“UX” should go away. What everyone calls UX is just proper UI design. Too often the term “UX” is put on this pedestal. It’s thought of as more important or cerebral than visual design. The problem with that thinking is that UX _is_ very obviously visual. Those that try to distance UX and visual UI design often have terrible aesthetic taste and lack any creative skill.

Which should give you some indication why the design industry is a shell of its former self. The homogeneous nature of modern web products is concerning, but it makes sense unfortunately.

Actually, I'm finding that UX design translates to "documented design", i.e. providing proof for every design decision.

I find your comment very similar in tone as the article: someone who is a interface designer that has had bad experiences with UX designers.

I think this is unfortunate, because I think UX design just a definition of the process that product (digital or physical) design was already doing, and now there is a common (though still evolving) language to be able to communicate the challenges of the full product design lifecycle.

To me UX is the superset for user centered design and User Interface design is a subset of it. They are both important. UX is not UI because they are not comparisons, but parts of the same thing.

Those are my thoughts and experiences at least.

Ah, I think this is a bit simplistic, as it leaves out testing, which is critically important.

Too many UX people don't follow or even know what a proper user-centered design process looks like. Talking to users and looking at data is a lot of it. Testing is another critical component.

The other big part is to be methodical with how you do ideation, design, and prototyping.

Testing is important, absolutely. But it too can be summarized with exactly those two points. It’s part of the same cycle. The proper way to test anything is to launch it, talk to users.. and look at your data.