Death is an inevitable thing for every human being. We all die someday as everything fades away into the dust with time. The UX design was a hot topic 4 years ago when I was working as a frontend engineer for a reputed company at that time. I was really interested to know this wonderful subject. As the time pass by I wanted to become a UX designer because I fell in love with the subject called User Experience. After nearly 4 successful years as a UX designer, I had one single question. “Are we doing the right thing?” After becoming a big fan of the Medium I build a habit of reading every article which was written about User Experience. It made me very happy because I felt like I am not alone in this world. Many writers talk about User Experience design but most of the things I have seen has been already found by someone else. User Experience has stopped evolving to its full potential. We swim in a swimming pool with water pored many years back. Now you might be wondering “What the hell are you talking about?” Before User Experience designers there were interaction designers who worked on creating better interactions and “responsive websites”. We always adopt new things as designers while some titles fade away.

I would like you to look into the following ideas where I think UX is fading away.

1. UX is about business too

We are looking into an age where UX designers have to adapt to new titles with ease not just looking into improving the overall experience of the application but be more involved in the business. Having more knowledge in the business side of the application would help the business to make good decisions while going to the future. If you only think about the focus groups and their problem you may create a wonderful product for the “users”. If you look into the business perspective of the application that would improve the overall business goals too. Most of the time we focus more on the user’s perspective and less on the business itself.

2. The conversational design is in the rise

Humans don’t like the same thing every. Sometimes we use the same objects since we don’t have a choice. The traditional UI forms are quickly becoming obsolete and will be replaced by AI’s which has better capability to create better interactions rather than typing your details or what you want you will be able to say what you want for the form to be filled. Notice that Google and Facebook have AI’s that can track the user behaviors and give suggestions to the user depending on their behavior online.

3. Lack of empathy and acceptance of diversity taken into consideration by designers

The UX design is not about creating beautiful designs. Designers should look into understanding their users with the use of empathy. The understanding of how people feel is always something designers misunderstood. The designers take empathy from their end and how they would do looking at the user’s problem from their perspective. This common mistake has to lead many applications to fail and create bad UX. Very rarely I see that designers do user research to understand that the application does not work with some user segments. The lack of understanding of diversity in different ethnic groups, races, and genders much more commonly ignored. This has created a bad experience on understanding different user types who will be affected by using this application.

4. Where is it when I need it?

Human behaviors are changed by the time of the digital age. People use to wait for things to happen in the late 80’s and 90’s. The growth of information technology and real-time service providers such as social media has made an impact on how humans behave. People want things immediately and fast. It has become same with the applications that the designers working at the moment. An implementation of a feature can keep an organization over its competitor. Missing a key feature lost in your backlog can damage the organization’s business and hurts its economy. I have seen this too much where UX designers are not taken to make business decisions but to make designs only. This has made more startups to sink than float in the current market.

5. Not taking UX seriously by the management

The power of UX is quite frightening to Engineering based organizations. Many organizations find UX as a helping tool only and the value of the UX is not taken into consideration. Many organizations keep Development environment and designers have less say in the projects. Most of the time they are treated as graphic designers or frontend designers only. Some organization does not want to have a UX process for their projects. This has made the UX just to become a buzzword in certain organizations and some Engineering communities.

6. Going down the same path because it works?

Some of us are stuck in certain domains too long we don’t know what happens outside. Some UX designers stuck themselves in Enterprise based applications and some to Consumer based applications. We create the UX processes based on the domains and keep to it because it works for us. We never look into the new technologies such as Virtual reality, Artifical intelligence, the blockchain, augmented reality and chatbots. Most of the time this happen due to lack of investment in research on these areas not allowing the UX designers to look for possible solutions. The research on these technologies would give a chance for the designers to improvements in the UX process.

7. Not sharing the knowledge among the community

The knowledge is the key to develop a better community for UX designers. For the past few years, I have seen many organizations trying to make a good community by sharing what they have learned throughout the years of experience. In some cases, I have noticed that “UX designers” lacks the basic knowledge. This is the main reason for the death of UX. If the knowledge is not shared properly people will start defining things in the wrong way. The wrong way can damage the real way of doing things because that might confuse the people who are coming to the industry from finding right from wrong.