After hundreds of conversations across the tech industry, I’ve noticed a consistent problem: most people think “UX Design” means creating pretty interfaces.
The confusion is everywhere. Engineers, business stakeholders, and sometimes management believe UX designers just make things look good on screens. They casually use terms like “UX/UI designer” as if it’s one role, missing the bigger picture entirely.
This misunderstanding has deep roots. Over the years, people have forgotten what UX actually covers, reducing it to visual design work.
I think we need better terminology. Let’s start using “Experience Design” instead.
This name captures what the role really involves: designing complete user experiences. Experience designers don’t just create interfaces – they research user needs, map user journeys, define core problems to solve, and design interactions across different channels like voice interfaces, touch feedback, and various digital touchpoints.
When people hear “Experience Design,” they naturally understand the scope: “These professionals design how users experience our product.” It’s clear, accurate, and removes confusion.
Sometimes progress means letting go of outdated terms. While other experience types exist like developer experience, when building products, our focus stays clear: creating great user experiences.
The title should reflect the actual work. Experience Design accomplishes exactly that.
What I read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >900) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
Running B2B Product Discovery Without A/B Testing: Enterprise product discovery using qualitative triangulation and customer interviews when quantitative data and statistical significance are unavailable. (by Assaph Mehr)
When HiPPOs and ZEBRAs hijack the roadmap: How to deal with roadmap disruptions by managing stakeholder behaviors through evidence-based reasoning and political awareness. (by Kristy Garland)
The Inevitable Failure of One-Shot Project Funding: Software requires continuous investment and intact product teams after initial launch to address technical debt, user feedback, and bugs. (by rich mironov)
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I think there's an interesting connection here between what UX actually encompasses and how people interpret what the discipline is supposed to do. The terminology is one part of that, but there's also the gap between what something is intended to mean and what people understand it to mean.
I've explored both sides of that in a couple of pieces:
The Interface Is Not Only a Screen - https://beforeinterface.substack.com/p/interface-not-only-a-screen and
The Interpreter Gap - https://beforeinterface.substack.com/p/the-interpreter-gap
They might be relevant to this discussion.
Benedikt, I share the frustration, but I'm not sure the name is where the problem lives. Human factors has been through this cycle. The Human Factors Society became the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in 1992, usability became UX, and each rename was supposed to fix how people understood the work. Stakeholders read a role by what they see it deliver. If the visible output is screens, the role gets filed as screens, whatever the title says. What changes the perception is tying the work to decisions: the feature that got cut, the error rate that dropped, the requirement that changed because of what the research found. Once people see that, the title starts to matter much less.