An opinion piece. UXD should matter, but in practice users don't care and many big companies have quietly stopped caring too. Here is the evidence, and why it happened.
This is a first-person UX rant by Fabio Devin, not a neutral guide. The argument: ‘Is UXD important today?’ is different from ‘Should UXD be important?’. The author answers no to the first and an emphatic yes to the second. In practice, users are indifferent to UX Design, and even mega-companies with elite UX teams now ship basic accessibility failures, untested flows and dark patterns. UXD is not dead, but it is struggling, squeezed by marketing and development priorities.
Key takeaways
- 'UXD' (User Experience Design) is the precise term: we cannot create an experience, only design with the intent to guide one.
- Descriptively, users do not care about UXD, and neither do many companies; normatively, they should.
- UX quality is declining, in both craft and in big companies openly ignoring basic principles.
- Real examples: Google Cloud / GA4 usability, WeTransfer's cookie dark pattern, Apple's MacBook Pro accessibility errors.
- UXD is not dead, but it is squeezed by marketing and development teams and by its own overhyping.
Why 'UXD' and not 'UX'?
We cannot create a user experience. Different users have different experiences; we can measure them, but not generate them.
Fabio Devin
What we can do is design with the intent of guiding users toward an intended experience, analog, digital, virtual or physical. That is UXD, User Experience Design. Today UXD is often narrowed to HCI, or reduced further to plain web or app design, with many practitioners confusing UI design with building a web application. Much of this traces back to shallow ‘UX courses’ that skip or perpetuate the confusion, often selling the dreaded ‘UI/UX’ label.
So why isn't UXD important?
UX boomed around 2010, peaked just before COVID, and has declined slowly since, both in quality and in adoption. The striking part is that big companies with world-class UX departments are ignoring basic principles: tables used for layout, accessibility failures nearly everywhere, near-impossible untested user flows, and dark patterns treated as normal. These teams know their craft, so the cause is usually organizational: UX gets subordinated to branding and marketing, or overruled by development.
Exhibit A: Google Cloud and GA4
Google Cloud APIs are famously unintuitive, and GA4 shipped with fewer features than Universal Analytics while being harder to use for experts and novices alike, a clear sign it was not tested against the version it replaced. A simple test: try to get an SMTP setup on Google Cloud using only Google’s own documentation, no third-party tutorials. The task should be trivial; in practice you cannot complete it without searching outside the docs. Compare that to the clean intended user journey (an application of intentionality and user intent).
Exhibit B and C: WeTransfer and Apple
| Case | The problem | Issue type |
|---|---|---|
| WeTransfer cookie wall | Barely legible text over a scrim, a low-visibility ‘Manage Preferences’ ghost button, and a ‘No thanks’ link that, when clicked, silently ‘accepts’ cookies anyway. The copy said reject; the behavior said accept. | Dark pattern |
| Apple MacBook Pro page | Apple’s homepage is clean and accessible, but the MacBook Pro page reported 43 accessibility errors and 202 alerts (about 50 also errors), with 195 structural elements where almost everything is a heading or list, painful with a screen reader. | Accessibility |
Accessibility is mandatory by law in most countries, yet routinely overlooked. The MacBook Pro page reads less like a UX designer’s work and more like a page built by developers with no grounding in basic UX principles.
So is user experience dead?
No, because it is a trick question: user experience itself cannot die, only UXD as a practiced specialty can struggle, and it is. UX forums and LinkedIn, once buzzing with ‘the next big thing’, are now full of laid-off practitioners. Designers share the blame: we hyped UXD as a magic fix, when real UX is slow, testing-heavy data-driven design that struggles to compete with the simpler logic of marketing. The honest bottom line: most users and most companies do not care about UXD, and admitting that is the first step to fixing it.
Descriptively, not really: most users and many companies act indifferent to it today. Normatively it should be important, and good UXD still solves real problems.
UX is the experience itself, which we can only measure, not create. UXD (User Experience Design) is designing with the intent to guide users toward an intended experience.
Usually organizational pressure: UX gets subordinated to branding and marketing goals, or overruled by development teams, not because the UX staff lack skill.
A design that tricks users into actions they did not intend, like a ‘reject cookies’ link that quietly accepts them, as in the WeTransfer example.
No. User experience cannot die because it always exists. What is struggling is UXD as a practiced, respected specialty.
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