UX Is Broken – and No One Wants to Admit It
Customer experience has become one of the central discourses of contemporary organizations. It appears in strategies, roadmaps, metrics, and executive presentations. Yet rarely does anyone stop to ask what customer experience actually means today – or whether it still corresponds to the reality in which people live, act, and make decisions.
I argue that the foundation of customer experience, and particularly UX thinking, is broken. Not because individual design solutions are poor, but because the entire conceptual framework rests on a world that no longer exists. And this is something few are willing to acknowledge.
It is important to clarify what “broken” means in this context. Customer experience is not broken in the sense that it no longer functions at all. It continues to produce results, reports, and decisions. It is broken in the sense that its core assumptions about humans, context, and action are outdated. The model functions technically, but it explains a reality that no longer exists.
In this sense, the issue is not merely that customer experience is “broken” in a colloquial sense. What we are facing is a deeper phenomenon: a conceptual collapse, or an epistemic crisis. We are no longer certain what customer experience actually refers to under current conditions, yet we continue to measure it as if its meaning were self-evident.
An epistemic crisis does not mean that knowledge is no longer being produced. On the contrary, more data is generated than ever before. The crisis lies in the fact that we no longer know what this data represents. Measurement continues, but its object has become blurred.
Context Customer Experience Has Become an Assumption, Not a Question
Originally, customer experience was a research-driven starting point. It was grounded in uncertainty: we do not know how a person experiences this service, so we must go and observe, listen, measure, and test. Customer experience was a question, not an answer.
Over time, this question has turned into an assumption. Customer experience is no longer problematized; it is presumed to exist and to be under control. Metrics report its status. Dashboards indicate direction. Deviations are interpreted as edge-case errors rather than signals that the entire model might be inadequate.
Once customer experience becomes an assumption, it ceases to be an object of inquiry. It becomes a norm. And norms do not ask questions – they direct behavior.
The Customer Experience Discourse Is Trapped in Its Own Concepts
Discussion around customer experience continues to revolve around the same concepts: smoothness, ease, friction, conversion, engagement. These concepts emerged in an environment where services were linear, usage situations were bounded, and stimulus density was low.
Contemporary discourse rarely asks whether these concepts are still sufficient. They have become self-evident. When the conceptual vocabulary stagnates, so does thinking. Customer experience begins to explain itself.
As a result, everything new is forced into an old framework rather than the framework itself being re-evaluated. Customer experience does not evolve; it repeats itself.
Customer Experience Measures What It Knows How to Measure
One of the central problems of customer experience thinking is its tendency to conflate measurability with significance. What can be easily operationalized gains disproportionate weight. Clicks, paths, conversions, and latencies become proxies for experience – not because they explain experience, but because they are available.
This is not a failure of measurement per se. The problem arises when metrics cease to be instruments and begin to define reality. When this happens, customer experience no longer seeks to understand the human being, but to optimize the system from its own perspective. Experience is reduced to what fits the model.
In this sense, customer experience is not merely a poorly measured phenomenon, but a normative structure. It defines what kind of experience is considered acceptable.
At this point, it is worth stating the issue plainly. Often we are not measuring customer experience at all, but the customer’s ability to tolerate poor organizational processes. The Net Promoter Score rarely reflects satisfaction, let alone a meaningful experience. More often, it indicates whether the customer still had the energy to complain. NPS is a survival indicator, not a flourishing metric.
This does not make metrics useless, but it does make them dangerous when they are interpreted as the truth of experience. When tolerance is confused with experience, the system rewards itself simply because the customer has not yet left.
Customer Experience Does Not Tolerate Uncertainty, Even Though Reality Is Built on It
Early customer experience thinking acknowledged uncertainty. Humans were partly unpredictable, and therefore had to be studied. Contemporary customer experience thinking, by contrast, seeks to minimize uncertainty. It does so through standardization, generalization, and abstraction.
Uncertainty does not disappear; it merely becomes invisible. When customer experience models are presented as truths, deviations are interpreted as disturbances. Human behavior begins to appear erroneous when it does not conform to the model. This reverses the original relationship: the model becomes the measure of reality, not the other way around.
In academic terms, this constitutes a category error. In practical terms, it means that humans are forced to adapt to a model that was originally meant to adapt to them.
The Language of Customer Experience Is Fluent, but No Longer Explanatory
Customer experience discourse today is remarkably fluent. It employs persuasive terminology, visual representations, and narratives that create an impression of deep understanding. This very fluency makes critical examination difficult.
When language works too well, it ceases to reveal its limitations. Customer experience is spoken of as if it were a universal phenomenon, even though it is in fact a historical construct, shaped by specific technological, economic, and cultural conditions.
The fact that customer experience sounds credible does not mean that it is conceptually sufficient.
Why This Has Not Been Questioned Earlier
It is tempting to ask why the structural problems of customer experience thinking have not been more widely identified earlier. The answer is neither conspiracy nor incompetence, but success. Customer experience has worked well enough for long enough.
This is precisely what makes the situation problematic. When a model functions adequately, its limitations become visible only when the environment changes faster than the model can adapt. That point has now been reached. The foundational assumptions of customer experience have not collapsed overnight; they have gradually drifted away from reality.
This drift cannot be corrected by refining the old model. It requires acknowledging that the starting point itself is flawed.
The User Is No Longer the Human Being Customer Experience Originally Referred To
Contemporary customer experience models are based on an assumption of a rational, relatively stable actor making decisions within a service. In reality, humans operate within constant stimulus overload, overlapping contexts, and frequent cognitive strain.
A person does not encounter a service in isolation. A person is not a “user” in the sense in which the concept was originally developed. A person is a dynamic state system, whose experience is shaped by physiological condition, environment, time pressure, prior experiences, social signals, and countless other factors that no single interface controls.
Customer experience models nevertheless continue to treat the human being as if they were an internal component of the system rather than an organism embedded in an environment. This simplification is not neutral; it shapes measurement, interpretation, and ultimately decision-making.
A human being is not a user. The user is an abstraction created to simplify system design and implementation. It is a technical construct, not an anthropological truth. Human decision-making is influenced more by alertness, blood sugar, stress, and environment than by button color or interface layout.
Contemporary customer experience thinking refuses to acknowledge this whole. Not because it is unknown, but because it does not fit easily into existing models. What cannot be easily measured is systematically rendered invisible.
Environment, Context, and Stimulus Density Have Changed – the Models Have Not
Over the past decade, the world has changed more radically than most customer experience models are willing to admit. Stimulus density has increased, decision-making has fragmented, and technological intermediaries have multiplied. Yet customer experience is still often measured using the same logic as before.
The service is still treated as a discrete event, even though it is in reality only one signal among many. Customer experience does not emerge within the service itself, but within the person’s overall state. When this is ignored, metrics begin to measure system convenience rather than human reality.
At this point, customer experience no longer describes experience, but the system’s assumption of what experience should be.
The End of the Linear World
The crisis of customer experience does not stem from malice or neglect, but from a historical transition. The core models of customer experience were developed for a world that was fundamentally linear. Services had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The user entered the system, completed a task, and exited. Experience was a path.
That world has ended. Contemporary digital reality is not a path but a field. It is always on, overlapping, and continuously interrupted. Humans no longer “use” services; they exist simultaneously within the influence of multiple systems. In this environment, customer experience does not arise from a single interaction, but from a dynamic state that linear models cannot capture.
Applying old models to this reality inevitably produces distortion. This does not make the models morally wrong, but it does render them conceptually insufficient.
Customer Experience Lives in a World That No Longer Exists
Many current customer experience practices are implicitly rooted in the past – in a world where the user was focused, channels were limited, and interaction unfolded in clear stages.
That world is gone. Yet the models persist. They offer an illusion of certainty in a situation where reality has become more complex than the models allow. This creates a sense of control while genuine understanding erodes.
In this sense, customer experience is not merely outdated. It is structurally dishonest with respect to the reality it claims to describe.
This Is Not the Fault of Individual Professionals
It is important to state this clearly: the problem does not lie with individual designers, researchers, or developers. Most operate to the best of their ability using the tools and concepts available to them.
The problem is structural. It arises when an entire profession, educational system, and business logic rest on the same foundational assumptions, and when no one has a genuine incentive to challenge them. When metrics, career paths, and organizations are built on the same logic, critical examination easily remains marginal.
The Problem Is Structural, Not Operational
Customer experience cannot be fixed by adding more tests, fine-tuning metrics, or updating design systems. These are operational responses to a structural problem.
A structural problem requires structural examination. First, we must define what we actually mean by customer experience. Second, we must identify the assumptions about human behavior embedded in our models. Third, we must assess to what extent these assumptions correspond to present-day reality. Without this examination, customer experience remains a polished narrative about a world that no longer exists.
If Customer Experience Were Honest, It Would Start Here
An honest approach to customer experience would not begin with solutions, but with doubt. It would acknowledge that current models are partial, historically contingent, and limited. It would accept that not everything meaningful can be measured, and that measurement itself shapes what we consider real.
This situation is not a dead end. An epistemic crisis is also an opportunity. It forces us to revisit the questions that were abandoned as customer experience became institutionalized. What does a human being experience? Where does experience emerge? Under what conditions can it be understood at all?
Hope does not arise from new metrics or better tools, but from honesty about what we do not yet know.
This article does not attempt to fix customer experience. Its purpose is to pose a justified question: do current customer experience models still correspond to the world in which people actually live?
I will return to this question next time.