Lots of things we do every day - driving a car, boiling a teapot, buying an iPad or exploring new restaurants in a neighborhood - could be considered a user experience. How long did it take you to figure out your car’s new music player or how to turn on an internet enabled teapot? Does Yelp make it easy to navigate to a restaurant? All these questions are part of your user experience.
Today the term “user experience” is typically associated with the digital world, however, in a broader sense, user experience is all around us. So, who coined this term?
User-centered design
It’s 1984, and Apple was flying high. The original Macintosh was released, the company’s first mass-market PC featuring a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse. It instantly made Apple an innovator of user experience, and we see this continuation of user centric design in the first iPod in 2001, to the iPhone in 2007 and the iPhone 10 in 2021.
Parallel to this, one man is working on a book called User Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-computer Interaction. This man is Don Norman, a writer and a consultant in cognitive engineering with the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Psychology. It’s in this very book, published in 1986, the term “user-centered design” was introduced. Don Norman introduces the idea that a designer should focus on the needs of the user and not on the system itself - a belief that was widely used and called “user centered system design” at that time.
Normal develops this idea further in his second book - The Design of Everyday Things in 1988, which has been a UX staple since then. In his interview with Adaptive Path, Norman notes, “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 the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual.”
Don Norman. The Design of Everyday Things. Photo credit: Monica Ma
UX design and UX designer
Fast forward a few years, and in 1993 Don Norman joined Apple as a User Experience Architect, which makes him the first person to have “UX” in his job title. It’s at Apple that Don with the team devised the term “user experience” and set up what they called a “User Experience Architect office”. There is a great short video where Don Normal talks about this process.
In sum, Don Norman was the first person to coin the term “UX”, “user-centered design”, to have the title of “UX” for his position, and as a result, Apple became the pioneer of UX design in the digital world.
User advocate
In 1998, Don Norman alongside Jakob Nielsen, another pioneer in user-centered UX, formed the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) with the vision to help designers and brands move toward more human-centered products. This website is a great tool for all product designers, and their 10 usability heuristic principles are a must-know in the industry.
At 86, Don Norman remains a fellow at Nielsen Norman Group and also holds the position of founder and director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. Above all titles though, Don Norman, is what many would consider the epitome of a user advocate.
Cover photo credit: Nielsen Norman Group