The UX Defined UX Designer Is No More

UX is now an acknowledged business process across several industries. Having grown out of Human Factors, Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design, UX is increasingly witnessing scholarly attention outside these historical roots. However, this popularity of UX also seems to have caused a broadening of the UX concept – where several non-UX professional roles and perspectives now shape its meaning. This makes its relationship with interaction design more ambiguous and possibly more diluted, potentially widening the gap between UX as an academic focus and its associated professions. Therefore, we seek to empirically briefly explore how UX is treated in HCI textbooks, as well as current design-related job postings. To that end, a research-practice analysis was conducted based on a literature review and an empirical analysis of job postings for UX design-related professions.Based on this limited study, we suggest that these multidisciplinary perspectives have transformed UX into a kind of placeholder for any ‘interaction’ experience, within the set of academic definitions and included job postings. Moreover, it becomes clear that within the scholarly HCI debate this transformation is accepted and fostered – as it borrows theories from other disciplines that are driving these different perspectives. To that end, it can be argued that UX has developed to be a holistic business perspective – rather than a product specific perspective – where a multitude of non-traditional UX-roles take part in a businesses’ UX efforts. Resulting from this development, we argue that UX nominally has become somewhat decoupled from its roots in the interaction design profession