The term ‘user experience’

The term User Experience was probably first heard in public at the CHI '95 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems held on May 7-11, 1995 in Denver, Colorado. The combination of the two words User Experience first appeared in a presentation by Donald Norman , Jim Miller and Austin Henderson of Apple Computer entitled What You See, Some of What's in the Future, And How We Go About Doing It: HI at Apple Computer, particularly in the sentence: “In this organizational overview, we cover some of the critical aspects of human interface research and application at Apple or, as we prefer to call it, the ‘User Experience.’” By this point, user experience design was very much happening*—*it just didn’t have a label yet. Cue Donald Norman! Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist, joined the team at Apple in the early 90s as their User Experience Architect*—*making him the first person to have UX in his job title. He came up with the term “user experience design” as a way of encompassing all that UX is. As he explains, “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.” In 1988, Norman published The Psychology of Everyday Things (later updated to The Design of Everyday Things)*—*which continues to be a UX design staple to this day. This book dives into so many practical aspects of design, such as affordances, signifiers, feedback, and more What does Don Norman think about the way the term “UX design” is used in the modern-day context? He shares his thoughts in this video.

1995/05