Most of the UI/UX designers that I see at work and other places are basically graphics designers. I just wish UI designers learn more about interaction design than just pure graphics design.
The challenge the profession currently faces is that a lot of people go into it for the wrong reasons and who are not suited for it. Because there is no money in traditional graphic design, many graphic designers elect UX thinking it's nearly a 1:1 transfer. There is a lot of mis-match.
You really have to really like and have a good sense of human cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have to like thinking in systems. You are basically design (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing in all its forms and in many modes.
Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to others, would really rather be designing book covers and concert posters.
I generally work with graphic designers who made the switch to calling themselves UI/UX designers because the realized it paid more. They’re much better than me at understanding composition, fonts, colors, visual hierarchy etc…, but they don’t know much at all about actually designing interactive UI.
In many cases the designers are the first people to work on engineering the product and they aren’t equipped for this work at all.
TBH, the overwhelming majority of developers assume they know a lot more about UI, UX and visual design work than they actually do... I'm continually shocked by how many think bringing in a UX person to add visual polish to an otherwise complete product in any way makes sense. In software dev environments, they necessarily have a lot of say in who gets hired. If you're not clear on who does what in the design business, you get people with shiny portfolios of app UI screens assembled in Photoshop to do your "UX" if there's enough time and budget left for the "extra" sprint.
My wife is trained in UX research and UX/UI design and is trying to break back into the job market after years of being out (kids, sick mother, school, etc.) and although she had a background in some graphic design (and marketing and content) years ago, she doesn't feel confident-in or want to emphasise on graphic design and doesn't have an up to date portfolio of that kind of thing. And what she is finding is almost all the positions titled "UX Designer" are really just "web design" or "graphic designer" with a fancy new title, and they won't look at her, really.
The few times that I've done front end work I've always found it frustrating how the UX people I worked with seemed more concerned right up-front with pixel padding and font choices and colours and animations and logos than with getting the initial storyboard and low fidelity mockups right first.
TLDR; most shops hiring "UX designer" are really wanting to hire graphic designers and pixel slingers.
P.S. if you know of anybody hiring (remote, full or part time or freelance) for UX research, content design, information architecture, and so on and who wants a mature and conscientious worker with past professional experience in the tech sector... ping me at ryan . daum @ gmail.com
What I think is worse is even when they have a formal background in UX the company never wants to utilize it. Every time it's the same junk process. Instead of deriving features from user journeys, empathy maps, and personas the company has the "UX" person generate documents that validate the feature list the customer already wanted, users be dammed. You can also forget about A/B testing or in-person testing the person at the top with a C in their title knows what their users "need" so there is no need to pay for testing.
Thought it was always funny, I guess hiring managers don't see the overlap the same way I do.
It's nearly impossible to find good UX resources for boring websites. It's all "30 clothing brand websites with cool hamburger menus".
If you're building a knowledge base, you're pretty much on your own. There's only the UK government's blog, nngroup.com and a few others.