Post #2680397

2026-02-09 19:24 UTC

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng this thread is relavant to me, so am going in. I agree with every word you say Karsten, I feel a similar frustration. I started my career by building physical interfaces and at that time my obsession was to design for the senses, do away with screens. Now many years later I teach in the field of "UX", a notion I resist but my University employer embraces with glee. Your observations are true to reality, the Overton window of possibilities in so-called UX has been getting narrower and narrower the last ten/fifteen years. Effectively becoming a monoculture. A lot of people that years ago would have done interface design have been Figma-brained. I refuse to use the terms UX and HCI intechangeably because I think that UX is what happened when industry threw a ton of money to "design" and hybridized it with marketing. I have students these days that have been practicing UX for five years professionally and do not know what HCI is. Can't blame them. HCI has also not been very successful at staying relevant.

Replies (3)

@zilog@post.lurk.org 2026-02-09 19:25

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng The field of UX has a distaste for depth, any curiosity-driven research is disdained as minoritarian, or not user-centered enough, or art (!). And any in-depth engagement with technology is disdained as implementation and therefore beneath the expression of a "product vision", which they seem very comfortable in appropriating for themselves. I have taught coding to kids, to electrical engineers and physicists. I have taught medical doctors, to code in python for data analysis. I have helped scientists with HPC workflows and write shell scripts to send jobs to supercomputers. All of them understood that coding a little bit would be part of their jobs and learned easily and with the commitment they dedicate to any other subject. But not UX designers, most UX designers see code as somebody else's job. Or if they learn any code they commit the minimum effort, beause "I will not become good at this, but I want to learn so that I'll be able "to talk to engineers"". When so-called No-Code products where a thing, they all praised No-Code as the next paradigm. Now that LLMs have pretty much killed No-Code approaches LLMs are The Thing. But at the bottom it all lies the same disdain for "implementation", and experimentation.

Open ##2680398
@emenel@post.lurk.org 2026-02-09 19:25

@zilog@post.lurk.org @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng hard agree. tbh this is a huge part of what pushed me out of the field.

Open ##2680399
@zilog@post.lurk.org 2026-02-09 19:27

@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng UX is a cargo cult and monoculture that thrives only by self-emulation, standardization of assumptions, fagocitation of trends and elimination of nuance. It takes traditions in interactive computing & graphic design and replaces them with nothing, a hollow void. Literally nothing, in some cases literal white space. Because as the cargo cult likes to parrot "less is more", because they manage to misunderstand two things in that one motto. The whole of modernism in design and the definition of cognitive load. As smartphones became the way that 7 billion people engage with computing, everything everywhere that has a screen must therefore be treated like a smartphone and that's it, that's the end of the debate as far as UX is concerned.

Open ##2680400