“A Good Baseline”: Is UX Writing Science or Art?
Updated Februar, 2026 by Dr. Katharina Grimm
Dr. Katharina Grimm is a UX Writer, educator, and founder of The UX Writing School with 8+ years of industry experience and PhD in Technology Management and Communications.
In the last ten or so years, UX Writing has gained visibility and recognition as a discipline — and with that visibility has come a growing tension around how we understand our craft. Is it primarily a creative task, one that's about empathizing with the user and addressing their emotional needs while following certain rules? Or is it a technical, evidence-based discipline that follows structured principles, with creativity as a secondary ingredient?
And I know what you're thinking: "Both." Or: "Well, sometimes it's more the first, sometimes more the second."
Not today.
Finding a clear answer to this question actually matters — not just philosophically, but practically. It affects how we teach, hire, and evaluate UX Writers. It shapes whether our work is treated as strategic or ornamental, as evidence-based or intuitive. It determines how we explain and advocate for UX Writing within product teams. It shapes how we define quality. In short: it affects everything about how we do our job.
And the debate isn't always driven by careful, balanced analysis. Sometimes it's inflamed by bold public statements — like this one from Carl Rivera, CDO at Shopify, which drew heavy criticism across the UX community:
"I want to get away from terms that make our craft more science than art. AI enables anyone to make things usable: our job is to make them unforgettable. We hire for taste. For aesthetics. For a point-of-view. Anyone can generate a good baseline."
This statement was widely criticized for suggesting that AI has leveled the field of usability to the point where craft is reduced to taste — and that good UX can, essentially, be generated by anyone. It downplays the complexity of conceptualizing digital systems and the expertise required to do so. And most significantly, it implies that what makes our work valuable lies in aesthetics rather than function.
I find statements like this one genuinely concerning. They can encourage decision-makers to wrongfully devalue UX work to something that can be handed off to AI already — while the reality is that these tools are still far from understanding context, consequence, or user psychology. A 2025 Lyssna survey found that 54% of designers report their clients want to jump on AI trends without clear use cases ResearchGate — exactly the dynamic Rivera's framing risks enabling.
But is everything about Rivera's perspective wrong? Aesthetics do play a role in digital experience and brand building. And yes, there's a real risk that as AI becomes more integrated into product development, digital products will start to look and sound increasingly generic and interchangeable.
So: science or art? Let's work through this properly.
What Is Art? What Is Science?
To evaluate where UX Writing sits, we need to be clear about what each of these terms actually means.
Art, fundamentally, is a form of self-expression. It is subjective, interpretive, and emotionally driven. It often exists for its own sake, or to convey a personal or cultural experience. Its meaning shifts depending on context and audience, and it is evaluated by criteria like originality, aesthetic value, and emotional impact. The personality and lived experience of the author plays a central role. Art exists to provoke thought, evoke emotion, and shift perspective.
Science, by contrast, is the structured pursuit of understanding reality and developing reliable solutions within it. It relies on research, testing, analysis, and repeatable methods to uncover patterns and produce usable knowledge. Scientific thinking is systematic, guided by a commitment to evidence. Subjective viewpoints and biases must be identified and accounted for in order to produce solutions that actually hold up.
Reading those definitions in relation to UX Writing, a verdict becomes clear: product copy is not written to express the writer's vision. Content is not designed to reflect the content designer's perspective on the human condition. It is created to solve a problem for the user.
UX Writing Is Not About Self-Expression
The role of a UX Writer is to guide, support, and inform — often in high-stakes, high-friction, or time-sensitive moments. When a user resets a password, grants access to personal data, or tries to understand a pricing change, the language we provide must do more than sound good.
These moments require cognitive knowledge, linguistic precision, awareness of technical constraints and dependencies, backend logic, and design requirements. A broad vocabulary is not the primary qualification. Poetic instinct is not the primary qualification.
And when UX Writing is done well, users won't notice it. Just as in UX design, the results of our work contribute to an overall seamless experience — one that the user moves through without friction and without needing to consciously process. That's the goal.
There's no gallery opening for invisible writing. No artist's statement. The measure of success is not that users found it beautiful — it's that they didn't get stuck.
Art in an Artless Craft
With that established: no, UX Writing is not a form of art. Not even when the definition is stretched to accommodate Rivera's apparent framing of the discipline. But that doesn't mean UX Writing is entirely free from elements that art also draws on.
Zeitgeist plays a real role in UX. The general set of ideas, feelings, and cultural sensibilities that characterize a specific period shapes what feels appealing and resonant to a broad audience right now. A UX Writer who is attuned to that register will produce work that lands differently than one who isn't.
Human emotions are also essential ingredients in both art and UX. The words we write, the rhythm of a sentence, the warmth or neutrality of a message — all of these shape the user experience. And every user experience is, at its core, a human experience. We can't and shouldn't strip the human element from our craft and reduce it to pure analytics.
In these respects, UX and art share certain sensibilities. But that partial overlap is exactly what makes Rivera's framing dangerous — because it takes something real (the human, emotional dimension of UX) and uses it to justify a framework (hire for taste, prioritize aesthetics) that is fundamentally incompatible with how good UX actually works.
The Empathy Trap — and Why Aesthetics Is the Same Problem by Another Name
"Hiring for aesthetics" means hiring someone to build something aesthetically pleasing — or more specifically, something that both the hiring manager and the candidate find aesthetically pleasing. A shared sense of taste, essentially.
The problems with this approach multiply quickly:
Just because a hiring manager or CDO finds something aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean the end users will.
Just because something is aesthetically pleasing doesn't mean it creates a good experience — seamlessness and beauty are different things.
Putting aesthetics at the center of design and writing decisions makes it nearly impossible for teams to give structured feedback or defend design choices with anything other than personal preference.
User testing under this framework risks collapsing into simple preference polls: "Do you find this aesthetically pleasing?"
The problem here is subjectiveness — dressed up as a universal principle. And this problem is not new in the UX community. It's been around for a while under a different name: empathy.
We often hear UX practitioners across disciplines claim that empathy is a core skill — that our job is fundamentally about feeling what our users feel.
If you ask me, that framing doesn't hold up.
Empathy can be defined as being aware of and sharing another person's feelings, experiences, and emotions. Sounds relevant to UX, right? In theory. But are we actually able to accurately feel what our users feel? Almost certainly not. If you work in UX, you have extensive experience with digital products. You know what a burger menu is. You know what happens when you tap it. That knowledge alone makes it genuinely difficult to empathize accurately with users who don't share that background.
Add to that: age, ethnicity, cognitive and physical abilities, cultural context, prior experiences with technology. You cannot share all characteristics of all your users. And science has consistently shown that we tend to empathize more easily with people who are similar to us — which is exactly the risk summarized by the classic UX principle: "You are not your users."
Empathy, like aesthetics, is too subjective to serve as a north star for UX practitioners. Both are useful as secondary sensibilities. Neither should be the primary guide.
What the Research Says
The current state of UX makes this tension especially relevant. According to a Lyssna survey of 100 UX designers conducted in December 2025, teams are moving away from AI-heavy, aesthetics-driven approaches and toward more evidence-based workflows ResearchGate — precisely because the aesthetics-first model hasn't delivered on its promises in terms of user outcomes or market performance.
The 2024 ProductBoard Product Excellence Report found that teams using continuous discovery — structured, evidence-based research cycles — have twice as fast release cycles and 30% higher feature adoption MIT News than teams that don't. That's not an argument for stripping creativity out of UX. It's an argument for grounding it in evidence.
And according to the 2024 UX Tools Survey by UXness, accessibility and inclusive design ranked as the second most important trend shaping UX in 2025, cited by 55% of respondents. Accessibility is a scientific, standards-based discipline. It cannot be addressed through taste or aesthetic judgment. It requires knowledge of specific standards, technical constraints, and the cognitive and sensory realities of diverse users — exactly the kind of expertise that Rivera's framing renders invisible.
The Risks of Framing UX Writing as Art
When UX Writing is positioned primarily as a creative or artistic discipline, several concrete risks follow:
Bias in hiring: "Hiring for taste" tends to produce teams whose shared aesthetic reflects the cultural background, generation, and worldview of whoever is doing the hiring — excluding perspectives that would actually improve the product.
Bias in evaluation: Without evidence-based criteria, feedback becomes circular and unresolvable. ("I designed it this way because it's aesthetically pleasing." "Well, I don't find it pleasing." "I do.")
Exclusion by design: What reads as elegant, witty, or "good" to one person may be confusing, off-putting, or even culturally insensitive to another. When aesthetics leads, accessibility and inclusion tend to follow — or not follow at all.
Devaluation of expertise: Framing UX Writing as primarily about taste makes it easier for stakeholders to argue that AI can do it, or that any creative person can do it. It obscures the specific technical, linguistic, and cognitive knowledge that effective UX Writing actually requires.
Overestimation of AI: Rivera's framing assumes AI has already solved usability, leaving only the "artistic" dimension for humans. This significantly overstates what current AI tools can do with context, consequence, and user psychology.
“Framing UX Writing as primarily about taste or aesthetics doesn’t elevate the discipline — it obscures what makes it hard. Effective UX Writing requires linguistic precision, cognitive knowledge, and an understanding of how real users process information under real conditions. Rather than art or self-expression, that’s expertise.”
Art Can Refine, But Science Must Lead
Rivera's vision of unforgettable experiences is ambitious. But it has very little to do with good UX practice. As understandable as the impulse might be — to push the more mechanical parts of product building toward AI while reserving the "creative" dimension for humans — that framing misunderstands both the nature of UX and the current capabilities of AI tools.
It also ignores the collaborative intelligence of interdisciplinary product teams: designers, writers, developers, researchers, all contributing different forms of expertise. Reducing the writer's contribution to taste and aesthetics doesn't elevate UX Writing's status within that team. It diminishes it.
What is considered elegant, witty, or "cool" is not neutral. It is shaped by cultural norms, generational values, and social power structures — often without our awareness. What feels natural and appealing to one group may be confusing, exclusionary, or alienating to another. Scientific thinking helps guard against this by grounding decisions in observed behavior and evidence, not assumptions, intuition, or personal preference.
That doesn't mean creativity has no place in UX Writing. It means you need the expertise to recognize where it adds value — and where it doesn't.
“UX Writing is fundamentally a science-led discipline. Its primary function is to solve a problem for the user — not to express the writer’s perspective. Creativity and cultural attunement are valuable secondary inputs, but they cannot substitute for the linguistic, cognitive, and technical expertise that effective UX Writing requires.”
Key Takeaways
UX Writing's primary function is to guide and support users — not to express a writer's artistic vision. By definition, that makes it a science-led discipline.
Art and science share some sensibilities relevant to UX: cultural attunement, emotional awareness, human connection. But these are secondary inputs, not the foundation.
"Hiring for taste" and "prioritizing aesthetics" are versions of the same problem as "centering empathy" — they substitute subjective, unverifiable criteria for evidence-based ones.
Framing UX Writing as art makes it harder to defend, harder to evaluate, and easier to dismiss or replace.
Evidence-based approaches — research, testing, structured criteria — produce better outcomes and better advocacy for the discipline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is UX Writing a creative discipline?
UX Writing involves creative judgment, but its primary function is problem-solving, not self-expression. The most important criteria for good UX Writing are clarity, accuracy, accessibility, and alignment with user needs — all of which are evidence-based, not aesthetic.
What's the difference between UX Writing and copywriting?
Copywriting is typically aimed at persuasion and brand expression, often in marketing contexts. UX Writing focuses on guiding users through product experiences — informing, supporting, and reducing friction in high-stakes moments. The two disciplines overlap in some areas (particularly around voice and tone) but have different primary goals.
Why is "hiring for taste" a problematic approach in UX?
Taste is inherently subjective and culturally situated. Hiring based on shared aesthetic preferences tends to produce teams with narrow perspectives — which directly affects the inclusivity, accessibility, and usability of the products they build. Evidence-based hiring criteria, tied to measurable skills and knowledge, produce more reliable outcomes.
Does AI change whether UX Writing is science or art?
Not fundamentally. AI can generate serviceable copy for simple, predictable contexts. But it cannot yet reliably account for context, consequence, user psychology, accessibility standards, or cultural nuance — all of which are central to effective UX Writing. The argument that AI has "solved usability" significantly overstates current capabilities.
What role does empathy play in UX Writing?
Empathy is often cited as a core UX skill, but it's more limited in practice than the framing suggests. Because we tend to empathize more easily with people similar to ourselves, empathy as a guiding principle risks reinforcing bias rather than counteracting it. Research, testing, and structured methods provide more reliable insight into what diverse users actually need.
How should UX Writing be evaluated if not by aesthetic criteria?
By evidence-based criteria: Does the copy reduce friction? Does it improve task completion rates? Does it align with accessibility standards? Does it maintain brand voice consistently? Is it clear and accurate? These are measurable, defensible standards that give teams a shared basis for feedback and evaluation.
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