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There have been countless articles written in the last year that amount to asking the same questions:
"Is this the the end of UX, or a new beginning?"
"Should I learn UX?"
"Should I learn QA?"
"Should I switch careers?"
These are the kinds of questions I wanted to help people navigate by making this website.
In my professional experience, the writing was on the wall by January of 2023, when Open AI's ChatGPT found it's way to the world at large.
Prior to then, I'd receive about 15 emails a day from recruiters with different job offers (I've been in UX for about 10 years).
Pretty much overnight in January of 2023, that number went down to less than 5 of these a month, and has stayed there ever since.
That's my thermometer for the UX job market.
It's been widely reported that many job listings that have been up over the last two years were in fact, not real.
What happened to UX?
If we take a step back and look at a wider perspective beyond the UX job market, we can see couple of things to be true in America, and subsequently for the world as a whole:
Over-Saturation of the Market
It's no secret a generation of humanities majors came to UX over the last decade as a way to translate empathy into experience in software, without the need for a computer science background.
Hiring UX for many years was necessary to make products useable.
As this evolved into considerable sums of money for companies to spend on UX, demonstrable ROI for UX large UX staffs became harder to produce, given that all digital products are faced with structural conventions that are over a decade old and engrained in user's expectations.
Best practices are in most cases are enough to work with for product design.
Economic Uncertainty
I'm committed to keeping this site apolitical. However, I feel the need to say economic uncertainty is bad for business. Politics is bad for business. These things are old news, but have clearly been forgotten.
Tightened purse strings for hard times don't equate to large hiring numbers -- anywhere.
High Interest Rates
Companies hire on borrowed money.
Businesses aren't likely to risk profits on new hires.
With interest rates as high as they are, hiring is set to be slow in a lot of sectors, not just tech, and not just UX or QA.
Mobile is Resolved
Mobile is basically resolved. There will always be new screen interactions to design and explore, but they will require more creativity in my opinion, and less reliance on data, and may not equate to larger numbers.
For example, innovations will continue to be made around accessibility.
If the goal is getting a customer from A to B, there's good chance the solution to that problem is for sale to anyone at a very low price as a white label product, or free on github.
Responsiveness is Resolved
For the most part, responsiveness between desktop, tablet, phone, watch, tv, whatever -- These things are also largely resolved. There will probably always be the need for some amount of device QA testing.
Products may always require a designer to make a seamless experience across platforms, but the basic idea of responsiveness is past the exploratory phase for now.
Over-Emphasis on UI
There are a lot of people who primarily do UI positioned in the job market as UX.
UX in the broadest sense is, to me, about being able to enact problem solving around human computer interaction.
One of my hopes for this site is I can provide some groundwork for problem solving as it relates to software usability, for people on the job or just looking for resources.
Cultural Shift
We are living through a moment when the user is simply not the focus. There is a lot of evidence to that in world news, and in politics.
As business leaders shift towards AI for knowledge-based services, and service-based task execution, there is evidence of a cultural change towards more regressive styles of leadership.
Products being dictated from the top down are by design not based in UX.
My personal opinion is that industry leaders in tech have not been transparent about the effects of AI on hiring in the last few years.
American job numbers are muddled by things like people signing up to drive for Uber, so it's impossible to get a clear and complete picture of the job market.
Is UX dead is 2025?
It may seem like it, but the truth is businesses who want to compete to win will always need to clearly understand their users.
It might be time for UX to re-invent itself. Hopefully this site can help you navigate adjacent positions.