UX has a big problem

On the night of June 2025, the director of design at Shopify posted on X that they are stripping out UX from their design titles. No more UX designers, no more UX writers, just designers and writers. A few weeks before this, the VP of design at Duolingo also shared on LinkedIn that they are changing their design team name from User Experience to Product Experience, and he went on one of my favorite design podcasts to double down on this decision.

Does UX actually feel like who we are and what we're doing at Duolingo? How did we even land on UX to begin with as what we call ourselves? And, you know, maybe there's a little bit of a bias here. A lot of us come from a world where UX really just meant drawing boxes and passing it off to somebody else. We really think that all of us should be way more involved in the product. For us, user centricity is just a given and an assumption, and it doesn't have to be a conversation. And you can tell a company's low design maturity if they still have to advocate for the user.

I don't think this is just some random trend. I think it's a symptom of something bigger. I've thought about it long and hard, and I have come to a conclusion that the UX field has an identity crisis problem that's been brewing for years. Since the mid-2000s, when companies like Apple, Airbnb, Facebook, and Netflix showed everyone how important great user experience is to creating a successful digital product, we've seen different companies adopt different titles, for the same design work. Apple referred to their designers as human interface designers. Google called their designers UX designers, and they still do that to today. Facebook were one of the first to blend the role of a user interface and user experience designer into a product designer, and a lot of companies have followed suit since then. The names and titles keep changing because we've never really nailed down what the job actually is because it means different things to different companies. I think this identity crisis comes down to 3 interconnected problems. That are now hitting us all at once. First, nobody actually knows what designers do. If you pick 3 engineers from different companies and ask them to describe what a product or UX designer does, it's very likely that you get 3 different responses. It's also the same if you pick 3 different designers from different companies and ask them to describe what their day-to-day work looks like. A designer at Company A might say they get product specifications from their product manager and design the user interface and then ask the product manager for approval. A designer at Company B might say they work with a product manager and researcher to identify the problem that they are trying to solve, then they brainstorm on solutions and refine the designs with engineers along the way till it is shipped. Another designer at Company C might say they do everything from strategy to research to wireframes to visual design and maybe even some frontend code. The designer and company C is spread so thin across the entire product lifecycle that they can barely focus on anything properly. I mean, a recent survey conducted by a huge and reputable platform revealed that the most burnt out person in a product team is a product designer. It's not the engineers, it's not the product manager, but the product designer. When your role can mean literally anything, you end up doing everything and excelling at nothing. This is likely why we are seeing that burnout. And that leads us to the second problem. We're expected to be everything to everyone. And that's where things get really messy because design sits in this weird spot in the product lifecycle. Should we be focused on the experience of the people using the product, or should we be defining the strategy? Should we be designing what the user wants, or should we be designing what the executives and the investors want? I feel like we've always felt the need and the pressure to justify our value by doing more because it's hard to show exactly how much money a delightful user experience can make or save, especially at companies with low design maturity. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for being a generalist. If you've seen the other videos from this channel, you'd know how much I talk about how important it is to be a generalist. I think being able to do a bit of everything is really important for a good design career or any tech career. But there's a difference between being well-rounded and spreading yourself so thin that you lose your identity completely and you don't even remember that you're a designer anymore. For me, being a generalist means having one or two primary skills that I deliberately develop, and then I have other skills that I'm picking up along the way. My primary focus has always been developing my abilities to quickly understand the right problems to solve and having a really high bar for craft. When I'm solving that problem. Everything else is secondary to solving the right problem and solving it in a delightful manner. This doesn't have to be your own idea of being a generalist, but you have to define what yours is. Because when companies expect you to be equally amazing at user research, strategy, visual design, frontend development, growth, and all of these things together, something definitely has to give. And usually what gives is the core design skills and user centricity that got most of us into this field in the first place. Which brings me to the third and maybe most interesting problem, and that is that the idea of designing for a user is changing because what even is a user anymore? There are many things changing about who we are designing for and why. The moment insane hyper, or for lack of a better word, like mammoth growth and profitability became the North Star for product companies, the idea of designing for a user doesn't really hold true anymore. For example, If I want to order my favorite African food from Uber Eats right now, I have to go through odours of screens interrupting my food ordering experience just because they want me to join the paid plan, and there's no way for me to ask them not to interrupt me next time, or if there is a way, it's deliberately hidden so that I never find it. This is not a good user experience, and Uber knows that, and it's the same thing on Duolingo. The growth hacks and manipulation tactics that they have to get you coming back to the app or to subscribe for a paid tier is more of an intentional product experience than a user experience, which is why I agree with them for removing user from their Design Hub name. In fact, I think they are being honest by making that change. Also, AI is changing the idea of who we are designing for, and it's happening so fast. We used to design for humans, which is pretty straightforward, but now there are AI agents browsing our websites, using apps just like humans do, and some of them are already completing tasks. Tools like OpenAI's operators go through websites to book hotels. So if both humans and AI agents are using our product, does user experience design still make sense anymore? When the users are both humans and non-humans, the whole concept of UX starts to feel outdated. And this might be the exact reason why these leaders at Shopify and Duolingo are making these changes. And their CEOs are pretty vocal about how they are adopting AI in their orgs as well. Shopify's CEO already said that everyone needs to be prototyping with AI, and Duolingo's CEO said that they are going to be transitioning to an AI-first company. The truth is that tech is evolving faster than any of our job titles can actually keep up. This is why I don't consider job titles important. I don't think you should too. Whenever someone asks me what I do, I always refer to myself as a designer. But the next question that they always ask is, what kind of designer are you? And then I start to explain. If that isn't an identity crisis, then I don't know what is. Where am I going with this video again? I guess the reason I'm saying all of this is to advise you to ignore the debate about titles and just focus on getting really good at solving real problems for real people. Without losing your identity in the process. I'll see you in the next video.