The User Experience Team of One. Leah Buley

FIGURE 1.5 UX has a long and storied history that intersects with other business, design, and technology developments that your colleagues may be familiar with.

      Now here’s the longer version. User experience is a modern field, but it’s been in the making for about a century. To see its beginnings, you can look all the way back to the machine age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, corporations were growing, skilled labor was declining, and advances in machine technology were inspiring industry to push the boundaries of what human labor could make possible. The machine age philosophy was best exemplified by people like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, who both pioneered ways to make human labor more efficient, productive, and routinized. But they were criticized for dehumanizing workers in the process and treating people like cogs in a machine. Still Taylor’s research into the efficiency of interactions between workers and their tools was an early precursor to much of what UX professionals think about today (see Figure 1.6).

      

FIGURE 1.6 Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of Scientific Management, pejoratively known as Taylorism.

      The first half of the 20th century also saw an emerging body of research into what later became the fields of human factors and ergonomics. Motivated by research into aeromedics in World War I and World War II, human factors focused on the design of equipment and devices to best align with human capabilities.

       NOTE THE ORIGINS OF ERGONOMICS

      In the late 1940s, research into pilot errors in the cockpit by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Fitts (who was also a psychologist) led to recommendations for the most effective organization of cockpit control knobs. Several years later, Fitts would coin Fitts’s Law, one of the basic laws of physics for user experience designers. Fitts’s Law states that the time required to move to a target is determined by the distance and size of the target.

      By the mid 20th century, industrial efficiency and human ingenuity were striking a more harmonious relationship at places like Toyota, where the Toyota Production System continued to value efficiency, but treated workers as key contributors to a continually improving process. One of the core tenets of the Toyota philosophy was “respect for people,” and it resulted in involving workers in troubleshooting and optimizing the processes that they were a part of. As one example, workers at Toyota factories could pull a rope called the Andon Cord to stop the assembly line and give feedback if they saw a defect or a way to improve the process.

      Around the same time, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss wrote Designing for People, a classic design text that, like the Toyota system, put people first. In it, Dreyfuss described many of the methods that UX designers employ today to understand and design for user needs, as shown in Figure 1.7. In Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss writes “when the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the [designer] has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”

FIGURE 1.7 Dreyfuss created Joe (and a companion diagram, Josephine) to remind us that everything we design is for people.

      At the same time, some interesting parallel movements were taking shape. A small handful of academics were doing research into what we now describe as cognitive science. As a discipline, cognitive science combined an interest in human cognition (especially human capacity for short-term memory) with concepts such as artificial and machine intelligence. These cognitive scientists were interested in the potential of computers to serve as a tool to augment human mental capacities.

      Many early wins in the design of computers for human use came from PARC, a Xerox research center founded in the early 1970s to explore innovations in workplace technology. PARC’s work in the mid-70s produced many user interface conventions that are still used today—the graphical user interface, the mouse, and computer-generated bitmap graphics. For example, PARC’s work greatly influenced the first commercially available graphical user interface: the Apple Macintosh.

      The term user experience probably originated in the early 1990s at Apple when cognitive psychologist Donald Norman joined the staff. Various accounts from people who were there at the time say that Norman introduced user experience to encompass what had theretofore been described as human interface research. He held the title User Experience Architect, possibly the first person to ever have UX on his business card. Norman actually started out in cognitive psychology, but his writing on the cognitive experience of products, including technological products, made him a strong voice to lead and inspire a growing field (see Figure 1.8). According to Don 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.”

FIGURE 1.8 Norman’s book The Design of Everyday Things is a popular text that deconstructs many of the elements that contribute to a positive or negative user experience. It’s still pretty much required reading for anyone who is interested in UX.

       UX and UI: What’s the Difference?

      You may find that the average person is more familiar with the term UI than UX. UI refers to the user interface, or the screen through which a person interacts with a computer or device. Because most people have used computers at one time or another and have had encounters with UIs that were both good and bad, they often have some idea of what a UI is, and why it matters. UX, on the other hand, is a more intangible concept that encompasses not just UI, but also the hardware, the user’s context of use, and the user’s goals and motivations. That’s a lot harder to cram into one mental picture. To explain the difference to others, it can be helpful to provide a tangible example. For example, PayByPhone is a service that integrates with parking meters to solve a basic problem: paying for parking even if you don’t have change. The picture on the left in Figure 1.9 is the app’s user interface, or UI. The picture on the right conveys some sense of the broader user experience of needing to pay for your parking, discovering that there’s an alternative way to pay, and then trying to figure out how to do it.

FIGURE 1.9 With the PayByPhone service, the user interface is just one part of the overall user experience.

      With the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and then the Web in the 1990s, many of these trends converged on each other. Graphical user interfaces, cognitive science, and designing for and with people became the foundation for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). Suddenly, more people had access to computers and, along with it, a greater need to understand and optimize their use of them. HCI popularized concepts like usability and interaction design, both of which are important forebears to user experience. In the Internet bubble of the mid and late-1990s, new jobs with titles like “Web designer,” “interaction designer,” and “information architect” began cropping up. As people became more experienced in these roles, a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the field of user experience began to