The job I spent 7 years explaining still doesn't exist.
In December 2024, Lorem UX featured me in their portrait series "Inside the office of..." Ten questions, clean format, honest answers. Reading them back, I saw the pattern: every answer, dressed up as an anecdote or a tip, was saying the same thing. I was trying to explain a job nobody understands. After 7 years, I stopped counting.
The evangelism tax
A number floats around the UX community: 76% of a UX professional's time isn't spent doing UX. It's spent explaining what UX is. Convincing teams that your role matters. I don't know if the number is accurate. What I know is that it matches what I lived for 7 years.
You're hired to design content. You spend your days justifying why content should be designed. The actual writing is maybe 5% of the job. The rest is diplomacy, education, and organizational survival.
Ben Davies-Romano, Principal Content Designer at Wise, asked the question that sums it all up: why does the burden of education fall on the shoulders of already-stretched professionals, instead of becoming an organizational priority? Felicia Wu went further: after 10 years of Content Design existing, we've explained enough. If people still don't get it, the problem is no longer pedagogical.
The invisibility paradox
The cruelest irony of the profession: the better you do your job, the more invisible it becomes. A seamless user flow, zero friction, zero confusion, zero support tickets. The stakeholder looks at the result and congratulates the devs, the designers, the product team. The words that guided the user through every step? Nobody sees them.
You can't put "zero users were lost" on a slide deck. Your best work looks like nothing happened. And management doesn't give raises for the absence of problems.
When I built wooden houses in south-west France, the wall I raised in the morning was still there in the evening. Visible, solid, undeniable. Content Design is the opposite. When it works, it looks like nothing at all. And when it looks like nothing at all, nobody understands why you're getting paid.
"So you're a copywriter, basically?"
The trap of Content Design is the word "writing." The moment people hear it, their brain shortcuts to marketing. You say UX Writer, they hear copywriter. You say Content Designer, they hear copywriter. You spend your life correcting a confusion that the job title itself creates.
The distinction is simple, though. A copywriter asks "Who's the audience?" and "What's the character limit?" A Content Designer asks "Should this button even exist?" and "Is this the right moment in the flow for this interaction?" It's a fundamentally different level of product thinking.
In France, it's worse. The profession is still emerging: no official job classification, almost no recognized training programs. You're not explaining a misunderstood job. You're explaining a job most people have never heard of.
The title carousel
And as if external confusion wasn't enough, the profession can't even agree on its own name. UX Writer. Content Designer. Product Writer. Content Strategist. UX Content Designer. Each rename is a silent admission that the previous title failed to communicate what we do. And each rename resets the explanation counter to zero.
Filipa Moreno, Senior UX Writer at Santander, summed up the exhaustion in February 2025: "I'm tired of the game, the processes, the requests for polishing copy on screens that are already being developed." Ilaya Teejay titled her piece without subtlety: "I am tired of being a UX Writer, Content Strategist, and all the roles in between."
When I started in 2019, I was a UX Writer. In 2022, a Content Designer. Today, an AI Product Builder. Three titles in 5 years, and at every pivot, the same question: "So what do you actually do?" That's partly why I left the profession. Not because I fell out of love with it. Out of exhaustion. At some point, you get tired of fighting to exist in an org chart that doesn't even know where to put you. You'd rather build something where the value is visible, immediate, undeniable. Where nobody asks whether your role is really necessary.
AI as the third layer of fatigue
For 7 years, the question was "What do you do?" Then it became "Why would we pay for that?" And now it's "Can't ChatGPT do it?"
UX job postings dropped 89% from their 2022 peak to early 2024. A third of organizations lost staff. Juniors are being replaced by tools that generate wireframes, mockups, and copy in minutes. Stakeholders now expect "one person with an infinite skillset."
In the Lorem UX interview, I talked about Microphage-1. A custom GPT I'd built to integrate all the guidelines and best practices of Content Design. My "mini-me," always available. In hindsight, it was already a sign: I was building the tool that made my own role less necessary. A few months later, I became an AI Product Builder. Survival instinct spoke before reason.
The family dinner test
The worst part is when you leave tech. Connor Doherty, UX Writer at Wayfair, found the only formula that works: "You know when you enter your credit card number wrong? I'm the one who writes the message telling you it's wrong."
Edwin Mohammad, UX Writer at GO-JEK, titled his piece without irony: "Are you a UX writer? Nobody knows what you do." Designlab even published a holiday survival guide: "How To Explain UX Design To Your Family This Holiday Season." The very existence of that article says everything.
My sister can't explain what I do. My mother can't either. My friends can't either. I've changed titles three times and at some point they just stopped asking.
Neither bitter, nor nostalgic
I don't regret those 7 years. Content Design taught me everything I know: understand a problem before solving it, think about the reader before writing a word, measure the impact of every decision. That's the foundation of everything I build today.
But I won't lie: when I read that the Nielsen Norman Group described 2025 as "a tough time to be a UX professional, with pessimism, disillusionment, and frustration widespread," I felt relief. Not because people are suffering. Because someone finally said it out loud.
The Lorem UX interview captured a specific moment. A profession that didn't quite exist yet in France, a guy trying to explain it, and a series of questions that forced me to put words on a discomfort the entire profession shares.
In 7 years, I changed titles three times. The underlying craft stayed the same: understand a problem, find the right words, build something that holds.
