagement when you should be optimizing for utility. Making users spend more time in your app isn’t success if they resent every minute. Sometimes the best UX is the one that gets people out of the interface as quickly as possible.
Embrace being wrong more publicly. The LinkedIn version of UX where everyone has perfect case studies and flawless processes is fiction. Real design involves failure, ambiguity, and trade-offs. Share those stories.
Design things that are genuinely useful instead of strategically clever. “Innovative” interfaces that confuse users aren’t better than boring interfaces that work. Sometimes the right answer is a dropdown menu, not a custom interaction pattern that took three weeks to build.
Remember that users are people, not metrics to be optimized. When you start thinking about “reducing friction in the conversion funnel” instead of “helping someone accomplish their goal,” you’ve already lost the plot.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
We wanted UX to be taken seriously. Mission accomplished. Now it’s taken so seriously that it’s been fully absorbed into the corporate machine, where “user experience” is just another lever to pull in service of quarterly targets.
We wanted to prove that design was strategic. We succeeded. Now designers spend more time in strategy meetings than actually designing.
We wanted influence over product direction. We got it. Now product direction is determined by A/B tests and executive politics, and designers are the ones running the tests and managing the politics.
We won. And in winning, we lost the thing that made us worth listening to in the first place: the ability to genuinely advocate for people using our products instead of just optimizing metrics that benefit the company building them.
The UX we have today is the UX we designed—not intentionally, but through a thousand small compromises, each one justified by the need to be taken seriously, to prove value, to have strategic impact.
Maybe the real question isn’t “How do we save UX?” but “Do we even want to save the version we created?”
Because the version that mattered—the one that cared more about craft than clout, more about users than metrics, more about doing good work than proving its value—that version died the moment we convinced ourselves that fighting for a seat at the table was more important than doing work worthy of respect.
The table was never the goal. The work was.
We forgot that.
And now we’re paying the price.