A UX Carol

Ulysses Xavier, a UX designer with many titles, scrolls LinkedIn on Christmas Eve and feels his career made obsolete by AI. He laments losing the days when designers owned research and journeys. A sudden transformation replaces his modern setup with the sound of a 28.8k modem and conjures the Ghost of UX Past. The ghost transports him to 1995, where a lone webmaster named Max handles design, HTML, server configuration, and image editing. The scene highlights an era without silos, when one practitioner combined multiple web and design responsibilities.

"Ulysses was a UX designer - or a "Product Designer," or maybe a "Digital Experience Architect," or a "Product Experience Manager," depending on which day you asked him. Currently, however, he felt more like a Figma monkey. He sat in his Scandinavian designer chair, bathed in the orangey light of a dual-monitor setup (because you gotta filter out that blue light), reading yet another hot take about how AI had rendered his so-called career - which was kind of a joke, anyway - obsolete."

"When he opened them, his MacBook and monitors were gone and his Spotify playlist "Coffee Shop Background Noises" replaced by the screeching, static-filled sound of a 28.8k modem connecting to the internet. The First of the Three Spirits Standing before him was an ethereal, slightly translucent figure dressed in flannel and holding a copy of HTML for Dummies. "I am the Ghost of UX Past," the figure said, its voice crackling like a 32-kbps RealAudio. "Come with me.""

"Suddenly, Ulysses was back in 1995. He saw an attic. A solitary figure sat hunched over a CRT monitor, coding in what looked like a very old-school Apple Notes, typing on a keyboard that seemed way too clunky and loud. "Is that ... a developer?" Ulysses asked. "No," the Ghost corrected. "That is Max. He's what's called a webmaster. In this era, there are no silos. He designs the page, writes the HTML, configures the server, and crops the JPEGs in Photoshop."

Read at Medium