FaUX: The Rise of Fake UX (And How to Know If You're Practicing It)

Every organisation claims to be user-centered now. It's table stakes. The language of UX has permeated boardrooms, investor decks, and job descriptions across industries. We have more designers employed than ever before, more research tools than we could possibly use, and more frameworks than any single team could implement.

And yet.

Something's off. Despite all this UX maturity, users still encounter baffling experiences daily. Designers burn out at alarming rates. Research findings gather dust. The gap between what organisations say about their commitment to users and what they actually ship has never felt wider.

I have a name for this phenomenon: FaUX — Fake UX.

FaUX is what happens when organisations adopt the aesthetics of user-centered design without the accountability. The rituals exist. The job titles exist. The workshops happen. But the feedback loop between understanding users and actually serving them better? Broken.

The Anatomy of FaUX

FaUX manifests in predictable patterns. You'll recognise them immediately—either from your own organisation or from products you've had the misfortune of using.

Process Theatre

This is FaUX at its most visible: the performance of user-centered design without the substance.

Fakeshops. Workshops conducted with full zeal and zest. Sticky notes flying around, everyone clutching multiple Sharpies, Miro boards so dense you'd need to zoom for an hour to parse them. Great energy. Impressive documentation. Outcomes that are "ready for action." Except no action is ever taken. The documents slide into a void where no one looks at them again. A few weeks later, you repeat the entire exercise.

Checkbox research. Running a single usability test so someone can write "validated with users" in a slide deck. The findings don't influence anything. They weren't meant to. The research existed to satisfy a process requirement, not to generate insight.

Fake validation. Executives referencing their conference keynotes or webinar Q&As as "talking to users." Internal demos to colleagues framed as user testing. Confirmation bias dressed up as discovery.

Synthetic user dependency. Using AI-generated personas or simulated user responses as a substitute for actual human research. As I've written before, AI cannot replicate the emotional richness, contradictions, and contextual messiness of real human beings. Synthetic users give you synthetic insights.

Structural Disempowerment

This is FaUX embedded in how organisations are built. The designers exist, but they've been architecturally prevented from influencing outcomes.

The decorative UX function. A UX team that's there for show. Their work carries no weight. No one with decision-making authority pays attention to their recommendations. They're a line item that makes the org chart look modern.

Post-decision design. Designers brought in after the solution has already been determined by others. Their job isn't to solve problems—it's to make predetermined solutions look presentable. Painting by numbers into an already laid-out canvas.

Proximity without influence. UX positioned so close to development that there's literally no scope to change anything substantive. The role has been reduced to producing high-fidelity wireframes on a timeline that permits no iteration.

The HIPPO effect. Highest Paid Person's Opinion. In the review meeting, an executive says, "I don't like blue, and I think users want a dashboard," despite data proving otherwise. The team pivots to please the executive. Research becomes decoration; intuition (of the powerful) becomes strategy.

Surface-Level Craft

This is FaUX disguised as quality. The work looks impressive but misses the point entirely.

Pixel perfection, zero usability. Interfaces polished to a gleaming shine, with no attention paid to whether humans can actually use them. Aesthetic refinement as a substitute for functional design. As I've explored in reducing cognitive load for usability, real usability is about making things easier to process, not prettier to look at.

Lipstick on a pig. Beautifully designed forms connecting to a fundamentally broken service experience. The UI is gorgeous; the underlying journey is a nightmare. The design team has optimised the visible 10% while the invisible 90% remains hostile to users.

Metrics theatre. Tracking NPS, CSAT, or satisfaction scores that leadership celebrates in good quarters and conveniently ignores when they decline. Measurement without accountability. Dashboards that exist to provide comfort, not insight.

The Infinite Backlog

FaUX has a favourite graveyard: the product backlog.

UX recommendations get "prioritised"—which means they're added to a list where they'll sit indefinitely behind revenue features and technical debt. The research was done. The insights were documented. The recommendations were made. They're just never going to be implemented.

Discovery without delivery. Months of research, zero shipped improvements. The organisation can claim it invested in understanding users while conveniently never acting on that understanding.

The FaUX Diagnostic: How to Know If You're Practicing It

Here's a self-assessment. Be honest with yourself.

1. Trace your last three research studies. How many findings were implemented? If the answer is less than half, you might have a FaUX problem. If you can't even locate the findings, you definitely do.

2. When was the last time UX research changed a significant product decision? Not refined a decision. Changed it. If you can't point to a concrete example in the past year, your research function may be decorative. Remember: users are fickle, but their whys are not—if you're not uncovering and acting on those whys, you're doing FaUX.

3. Where does UX sit in your decision-making hierarchy? Are designers in the room when strategy is set, or are they briefed afterward? Do they have the authority to push back, or only to execute?

4. What happens when UX recommendations conflict with executive preferences? If HIPPO always wins, your user-centered process is a fiction.

5. How much time elapses between research and implementation? If insights routinely go stale before they're acted upon, the feedback loop is broken.

6. Do your workshops produce outcomes that actually ship? Pull up the artifacts from your last three Fakeshop—sorry, workshop—sessions. How many of those sticky-note insights made it into the product?

7. Is your design team measured on craft or outcomes? If success is defined by pixel perfection and stakeholder approval rather than user behaviour change, you're optimising for the wrong thing.

Why FaUX Persists

FaUX isn't usually malicious. It persists because it's functional—for the organisation, if not for users.

FaUX is comfortable. Real UX requires confronting uncomfortable truths. Users might hate your product. Your assumptions might be wrong. The feature your CEO championed might be solving a problem no one has. FaUX lets organisations feel innovative and user-focused without the discomfort of actually changing anything.

FaUX satisfies process requirements. Many organisations have mandated "user research" or "design reviews" as stage gates. FaUX checks those boxes efficiently. The process happened. The documentation exists. No one examines whether it influenced anything.

FaUX is cheaper in the short term. Real UX requires time, resources, and organisational patience. It means sometimes killing features, extending timelines, and admitting mistakes. FaUX keeps the trains running on schedule. The costs show up later—in technical debt, user attrition, and redesign cycles—but later is someone else's problem.

FaUX protects power structures. When UX has real influence, it redistributes decision-making authority. Suddenly, data about user behaviour matters more than executive intuition. Not everyone welcomes that shift. FaUX maintains the appearance of user-centricity while keeping traditional power structures intact.

FaUX is hard to measure. How do you prove that a workshop was performative? That research was ignored? That a design team is disempowered? The absence of impact is harder to quantify than its presence. FaUX thrives in measurement gaps.

The Cost of FaUX

FaUX isn't free. Organisations pay for it—just not immediately and not in ways that show up on obvious balance sheets.

Designer Burnout and Attrition

Nothing erodes morale faster than feeling like your work doesn't matter. Designers who spend months on research that's ignored, who watch their recommendations die in backlog purgatory, who are brought in to decorate decisions they had no part in making—they leave. They leave for organisations where they might actually influence outcomes. Or they leave the field entirely.

The cost of replacing a designer is substantial. The cost of losing institutional knowledge and team continuity is worse. The cost of building a reputation as a place where design doesn't matter? That affects every future hire.

Compounding Experience Debt

Every ignored insight, every unimplemented recommendation, every user pain point that gets backlogged indefinitely—these accumulate. Like technical debt, experience debt compounds. Small usability issues become ingrained user behaviours (workarounds, avoidance patterns, support ticket habits). By the time the organisation decides to address them, the fix requires not just solving the original problem but undoing the adaptations users built around it.

User Attrition You Can't Diagnose

Users rarely announce why they're leaving. They just leave. They encounter one too many frustrations, find an alternative, and quietly disappear from your metrics. FaUX makes this attrition invisible because the research that might explain it either wasn't done or wasn't heeded. You know users are churning; you don't know why, so you can't fix it.

Erosion of Competitive Advantage

In mature markets, experience is often the primary differentiator. When your UX function is performative, you're not building that advantage—you're just maintaining parity (at best) while competitors who take UX seriously pull ahead. The gap widens slowly, then suddenly.

The Cynicism Tax

Perhaps the most insidious cost: FaUX breeds organisational cynicism. When people watch user-centered language deployed without user-centered action, they stop believing. They stop trying. "We'll just do what the executives want anyway" becomes the unspoken operating principle. This cynicism is contagious and persistent. It outlasts any individual initiative to "fix culture."

The Path Forward

Recognising FaUX is the first step. Escaping it is harder—it requires structural change, not just attitudinal shifts.

In Part II of this series, I'll explore what Real UX (RUX) looks like in practice: how to measure UX impact in ways that matter to the business, how to build accountability into design processes, and how to move from UX as a nice-to-have add-on to Product and UX operating as a unified function with shared outcomes.

Because the goal isn't just to stop faking it. It's to build organisations where understanding users genuinely shapes what gets built.

If you recognised your organisation in this piece—or worse, recognised your own practice—I'd like to hear about it. What does FaUX look like where you work? Find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.