There’s no such thing as UI “art” as a separate process from “UX”. User experience is just a vague term Norman used to describe the general impression of using digital interfaces. He’s never actually even defined what criteria constitutes “good” or “bad”. So the term is as useless as “dining experience” is for restaurants. UX designer as a title and quasi-discipline became a thing the same way “agentic engineer” is a title nowadays, they’re not actual disciplines, they’re titles void of any history that consultancy firms come up with to sell more services.

The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.

The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.