The History of UX Design

“People ignore design that ignores people.” Frank Chimero, Designer

How did UX design begin? Cognitive psychologist and designer Don Norman coined the term “user experience” in the 1990s—but UX predates its name by quite some decades. UX concepts were first presented with the introduction of Feng Shui around 4000 BC!

Modern UX harkens back to the days of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor, who pioneered ways to make human labor more efficient, productive, and routinized. It progressed with the development of Human Factors and ergonomics, which focused on the design of equipment and devices to best align with human capabilities such as our reach, vision, memory and other human considerations.

In the beginnings of the computer age, research centers like Xerox PARC created innovations in workplace technology such as the graphical user interface, computer-generated bitmap graphics, and the mouse. In the 1990’s, Don Norman introduced the term User Experience at Apple to describe what had previously been called human interface research. According to Norman, “I invented the term because I thought Human Interface and Usability were too narrow: I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”

UX has shown great growth in the last decade and has been incorporated into most companies’ software development cycles. As you’ll see, the need for UX designers and researchers is expected to continue to expand in the foreseeable future.