The Golden Age of UX may be over, but not for the reasons stated

A few weeks ago an article entitled The Golden Age of UX is Over popped onto my RADAR, after causing a bit of a stir amongst the design community. If I was being generous I’d say it was a genius title, designed to spark debate amongst UX designers. If I was being slightly less generous, I’d say it was a devilishly brilliant piece of click-bait, designed to drive traffic to an agency site. Either way I had a feeling the article would annoy me, so spent the next couple of days actively ignoring it. However temptation finally got the better of me and I ended up taking the bait.

On the whole I agree with the sentiment of the title that the “Golden Age of UX” probably is over. I say that as somebody who has been working in the space since the early naughties, set up one of the first UX practices in the UK, and curates the longest running UX conference in Europe.

The field of UX started life as a small but emergent community of practice, on the fringes of conferences like SXSW and the IA Summit. It grew through the blogs of early pioneers, and through the work of consultancies like Adaptive Path and Clearleft. The community accreted around new conferences like UX Week and UX London, which, in their early years, attracted almost the entirety of the UX communities in their respective locations.