Many of us who work with human-centred approaches (by which I mean user experience, interaction design, service design and similar fields) are waking up to a harsh reality of what has happened to our practice over the years.
Some practitioners in these disciplines have gone from being seen as a strategic linchpin, to being consigned to increasingly superficial considerations.
We lost elements of user experience
At the dawn of the user experience era around the start of this century, our promise was that we could robustly solve problems by deeply understanding the fundamental needs of our organisation and our users.
Jesse James Garrett’s 2000 diagram, The Elements of User Experience, was a highly influential definition of the real purpose of user experience.
It showed how a good user experience is underpinned by its ability to ultimately meet user needs and business objectives. An understanding of those foundations informs the functional specifications and requirements of your system. In turn these inform the interaction design and information architecture. These feed into the interface and navigation design.
Only once you have understood those layers of a user experience can you deliver a strong visual design. That’s because the visual design ultimately needs to serve the more fundamental layers beneath it. A user experience is only good if it meet the underlying needs that the system exists for.
The lessons of this model have gradually been forgotten over the years. This is partly because most of our colleagues only see the surface-level result.
Ask most people outside our field what design is, and they are likely to talk about “look and feel”, not about the structural underpinnings that make things work. For this reason, I have argued before that we should avoid using the word design.
This tendency for people to only understand the surface results has caused a flattening of our practice. The multi-planed diagram that Jesse James Garrett used to define user experience has been squashed to a top-down view that only sees: “visual design”.
Many in our field now find themselves relentlessly pushing pixels, generating obscene amounts of high-fidelity but superficial prototypes at the request of our stakeholders.
But now that artificial intelligence tools such as Claude Design are able to generate these sorts of superficial prototypes, this has left many in our field feeling exposed.
Even within individual disciplines like user research and information architecture, our practice is perceived to be flattened by the desire to use AI tools to automatically generate our outputs.
The good news is that this development is actually an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.
Succeeding towards irrelevance
Peter Merholz hypothesised that design has found itself in this exposed position because of its perceived success in the 2000s and 2010s. The rise of design firms like Ideo and Adaptive Path coincided with Apple’s success being credited to its design focus.
But, he says, this increased exposure of design ultimately caused the narrowing of its focus. The more people became interested in design, the more they just wanted it to look nice:
Concern for the true complexity of software was ignored, which meant deeper practices in interaction design and information architecture became marginalised.
Yet, because many designers were just pleased to have their much-wanted “seat at the table”, they played along with this narrowing. They joined the feature factory, and reduced the practice to a set of easily understood but superficial repeatable steps like the double diamond.
Now, Peter Merholz notes, businesses are unlikely to consider design as playing a role in their problems. This is because many designers neglected their strategic responsibilities in the chase to produce as many mockups as possible.
One commenter on Peter Merholz’s LinkedIn post, Keith Instone said:
Oh the curse of the slash. “UX/Design” here. “UI/UX” in other places. That slash feels like the stick that was inserted in the bicycle wheel.
Our digital material is code
The fundamental flaw of visual design tools like Figma is that what we produce through them is incapable of being real. It accelerated us straight to “the surface execution layer”. But it fundamentally separated our thinking from the code that ultimately makes something work.
When I attended Jared Spool’s webinar series about integrating agile with user experience, he pointed out that separately documenting your user experience ideas is problematic.
In a collaborative setting, we need a single source of truth. But if the prototype and the code are different, you have separate universes. The only thing that brings these together is a manual and sometimes frustrating back-and-forth process known as the “handoff”. But it is entirely possible to avoid the messy handoff — by prototyping in code.
Working in code has been seen by some as, in the words of Jonas Downey, designing the wrong way. But as he goes on to note, the current phenomenon of “designers hanging out in Terminals and engineers vibe coding designs” has led everyone to skip the most important activity of all: understanding what to build.
Sloppy software
Thanks to vibe coding, it is now easier than ever to release software. But the quality of the software being released is decreasing.
The number of apps released on the iOS App Store has increased rapidly, particularly since the start of 2025. But the number of apps with significant usage is dropping off.
Our practice got squashed down to “look and feel” because there was a perception within our organisations that the biggest problem was getting things delivered. But now that it’s easier than ever to deliver, users are swimming in a sea of slop.
This benefits no-one. It certainly doesn’t benefit users, and in turn it doesn’t benefit the businesses churning these things out.
It turns out that the biggest issue organisations face is making sure they build the right thing, in the right way.
An opportunity to re-deepen our field
The advent of artificial intelligence has caused people to feel anxious about the future of their roles. That fear is understandable given the situation our discipline finds itself in. With human-centred approaches having been diminished, we often fail to deliver the value we should. This makes designers easy pickings for businesses looking to cut costs.
But the perils of hastily releasing slop are becoming apparent. Yes, businesses are finding it easier to release things. But all their competitors are too. Meanwhile, consumers are becoming more discerning in the face of commoditised mediocrity.
In such an environment, a product must clearly differentiate itself through a strong value proposition. Simply being delivered is not enough for a product. It must solve a problem for users.
This will lead organisations back to needing to consider those more fundamental aspects of user experience once more. Delivering a surface-level product will not cut it. A successful product will be one that has meets users’ needs and business objectives, through establishing clear functional requirements, informing a robust information architecture conveyed through a strong user interface.
In my upcoming articles I will highlight two activities in particular that will make human-centred practice more powerful than ever: strategy in user research, and ontology in information architecture.
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