Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered d

Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered design professionals who went to school for/taught themselves from the field of Human Computer Interaction, which involves a multitude of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for assessing usability and bringing the voice of the user early into the development lifecycle on the otherhand... now that is sorely lacking and is historically underinvested in. Their job makes your job as a developer easier, not having to redo work and waste time if they are plugged into your dev team and focusing on your users. Ask yourself, as a developer, do you feel you have the specialist skillset and expertise to truly validate designs with real people (users)? Is this something you would want to do, if only those pesky UX "design" professionals didn't take them over to justify their jobs? Let's put you in front of 10 different users of your product for an hour each, give you a facilitator guide, and have you guide them through a task-based usability review of your product. Make sure you aren't asking leading questions or biasing their responses, then synthesize the essence of all the interviews into insights to improve the product design. Finally create a read out report that you have to present to senior leadership for another hour on what you learned and how to improve the product design. Oh yeah, you now have 0 hours to code in your fulltime 9-5 job. Good luck! Note: I acknowledge a UX researcher is a full-time specialist role, however any UX designer worth a damn should be T-shaped and able to use qualitative research methods to interview users and evaluate their designs.. otherwise they are a UI designer and guessing at best.