Note to self. 

Inspired from the book 📖 Four Thousand Weeks

Most of us associate the UX or User Experience with digital products. But the origin of the term UX finds its roots in world war and nuclear power. 

A brief history of the term User Experience 🧵

During the second world war, U.S. gathered the best scientists together to develop a functional atom bomb in response to the atomic efforts of Germany. This project was code-named 'The Manhattan Project'.

In 1945 the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the technology developed from the Manhatten project. The bombings brought the World War II to an end.

Post the war, the Manhattan Project scientists were convinced that there could be an alternate spin-off of their technology for good use - The Nuclear power.

Between 1970 and 1985 U.S. starts building nuclear power plants across the country to develop a viable alternative to fossil fuel dependence of generating electricity.

Nuclear power is one of the cleanest ways to produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gases, but this technology comes with one major downside - Nuclear meltdown.

A nuclear meltdown is a severe nuclear reactor accident where the reactor is damaged from overheating, resulting in the emission of radioactive materials. The Chernobyl (1986) disaster was a nuclear meltdown.

In 1979, the U.S. saw a partial meltdown in its Three-mile island nuclear power plant resulting in a radiation leak. This was the most significant incident of nuclear power damage in the U.S.

Post the meltdown, the congress commissioned a report to analyse the accident. It was learnt that the plant operators were unable to understand the warning signals to take appropriate actions at the right time.

During the meltdown, the control room had eleven hundred dials, gauges, switch indicators, and more than six hundred warning lights. At that moment, each one of them was beeping, leaving them buried in chaos.

The operators swift through the emergency manuals and try out every possible procedure to fix them. But how does one find out the core problem when the system throws out hundreds of warning signs.

An engineer turned psychologist coauthored the analysis report who interpreted the incident as a poor control room design failure. This incident had a profound impact on how he thought of human-machine interactions.

He realised that people spent too much time designing the technical parts, but no one understood what was it like to work in a control room. There wasn't enough understanding of technology combined with psychology.

But his ideas around Design and psychology went largely unnoticed as he was an outsider to the field of Design. Designers at that time came either from art or advertising background, and they prioritised style over function.

In 1988, he decided to publish his ideas around the relationship between people and technology through the lens of daily objects we use, making it the first mainstream bestseller on Design called 'The design of everyday things', authored by Don Norman.

The book popularised the term user experience to the public. Though today Don isn't very appreciative of the term UX being loosely used by the tech world.

In 1993, Don left his academic research to join Apple as a Fellow with the title 'User Experience Architect', making him the first person to have had the title and was instrumental in hiring Apple's Jhony Ive, and the rest is history.

I have been fortunate to have met him and to have listened to his ideas on Design. A memory to cherish for a lifetime. 

References:

1. Netflix series: History 101 - Nuclear power
2. Book: User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant (Chapter 1)

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