Turning 50 recently has made me reflect on how UX has transformed over the last 15 years. Sitting in a Corvallis, Oregon apartment in 1995, I was absolutely awed by being able to virtually jump to the beaches of Rio deJaneiro, Brazil in a matter of about 10 seconds - a Web page “painting” before my very eyes, courtesy of Netscape Navigator, and some genius graduate work by Mark Andreesen’s at the University of Illinois that developed the initial Mosaic browser. In an instant the Internet was no longer a place where only geeks could control the landscape and push messages over gopher and ftp; instead it was a place with the only moderately tech-savvy masses could participate in a visually rich content and media sharing community. The “first Web” - version 1.0 - was born.
By the late 1990s, however, all was not well on the UX front. Jakob Nielsen, in his Alertbox articles, lamented the poor state of usability on a weekly basis (we let him do so, since he had considerable design consulting experience and had done a lot of usability tests; besides, we enjoyed hearing his “how many users to test?” debates with Jared Spool). As I did usability tests and heuristic reviews on a lot of websitessite, it was obvious that, while some websites had decent graphic design and usability, the vast majority had poor - even terrible - usability. And this was happening despite the fact that there was some good foundational books out there (for example, Cooper’s About Face, Nielsen’s Usability Engineering, and Rosenfeld & Morville’s Information Architecture for the Web).
By the early 2000s, when I worked at a healthcare eCommerce startup, “information architecture”, “visual design” (and many other variations on these monikers) became specialized disciplines under the umbrella titles of “web designer” or “web developer”. Best practice, research-based guidelines surfaced from organizations like IBM, Yale and usability.gov. At long last the disciplines of “usability engineering” had matured to the point where smart, talented folks could (if they were made aware, and cared) use prescriptive processes and tools to create more usable and “enlightened” sites and apps.
By the mid 2000s, when I was consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at Human Factors International (HFI), best-practice design standards had evolved to the point where design was primarily user-centered, focused as much on the target user’s goals and intents and as on having “good usability” and a nice graphical “look and feel”. Many of my clients were shrewd and demanding, and they should have been - they were plunking down 10s - some times 100s of thousands - of capital dollars for the promise of creating more efficient, attractive experiences that would both build their brand and augment their bottom line.
Fast-forward to the late 2000s. Don Norman and others introduced the era of emotional design, which emphasized that design should not just address our rational and behavioral goals, but should also tap into our visceral needs (how we wanted to feel at a gut level as we moved through these online experiences). This guided us (at least this practitioner) to think of emotional design and persuasion architecture in the same context as information architecture. While some users are bound to use applications (e.g. healthcare portal or CRM), if the app is inefficient and frustrating to use they now felt empowered enough to whine about their experience and advocate for something better. While using common websites (eCommerce sites, news sites, etc), we were harshly reminded that an uninspired, emotionally disaffected user can bail out at any time, taking their discretionary dollars with them.
Now that we’ve entered the 2010s, it’s apparent that old fashioned “can do” usability must be be closely coupled with “will do” user experience design and “excited to do” neuro design - the latter part being the site/app personality that keeps them coming back. Not only do we want to complete our tasks quickly, but we want to do them with a sense of pleasure (yes, that’s right, it’s OK to say “this should be fun, or at least pretty painless!”) It’s a great melding of the architecture of design with the aesthetic side. To use a physical world analogy, UX designers have become a hybrid between an architect and an interior designer in that we need to deliver both form and functional seamlessly to make “the client” happy.
The status UX has had in organizations has also transformed. Personally, my work evolved from doing “guerilla” usability work (quick, or too often free, usability tests) within IT and Development groups to partnering closely with marketers, product managers, stakeholders and executives. And over the last 4-5 years I’ve been delighted to see companies give high exposure and importance to their UX work by bestowing senior UX staff titles like Chief Experience Officer and Chief of Customer Satisfaction. Even Chief Information Officers who were previously focused almost entirely on technology and development, have “seen the light” (and ROI) that better UX practices can give to the features they are delivering. UX design has truly become both a highly strategic and tactical discipline.
All in all, I am VERY pleased with “the current state of UX” today. It’s come a long way, baby, and designers, users and companies alike have reaped the benefits. It will be interesting to see where our profession will be another 15 years. Based on the foundation that’s been set, I’m that UX specialists will push their organizations to even higher, user-warming heights.
skype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience
How to Reach Mark
email: mark.hall99@gmail.comskype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience
