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Ian Armstrong's avatar

The real destructive touch of this UX recession has been in two parts.

1. As always (courtesy of Hang 🤙 Xu) the "doers" are fairing better than the "thinkers", which has set back strategic design and innovation by a few years. That lends itself to Seffo's law.

2. Since Jesse James Garret wrote up The Elements of UX in the late 90s we've never really done the content side of UX design properly. Narrative architecture, the true wild west of UX (despite being a fundamental pillar), just took an absolute nosedive with this recession. Copywriters in UX follow instructions and UX writers write clear instructional copy. Few people are currently employed to create a fusion of compelling narrative to go with our usability and IxD strategies.

All of the clean execution on research under the sun can't create a compelling story to go with with a clever UI - and narrative is dead on arrival in most UX teams. The artists who are good at it are languishing in copy roles, some approximation of content strategy roles, or are quickly running out of unemployment. Hell, just ask my wife (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cloughrey/). If you aren't writing demand gen, you aren't writing.

Obviously 1 leads to 2, and the early AI boom is trying to replicate narrative using ChatGPT. It's not going well, and is going to get worse if AI companies can't solve the model collapse problem that occurs when AI recursively ingests its own work.

The view isn't nearly as clear in that context.

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Greg Parrott's avatar

Thank you for sharing your deep insights and unique perspectives that draws from your career of extraordinary experience, Jakob! You continue to inspire and give us plenty to think about for the future of UX. Greg

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