4. UX ≠ UI: I make interfaces because that’s my job, bro

Yeah, we went down the wrong path, but it’s not really our fault.

Look at these job listings. No, these aren’t cherry-picked posts copied and pasted from generic companies and small businesses doomed for failure. They’re real, recent listings from the technology elite, the perceived-to-be successful and knowledgeable that are revered from 60 Minutes to TechCrunch:

Sr. UX/UI Designer
Amazon Corporate LLC, Seattle, WA

UI/UX Designer
Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA

Lead User Experience & UI Designer
HP, Sunnyvale, CA

UX/UI Developer
Adobe, San Jose, CA

UI/UX Designer I
Samsung Telecommunications
America, San Jose, CA

UX/UI Mobility Designer
Dell, Round Rock, TX

Senior UX/UI Designer
GoPro, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA

UI/UX Designer
Evernote, Austin, TX

Intern UX/UI Designer
Pebble, Palo Alto, CA

Sr. UX/UI Designer
Nook, Palo Alto, CA

eCommerce UX/UI Designer
Beats by Dre, Los Angeles, CA

Lead UX/UI Mobile Designer
Logitech, Newark, CA

UI/UX Designer
Philips Global, Foster City, CA

UI/UX Developer
AutoTrader.com, Overland Park, KS

UX/UI Developer
JPMorgan Chase, New York, NY

UX/UI Designer
CBS Interactive, New York, NY

UX/UI Designer Job
American Express, New York, NY

Sr. UX/UI Designer
NBC Universal, Universal City, CA

Senior Product (UX/UI) Designer
Ancestry.com, San Francisco, CA

User Experience Designer (UX/UI)
ADP, San Dimas, CA

UX/UI Designer
NewEgg, Industry, CA

Senior Product / UX Designer
Outbrain Inc., New York, NY

UI/UX Designer
Zillow, Irvine, CA

UX/UI Information Architect
Caterpillar, Mossville, IL

UI/UX Designer
Staples, San Mateo, CA

Lead UX/UI Designer
Glassdoor, San Francisco, CA

I know. UI and UX are just acronyms (not even good ones) for “user interface” and “user experience.” And the hiring managers who listed them probably have good intentions. But blurring the two disciplines upon hiring designers has played an important role in our approach to creating technological experiences. It likely lies near the root of the commonly pervasive and disturbingly screen-obsessed approach to design. The result is that much of our lives today is dominated by digital interfaces asking us to tap, touch, swipe, click, and hover because that’s what people were hired to create.

HP CEO Meg Whitman says, “We’ve got to continue the innovation engine.”¹ Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards.”² Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “Innovation is so deeply embedded in Apple’s culture.”³

But when you specifically hire someone to generate UI, you won’t get new, innovative solutions. You’ll get more UI, not better UX.

This is UI:

Navigation, subnavigation, menus, drop-downs, buttons, links, windows, rounded corners, shadowing, error messages, alerts, updates, checkboxes, password fields, search fields, text inputs, radio selections, text areas, hover states, selection states, pressed states, tooltips, banner ads, embedded videos, swipe animations, scrolling, clicking, iconography, colors, lists, slideshows, alt text, badges, notifications, gradients, pop-ups, carousels, OK/Cancel, etc. etc. etc.

This is UX:

People, happiness, solving problems, understanding needs, love, efficiency, entertainment, pleasure, delight, smiles, soul, warmth, personality, joy, satisfaction, gratification, elation, exhilaration, bliss, euphoria, convenience, enchantment, magic, productivity, effectiveness, etc. etc. etc.

Somewhere along the way, we confused the two. And instead of pursuing the best, most creative, inventive, and useful ways to solve a problem, we started solving problems with screens because that was our job description. When we saw problems, we slapped an interface on it. UX stopped being about people, and started being about rounded rectangles and parallax animations.

It’s gotten to the point where many of our greatest minds aren’t being pushed into advancing science or taking us into space; they’re working at the new screen-based megacorporations that have surpassed oil companies in profits⁴ and political influence.⁵ They’re cranking out glorified digital billboards masked as websites and apps that are trying to monetize your eyeballs by pushing creepy ads onto all of your screens.

In the words of Jeff Hammerbacher, a former manager at Facebook and the founder of Cloudera, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”⁶

There’s a better path. There’s a better way of thinking. When we separate the two roles, we can start defining new, better experiences.

Unfortunately, some of tech’s most elite companies are stuck in a strange, complex trap.