We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it!

We didn’t just lose our influence. We gave it away. UX professionals need to stop accepting silence, reclaim our seat at the table, and design with strategic clarity, not just surface polish.

Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.

Maybe you’ve read the think pieces: UX is dead. Or dying. Or evolving. Or in a state of strategic irrelevance. Thought leaders like Pavel Samsonov, Patrick Neeman, Ed Orozco, and Cyd Harrell have all taken swings at the conversation, talking about how we’ve lost influence, lost trust, and in many cases, lost our way.

Let’s not waste time sugarcoating it: UX didn’t get sidelined by accident. We let it happen. We let ourselves be turned into ticket-takers, stylists, and decorators of decks no one reads. We watched “user-centered” become a checkbox. We accepted applause for work that never shipped and feedback that boiled down to, “Can you make it pop?”

And today we’re still arguing about job titles while AI eats our credibility, while design systems distract from actual design, while the trust we once built is slipping away. The worst part? We’re not even in the room to fight for it.

This isn’t a nostalgia play for some golden age of UX. That version had its flaws too. But we’ve reached a point where too many talented people are being treated like overhead, and too many teams are building products no one understands, no one trusts, and no one uses.

For those of us who still believe UX isn’t just about what’s on the screen, that it’s about how we show up, how we speak up, and how we make the case that what we do matters, it’s time to stop whispering from the corner. Time to speak like we matter. Time to reclaim the voice we let slip away.

How UX lost its influence

UX didn’t just get pushed out of strategic conversations. We let it happen. We focused on tools, not outcomes; process, not purpose. And now, we’re trying to design better systems from the kiddie table.

For years, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re “advocating for the user,” but in practice, we’ve often been advocating for our own process: our sitemaps, our card sorts, our post-it note frameworks. We’ve become so obsessed with how we do the work that we’ve lost sight of what the work is supposed to achieve.

As one UX Planet article bluntly puts it, “Stop preaching UX process!” Reminding us that methodology without outcomes is theater.

Ed Orozco put it more diplomatically in his piece for UX Collective: “The highest-impact part of the design process is identifying and framing valuable problems to solve.”

Pavel Samsonov echoes the shift when he writes that “instead of using research to understand who we are building for, our orgs have been setting course based on the ideal user they’d like to sell to.”

And nowhere is this more obvious than in UX conferences, which have become increasingly insular and repetitive. Instead of pushing the industry forward, many of these events feel like echo chambers of recycled slide decks; a carousel of talks about mapping, heuristics, and job titles, as if those are the levers that truly change products, teams, or trust. You can almost hear the collective rustling of Moleskines and tote bags every time someone mentions a double diamond.

“We’ve become problem solvers with our heads up our asses about process,” as one Redditor quipped in a UX design thread about unpopular opinions.

The worst part? They’re not wrong.

This kind of echo chamber has long frustrated thoughtful practitioners. Jared Spool once criticized the UX community for treating process like religion, turning useful tools into unquestioned rituals. In a 2017 article, he warned that process shouldn’t come before vision: “When a team focuses on process first, before the vision, they can lose track of what they are trying to accomplish.”

UX became cool. That was part of the problem

Like cargo pants in the early 2000s, UX got cool fast and out of nowhere. Suddenly every startup, bank, and SaaS platform needed a “UX person,” even if they didn’t know what that meant. The title became the equivalent of hot sauce: just sprinkle it on, and your product instantly had flavor.

“We need UX,” they’d say, but they couldn’t explain why. The demand exploded, and with that came a wave of people who wanted jobs. Unfortunately, that didn’t include people who had the responsibility or the experience. UX bootcamps sprung up everywhere, promising a fast-track to a new career. The industry, eager to fill the growing demand, welcomed the influx. But while some programs were thoughtful, many prioritized speed over depth, offering just enough vocabulary to sound competent but not enough understanding to be effective.

As one UX leader told me bluntly, “Great, now you can draw boxes and make up a persona.”

This created a dangerous cycle: companies hired underprepared designers, those designers couldn’t explain their value, and stakeholders came away with the idea that UX was a soft, fragile discipline that slowed things down and overcomplicated the obvious. It’s no surprise that many orgs left those engagements with a bad taste in their mouth, thinking “we tried UX… and it didn’t work.”

But it wasn’t UX that failed. It was the version of UX that we sold them: oversimplified, overpromised, and underpowered.

Patrick Neeman summed this up well: “Companies hire for UX because someone told them to, not because they understand what it is.”

The feedback loop broke

The foundation of UX is supposed to be a feedback loop: research, insight, iteration, refinement. It’s a discipline rooted in learning. But over time, that loop fractured. Usability testing became checkbox validation. Metrics replaced user stories. What was once Discovery turned into justification. A loop became a cul-de-sac.

As Pavel Samsonov observed, many teams today run “p-hacked” usability tests, structured not to learn, but to prove what someone already wanted to do.

In other words, they ran usability tests not to uncover problems or generate insight, but to justify decisions that have already been made.

In that kind of environment, outcomes take a back seat to optics. We stopped asking the hard questions. Even when we wanted to, we didn’t have the time, the budget, or the air cover. Better to push pixels and pray.

Another reason UX keeps getting sidelined: false confidence. Teams look at half-baked flows and recycled design patterns and think, “That’s close enough.” They posit, “It worked in our last product,” or, “That’s how [insert over-glorified industry leader] does it.” Instead of questioning the fit, they assume familiarity will substitute for usability. Nathan Curtis points out that when teams rely too heavily on pattern libraries and past solutions, they often mistake speed for efficacy and reduce the space for real problem-solving in the process.

What feels efficient to a product team often feels like friction to a user. Skipping UX to save time rarely does. It just guarantees you’ll waste more of it cleaning up later.

The Nielsen Norman Group has been calling this out for years. They say that without stakeholder buy-in or an ability to tie UX work to business outcomes, teams get stuck in surface-level deliverables that lack strategic weight.

We taught ourselves the wrong lessons

Many designers came into this work because they cared. They cared about people, about systems, about making things better. Instead, they found themselves performing process for process’ sake. The post-its went up. The journey map was made. The Figma file was perfect. And nothing changed.

Others just quietly walked away.

Those who stayed learned to keep their heads down, or learned to speak the language of delivery. They learned to get excited about design tokens, or design systems, or dark mode settings. Really, anything that didn’t require facing the void of real influence.

And we started to believe the myth: that this was as good as it gets. That UX was just a phase in the software development lifecycle. That design speaks for itself. That our value should be obvious.

It isn’t.

As Cyd Harrell has said about civic design in her podcast, if we’re not working with intention, empathy, and a sense of responsibility, then we’re just performing. And if we’re just performing, we might as well do it on TikTok. At least then someone’s paying attention.

Until we learn how to speak up again. Clearly. Credibly. And in context. We’ll keep getting the version of UX that the business is willing to tolerate, not the one we know the user actually needs.

The trust crisis

What AI (and everything else) is telling us

We’re watching history repeat itself and this time at machine speed. AI is the latest shiny object in tech, being shipped fast, scaled faster, and handed to users with the same shrug we’ve seen before: “users will figure it out.” But they won’t. Or worse: they’ll stop trusting the systems we build altogether.

This isn’t just an AI problem. It’s a design problem. And more specifically, a UX credibility problem.

We’ve accidentally trained stakeholders (executives, product leads, and entire orgs) to believe UX is a nice-to-have. That was a mistake. UX isn’t some bonus level you unlock when the roadmap clears up, or a last-minute sprinkle to impress the execs. It’s not the parsley garnish on your AI steak. It’s the plate, the table, and half the damn kitchen.

As I wrote in “We Trust AI… Until We Don’t,” trust in AI has almost nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with comfort zones. We trust autocomplete, but not AI-powered diagnosis. We’ll use facial recognition to unlock our phones, but not to approve a loan.

Comfort zones are a UX concern. But if we’ve been reduced to “make it pretty” or “clean up the flows,” we lose the ability to shape the experience people actually have with AI, not just what it looks like, but whether they trust it at all.

Cyd Harrell has long talked about the ethical implications of design in the public sector. She reminds us that government interfaces aren’t just digital interactions, they’re moral contracts. The same applies to AI. These systems don’t just serve people. They make decisions about people.

Cyd says, “Government technology should work at least as well as the private sector, because it carries the weight of moral obligation.”

If people don’t understand how a system works, or worse, believe it’s lying to them, we’ve failed. Not because of bad tech, but because of broken trust.

This erosion of trust is well-documented. A 2023 KPMG study found that 61% of global respondents were wary of trusting AI systems, with only 39% expressing confidence in their accuracy.

Similarly, A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction highlighted that trust in AI is shaped not only by performance, but also by transparency, ethical safeguards, and how well the system supports human understanding.

Meanwhile, research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that users build trust in AI incrementally, if it helps them succeed. Trust isn’t immediate. It’s earned, interaction by interaction, experience by experience.

Despite that, many AI tools are being rolled out like candy from a marketing piñata — with little evidence that UX research is guiding their design. As Nielsen Norman Group puts it, AI initiatives often prioritize the tech first and only loop in UX once it’s too late to influence direction. Microsoft, in its own UX guidance for responsible AI, urges teams to involve design and research from the start, not after the model is built, because trust and understanding can’t be bolted on later.

Where’s the usability testing for large language models? The participatory design sessions with real users? The accessibility work?

Spoiler: it’s happening too late, if at all.

We’re also seeing the quiet normalization of dark patterns. UI decisions designed not to help users, but to trap them. Confirmshaming. Forced continuity. Roach motel flows. These aren’t edge cases. They’re often built in on purpose and are often known as “Dark UX.” We build features that lock people into ecosystems, bury cancel buttons, manipulate behavior, or push frictionless engagement over informed decision-making.

As Deceptive Design documents, these patterns are increasingly used to boost short-term metrics at the expense of long-term trust. It’s anti-user behavior masked as clever conversion strategy, and the kind of thing a strong UX presence used to stop before it started.

In 2022, the FTC issued a policy statement calling out the rise of manipulative interfaces, citing how they “trick or trap consumers into subscriptions or disclosing personal data.” That’s what happens when UX becomes reactive, silent, or excluded from decision-making entirely.

We reward metrics that go up, even if trust goes down.

So once again, we forget the most important part of user experience: the user.

We’ve seen this movie before. In fintech. In healthcare. In hiring platforms. In government services. We ship complexity, slap on a dashboard, and expect trust. Then we act surprised when users either disengage or rage-quit the experience, like their private Slack group was just exposed to the whole company.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: this isn’t just a UX failure. It’s a business failure. Because when you ignore the human, you lose the customer. Trust isn’t a soft metric. It’s a hard outcome. It’s revenue. Retention. Reputation. UX is where user needs and business goals are supposed to shake hands, not silently walk past each other like exes at a conference.

And all the while, we’re updating decks. Rebuilding flows. Writing another Jira ticket with a “low effort, high impact” tag we know isn’t fooling anyone. And still, we wait our turn to be listened to.

Spoiler: that turn rarely comes.

As Jeffrey Veen, founding partner at Adaptive Path and former VP of Design at Adobe, said, “Design without strategy is just decoration.” And if that sounds a little too business school chic, let’s bring it down to earth with Sarah Doody, who put it more plainly: “When you involve people in the process, they’re more likely to believe the results.”

Strategy comes from talking to people. Trust comes from including them. If you’re not grounding your work in outcomes, context, and conversation, you’re not designing, you’re redecorating.

UX without trust is theater. UX without outcomes is noise.

If users don’t trust the systems we design, that’s not a PM problem. It’s a design failure. And if we don’t fix it, someone else will, probably with worse instincts, fewer ethics, and a much louder bullhorn.

UX is supposed to be the human layer of technology. It’s also supposed to be the place where strategy and empathy actually talk to each other. If we can’t reclaim that space, can’t build products people understand, trust, and want to return to, then what exactly are we doing here?

Reclaiming the voice

The case for speaking up (again)

Let’s not pretend this is some Pixar redemption arc. We’re not Andy’s toys waiting to be rescued from the donation bin. We’re Woody, realizing we still matter, even if we’ve been boxed up for a few years. The job’s not over. The kid still needs us. The work still needs doing.

But here’s the thing: influence is recoverable. It didn’t die, it drifted. We let it. We traded our voices for seatbelts in the product roadmap van and forgot that we used to drive.

Getting that voice back doesn’t mean pounding the table or redesigning your portfolio for the fifth time this year. It means remembering that UX at its best doesn’t just make products better, it makes decisions smarter. It makes businesses better. It puts humanity back into systems, and it brings business objectives into focus by connecting them to actual human behavior. All in language people can understand.

Reclaiming our voice means not waiting until a stakeholder asks for a redesign. It means being in the room when the problem is being defined in the first place. It means asking better questions, earlier, and not just the “what are we solving?” kind, but “why is this even a thing we’re doing?”

Jon Yablonski phrased it well: “The best way to get people to care about UX is to show them what happens when you don’t.”

Because if we’re not involved in shaping the direction, we’re just reacting to it. That’s not strategy. That’s survival.

It also means being honest about value. If what you’re shipping doesn’t work for users, it doesn’t matter how elegant the typography is. As Cameron Moll puts it, “What separates design from art is that design is meant to be functional.” And if we don’t bring that clarity, we can’t be surprised when we’re asked to “make it pop” one more time.

And let’s stop pretending the work ends when the prototype hits the handoff doc. Your job doesn’t stop at the screen. It just starts there.

And, as Dieter Rams says, “Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance.”

We don’t need louder voices. We need clearer ones. We need to talk like we know what we’re solving, and who it’s for. UX isn’t valuable because it adds polish. It’s valuable because it prevents dumb, expensive mistakes before they ever leave the sprint.

Your UX voice isn’t your style or your deliverables. It’s your ability to connect what people need to what the business can deliver and to make sure no one forgets that alignment is what success actually looks like.

We don’t need more templates. We need more conviction. We need to speak plainly, challenge politely, and stay laser-focused on building things that earn trust and actually work.

Let’s build a UX practice that people don’t just invite in at the last minute, but count on from the start.

Let’s get back to that.

A few ways to start

• Ask better questions earlier. Don’t wait until usability testing to challenge assumptions. Start during planning. Be the one who says, “What are we actually trying to solve here?”
• Make your work visible. Stop hiding behind Figma files. Build bridges with product, engineering, and marketing. Show how your thinking impacts real business outcomes.
• Use data and narrative. Pair your metrics with stories. Don’t just say a design improved conversion. Tell them why it did.
• Include more voices. Great UX doesn’t come from isolation. Invite stakeholders into your process so they own the insights, not just the output.
• Stay curious, not precious. Fight the instinct to defend your solution. Defend the problem you’re solving. Everything else is just form.

Let’s stop waiting for permission and start showing what UX was always meant to be.

Here’s a version tailored to match your tone and portfolio while following the same structure and formatting as Patrick’s:

About Dan Maccarone

The Barstool MBA: Lessons from the Real World of Business
Dan Maccarone is the author of The Barstool MBA, an Audible Original that blends sharp storytelling with decades of product strategy experience. It’s available exclusively on Audible:
> Listen on Audible

Dan is a UX strategist, product designer, fractional Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Charming Robot, a digital product design studio based in New York. Over the past 25 years, he’s helped launch and grow companies like Hulu, Foursquare, Rent the Runway, The Skimm, and Blade, while redefining digital experiences for The New York Times, CNN, TD Ameritrade, and The Wall Street Journal.

He’s also the host of Story in a Bottle, a podcast about tech, media, and the humans behind both.

You can connect with Dan on:
🔗 LinkedIn
🔗 Twitter (he’s not calling it X)