First things first; I believe that we are in the middle of a massive bubble in UX. In this article, I’d like to try and explain my thinking on this, what I’ve observed, the problems around it and what I think happens next.
This is not a negative reflection on anyone currently working as a UX designer, or anyone who is interested in pursuing a career in UX design.
Last night, I had dinner with two of my UX designer friends whom I hadn’t seen all year due to the COVID pandemic lockdown restrictions and stay-at-home directives. It came up pretty quickly in our conversation that all three of us had been independently thinking more about the “UX bubble” problem over the course of the year. This is something I first started observing and thinking about around 2015, but I would argue that it has only continued to increase since then, to the point where it has been extra hard to ignore over the last couple of years in particular.
UX is talked about as if it’s Bitcoin
“Is it too late to get into UX?”
At least every second person I speak to or read about who has recently become interested in pursuing “UX Design” is changing their career from a completely unrelated field to that of design, or “technology” more broadly. Previous careers for these pivots might include fields like: journalism, finance, marketing, hospitality, nursing etc.
The questions I see repeatedly:
Just finished my Graphic Design studies, now I would like to switch/specialize my career path into UX
I just finished architectural school and graduated with a bachelor’s degree, however I want to move into UX/UI design instead.
This brings us to an important characteristic of bubbles: they require the wider public to get involved. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing in UX right now.
The Paradoxes of UX
There are a number of paradoxes that sit at the heart of the UX bubble; these paradoxes are contradictory narratives that are always independently talked about as if they are somehow both true, but when viewed together, seem to cancel each other out.
The Bootcamp Paradox
Narrative #1: The constellation of UX is so vast, complex and specialised that no one could ever hope to understand even a small fraction of everything it encompasses.
Narrative #2: You can learn everything about UX in a 12 week bootcamp, then immediately join any company as a Mid-Senior UX Designer at a high base salary.
Inwardly, the message of bootcamps and UX courses tells us that “everything can be learned in 3 months”, yet outwardly, the message is often “UX is so huge that no single person could ever fully understand everything”.
The Demand Paradox
Narrative #1: There is a seemingly infinite demand for UX Designers, therefore, transitioning into a UX role is a guaranteed one way ticket to the job of your dreams.
Narrative #2: Companies have bottomless demand and not enough candidates to fill UX roles.
One narrative I’ve heard is that there’s an unprecedented amount of demand for UX designers, therefore, we’re seeing more people getting into UX design to help fill that demand. I don’t think this is true.
While there are certainly a bunch of UX design roles at many companies, I do think that the demand is slightly skewed. After talking to dozens of UX designers, managers and recruiters over the last few years, the truth is that the demand for “good” UX designers is very high, specifically because they are so hard to find.
If you talk to anyone trying to hire a UX designer, you will hear some variation of the same anecdote:
“We’ve had so many applications from recent bootcamp graduates, all with the same skillsets, resumes, portfolios and mock projects. The applications we bring in for an interview all say the right things in the interview, but the moment we ask them to explain further, they aren’t able to do so.”
The Salary Paradox
Narrative #1: UX is so easy that anyone can transition from a career with zero design experience and become a fully qualified UX designer in a matter of weeks.
Narrative #2: UX designers possess an incredible skillset that commands $100,000+ salaries right out of bootcamp.
If UX is so easy that anyone can transition from a career with zero design experience and become a fully qualified UX designer in a matter of weeks, then at face value, it would seem that being a UX designer requires little to no specific knowledge, and almost anyone could become a UX designer with nothing more than a bootcamp certificate.
On the other hand, I’ve personally interviewed bootcamp graduates who were told by their teachers and classmates that asking for a $100,000+ salary right out of the gate was not only reasonable, but that’s what they were entitled to, as someone who has this incredible skillset that companies have bottomless demand for, and not enough candidates to fill UX seats faster than they’re popping up.
Great Expectations of Bootcamp Graduates
Partly due to the bootcamp mantra of being “industry ready”, many Junior UX Designers emerge from these short courses with unrealistic expectations.
I’d like to recount a personal example of this that really stuck with me to explain the vibe of what I mean; and while this is just one particular example, it is very similar to many other experiences I have had with recent bootcamp graduates, and very similar to other stories I have heard from other friends of mine who have interviewed UX and front-end developer graduates looking for their first role.
In 2019, I interviewed a front-end development bootcamp graduate, who had just transitioned from a career in marketing to development via a 12 week bootcamp course and was interested in joining the company I was working at as a full time junior front-end developer. They were also keen to work out a way to work “full time”, but only do a 4 day work week (which is something we had historically been able to facilitate for other employees).
The interview went okay, until towards the end, when they asked how much money the role would be paying; I said that it was something to be discussed with my boss, but I asked if they had a number in mind. They quickly responded with “120”, as my eyes popped out of my head with genuine confusion. I had to clarify by asking “wait, do you mean $120 per hour… or $120,000 per year?”, to which they replied “per year”.
I explained how $120,000 per year was not a realistic expectation for a junior developer role, to which they quickly replied “Oh… but that’s because I’m after 4 days, right? What if I did do a full 5 day week?”. Again, I was taken aback, and had to clarify that $120,000 is a senior developer salary, and they should expect that it will take a number of years of experience to get there.
They listened to what I had said, then told me that the reason they asked for $120,000 per year is that one of their friends from the bootcamp had just got a job somewhere else as a “React Developer” and was being paid that amount. I said that sounded really unusual, and it’s not a realistic expectation to take to your future interviews for junior roles.
My final shock from the interview was that after we had gone over all of this, with my recommendation being to find a cool place that will mentor them as a junior developer and help them gain some real world experience so they could move closer to the “senior” role over time, their ultimate take away from this interview was “Okay, well, it sounds like I just need to apply for ‘React Developer’ roles then, in that case”.
The Market is Flooded with UX Designer Clones
Bootcamps are producing clones. In fact, I’ve heard that some bootcamp teachers are now advising students not to display the bootcamp on their CV/resume, precisely because hiring managers have become wary of the identical portfolios and skill sets.
With so many UX designers coming into the field with no prior experience in design at all, many companies and UX designers both seem puzzled when either side has seemingly unreasonable expectations. Companies are under the impression that a UX Designer would understand most fundamentals of design, and UX Designers are under the impression that they were not hired to have any such understanding. This has led many to hedge their bets by also learning UI design.
The UX around UX Kind of Sucks
Why does everything related to UX make everything feel way more complicated than it should? For people who focus on user experience as a career, almost all of the UX related diagrams, graphs, videos and educational material looks like it was designed by the same people running Agile workshops.
One bias that most fields have is to overrate their own importance and progress, and I don’t think UX is any exception to this. There are clear incentives to inflate the importance and complexity of UX.
UX is Out of New Ideas
In the annual “State of UX” in 2021, instead of the usual “trends” related to design, we’re gifted with 100 “lessons” on almost everything besides design for the year to come. The field is even encouraging us to stop using certain words altogether; when did we give “UX” permission to become the ministry of language?
Back in 2016, Fast Company published an article called “5 Design Jobs That Won’t Exist In The Future”:
User experience designers are among the most in-demand designers working today. So how could their jobs disappear? According to Teague designers Clint Rule, Eric Lawrence, Matt McElvogue, “UX design” has become too broad and muddled. “The design community has played fast and loose with the title ‘UX designer,’” they write in an email. “From job posting to job posting and year to year, it jumps between disparate responsibilities, tools, and disciplines. Presently it seems to have settled on the title representing democratized design skills that produce friendly GUIs.” In the future, they predict that UX design will divide into more specialized fields. “The expanding domain of user experience and its myriad disciplines will push the title ‘UX designer’ to a breaking point, unbundling its responsibilities to the appropriate specialists,” they say.
The hyper-specialisation problem seems to have only gotten worse. UX has become progressively less and less about UX over time.
Even the most commonly recommended book for UX design was written in 1988, where abstractions are used to describe things related to modern software design. We’re seeing a bombardment of UX articles with abstract titles like “What Star Wars can teach us about UX” which create an infinite series of fictional parallels that can be passed off as something new, distracting us from the fact that the real springs of knowledge and ideas have likely dried up long ago.
We may have reached the point of diminishing returns.
When the Bubble Pops
So what happens when this bubble inevitably pops?
I think we’re already starting to see the early signs. Every hiring manager I talk to has the same story about sorting through dozens of nearly identical bootcamp portfolios. Companies that went on UX hiring sprees a few years ago are quietly wondering if they actually needed all those positions. The signal-to-noise ratio has gotten so bad that I know recruiters who now specifically filter out candidates based on certain bootcamp names.
Here’s what I think the collapse looks like:
The first thing that will happen is companies will realise they don’t actually need a dedicated UX team of 10 people who all do roughly the same thing. The role will either get absorbed back into product design, development, and product management, or it will hyper-specialise into specific disciplines like research, interaction design, or information architecture. I suspect the generic “UX Designer” title will go the way of “webmaster” - a relic of a time when we hadn’t quite figured out how to divide up responsibilities yet.
The bootcamps will follow. When their graduates can’t find jobs anymore, enrollment will tank. Some will quietly rebrand into something else, others will just shut down. The ones that survive will probably be forced to get honest about what they’re actually selling: an introduction to design thinking, not a complete education that makes you “industry ready” in 12 weeks.
Salary expectations will come back down to earth pretty quickly. When you have thousands of people competing for the same junior roles, wages fall. That’s just how it works. The bootcamp graduate who was told to expect $100,000+ out of the gate will find themselves competing for positions that pay what junior roles have always paid.
For a while, I think “UX Designer” on a resume might actually hurt you rather than help you. Hiring managers who have been burned one too many times by disappointing interviews will start filtering these candidates out. The people with genuine skills will probably rebrand themselves with more specific titles that actually signal what they’re good at.
And those paradoxes I mentioned earlier? They’ll resolve themselves in the least comfortable way possible. You can’t simultaneously claim that UX is impossibly vast while also saying anyone can learn it in 12 weeks. You can’t have bottomless demand while thousands of UX designers can’t find work. You can’t command high salaries for skills that supposedly take three months to acquire. Eventually, reality wins.
The actual practice of creating good user experiences will survive all of this, because it has to. But I think it’ll be done by product designers, researchers, developers, and product managers who actually understand their specific craft. The people who genuinely care about users and have spent years developing real expertise will be fine. They’ll just stop calling themselves “UX Designers.”
The part that bothers me most is thinking about all the people who made career changes in good faith, who were told that UX was their ticket to a better life. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to bootcamps that promised them the world. They trusted that the narratives they were being sold were true. When this all comes crashing down, it’s going to be really painful for a lot of well-meaning people who just wanted a better career.
But I’ve never seen a bubble that didn’t eventually pop. The only real question is when.
