Most jobs have an easy-to-understand title you can quickly mention and move on from with no risk of confusion, and most job titles don’t require lengthy explanations. I’m a photographer. I’m a teacher. I’m a zoologist. People nod, say something polite like “That must be interesting!”, take a sip of their drink and continue the conversation. “I am a UX designer,” however, almost always results in raised eyebrows followed by a rambling monologue where I try to explain the complexity, expansiveness, and evolving nature of the field.
“You know what an architect does? UX designers—or user experience designers—are basically architects, but instead of designing physical structures, we design digital structures. And just as architects don’t actually physically build the buildings they design, we also rely on programmers and developers to build the digital structures we design.”
However incomplete my architect analogy may be, user experience design is not a new concept. Some claim the term was first coined by Don Norman in 1993 for his new job as User Experience Architect at Apple, whereas others say it was first described in a 1987 usability engineering journal by John Whiteside and Dennis Wixon.
The exact origin of the term may be debatable, but the fact that the practice of user experience design goes back a long time is not.
When the Greek physician Hippocrates wrote how a surgeon’s tools should be arranged for optimal use in operations, or mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor analyzed workflows in order to increase productivity while reducing work related injuries, or media mogul Walt Disney and his team of “Imagineers” put themselves in their guest’s shoes so they could create magical and immersive park experiences, they were all acting as user experience designers.
Perhaps the best predigital-era example of someone thinking of the user experience comes from 1955. Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss famously wrote, “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.”
Now if you imagine that the product he mentioned could also be a digital product like email or online dating, or buying airline tickets, or shopping for a new pair of shoes, and you replace the word people with users, you basically have the framework for user experience design today.
But here’s the catch. Ask ten different people to define user experience design today, and you’ll receive ten different answers. Unlike architecture, which has had thousands of years to mature and to be defined, we are still in the infancy of defining what this field actually is. Not to mention that experiences are inherently subjective, and that we design digital services, products or tools—not experiences—that we hope will result in the intended experience.
To make matters worse, during my many years of teaching user experience design, I realized a lot of the books and articles that cover this topic tend to be written from the outside-in, with the author compiling a list of examples that describe a process they were not actually a part of—a theoretical utopia. It’s also almost always written in a way that makes it seem like there is a perfect way of doing things, and if you don’t do it that way you’re doing it wrong. But the perfect UX process does not exist. There is no one definition of UX design, the same job title can mean different things at different companies, and the answer to almost every question is “it depends.”
This book is not a chronological retelling of the history of user experience design. It is also not a technical how-to book that will show you how to become a perfect user experience designer one step at a time. It’s a philosophical anthology of case studies, situations, problems, and contradictions I’ve encountered across more than fifteen years of working on real-world client projects that will teach you how to think, rather than tell you what to do. And in the spirit of the internet, it’s up to you whether you want to go through these sequentially, or jump around topics you find interesting.
But there is one thing we can all agree on: User experience is about users. So let’s start there. Who are they anyway? And why should we care? Understanding the needs, goals, desires, and motivations of these real human beings—everyone who interacts with and is affected by these digital products—is the first step in getting closer to untangling the contradictory field that is user experience design.