As a UX designer, I've worked with plenty of things that isn't strictly UI. Unless you count functions like the support staff a kind of UI, which it arguably is

As a UX designer, I've worked with plenty of things that isn't strictly UI. Unless you count functions like the support staff a kind of UI, which it arguably is (a kind of UI to the company or service offered). At some point, I started calling myself "service designer" instead, because UX as a concept was fairly easily appropriated by visual designers (I guess what you call "UI designers") to mean "appearance." Otherwise, what term do you use to mean that you're working to improve the experience of using a service across all interaction points it offers? I.e., across boundaries of particular screens, particular systems, particular company functions, or even particular companies in a few cases. But I'd like to point out that it sounds like that, even while criticizing the wasteful focus on "look and feel," the look and feel seems to be exactly what bothers you, not the functionality behind it. If only functional changes mattered, we wouldn't register either way if they decided change the visuals of the system. You wouldn't need skins if the impact of it were immaterial to you. It ends up that visuals are functional as well, and there's no hard line to draw between aesthetics and functionality. If I were to draw up a system that has great information architecture, navigation/findability, affordances, and the rest of it, but used terrible contrasts and font-weight: 100 everywhere, I would still have failed at making it usable. I do agree that many designers seem to have some kind of pornographic relationship to UI, where they revel in it for its own sake. Personally, I consider UI to be cartilage: there should be as little as possible of it (but not less), and it should perform its function and stay out of the way as much as possible. What "be as little as possible of it" and "staying out of the way" means is very contextual to service itself and the people using the service, which is why it is hard to establish a universally objective notion of what this means. It always ends up being an exploration to balance a vast set of variables. Maybe Apple is completely right in making macOS more iOS-like, since familiarity is one way of staying out of the way, and they seem to want to focus on people who own an iDevice, but no Mac. But their current take on it has me worried that they've lost interest in accessibility (in all meanings of the word) as a design goal.