What did we lose when UX became UX/UI?

The term “UX/UI” has never sat right with me. In fact, I’ve never been able to stand it. Not because UI is somehow beneath UX, but because that little slash makes it far too easy to treat UX as the stuff that happens before an interface becomes pretty: flows, wireframes, interactions, then UI.

That is also why sentences like “I did the UX” make me twitch. No, you didn’t. You designed something that may shape someone’s experience. Experience is not an object, and it is not an artefact sitting somewhere between the wireframes and the final screens. It happens to a person, in a situation, with a goal, under particular conditions. We once called a conference “Design for Experience”, and I still think that little for mattered.

Take one of those classic UX comparisons involving ketchup bottles, where one bottle is “good UX” and the other is “bad UX”. Bullshit. Put a nostalgic Heinz glass bottle on a table at MacLaren’s Pub and it may be exactly right. Put a squeeze bottle in a busy burger kitchen and it may win on speed and handling. Put that same squeeze bottle on a table at Jack Rabbit Slim’s and it may be right again, this time because it reinforces the atmosphere of the place. Neither bottle contains UX. Mostly ketchup. And I’d like some mayo and pindasaus too.

The phrase “good UX” is almost as slippery. Good according to what? A 90% task success rate might be perfectly acceptable in one context and horrifying if that task is preventing a nuclear accident. The number did not change. The stakes did. We can measure success, time, errors or satisfaction, but none of those measurements magically tells us what “good” means.

This broader understanding is not nostalgia. ISO 9241 still frames usability through specified users, specified goals and a specified context of use, and it applies not just to interactive systems but also to products and services. Jesse James Garrett made a similar point from another direction: the surface is only the visible layer, sitting on top of structure, scope and strategy. Germany’s DIN SPEC 66336 for public online services also treats quality across analysis, implementation, operation and further development. All three point to the same thing: the interface is part of the context, not the boundary of it.

That is why I do not want to look back in anger at the term UX/UI. The label itself is not the whole problem, and it certainly does not determine whether someone does good work. But language shapes what we notice, what we stop asking about and where we draw the edge of the problem. Some people will probably hate this article, while others will nod along. Fair enough. Same article, different experience. Which is rather the point. What bothers me about UX/UI is not the UI. It is the boundary.