A Holistic Look-back at UX’s Past Half Century
tl;dr: While many have compiled important UX concepts and companies to describe our practice’s history, the communities of 24 Hours of UX are attempting a more holistic view, with a focus on many subcategories of UX’s past. Explore and comment on our miro board for the next iterations!
The concept
Along with volunteers from around the world, we are organizing 24 Hours of UX, an annual event aiming to bring great unsung local talent to a global stage. Inspired by foresight and futures thinking, this year our theme is The Futures of UX. We will explore the many probable, plausible, and possible futures of UX for the next years to come.
When you begin a futures exercise, a good practice is to start by looking back. It is usually recommended to look back twice as much as you intend to look forward. And as we intend to look at the next 24 years of UX, we looked back at the past 48 years — round it up to half a century.
These types of ‘look-back’ exercises enable you to take a step back, look at where your topic of inquiry is coming from, and what it has established. Think of it like gathering inertia for your leap forward into the future. We did the same.
Hasn’t this been done before?
With help from our awesome volunteers and community partners, we gathered things that happened in the past and aligned them on a timeline. You can do this surprisingly fast, so well worth a try on any project. We then grouped the items we identified into various categories. This is where we believe our effort is different…
We looked at more categories than other similar efforts. We did this because we believe that our industry is shaped by so much more than just big brands or a few inventions. After our initial brain-dump, and then some further iterations, we grouped past events into the following categories:
- Milestones, events, trends — the occurrences that need to be hioghlighted
- Companies — Brands that made a difference
- Best practices, reports, education — contributions to ensure the practice of UX as a whole develops, instead of just firms or individuals
- Platforms, devices, technology — the way our efforts take shape
- Books — Robust summaries of how to do what we do
- Regulations, laws, and standards — the ecosystem that creates our boundaries
- Design tools —what we design with
- Communities & organizations — Volunteers who invest their time and energy into making the whole of practitioners more than the sum of their parts.
We invite you to explore our effort on our dedicated miro board. After browsing through it, consider the insights it gives you… or read on to see some insights it gave us!
(Notable mentions of similar efforts: Invision has a nice History of UX focusing on large milestones going back to DaVinci. Career Foundry has what they call a Definitive Timeline of UX, which focuses on concepts and companies, going back 4000 years (not a typo). And NNG looks at a 100-year view of UX from 1950 to 2050. Or this History of UX patterns by Erin Malone.)
What does a view like this tell us?
- We did not plan for this many categories initially. We just started listing madly. But regulations and communities started emerging — and now we wonder how/why others left these out...
- A timeframe helps bring focus. Sure, we could go back 4000 years, but we really wanted to stick to our 48-year timeframe
- It is fun to see how the inventions of the 1970s and ’80s led to pioneer consultancies and early design tools of the ’90s (and a little invention called the internet…).
- Rising from the ashes of the dot-com bubble, we see a startling new boost of technologies and a new wave of associations in the 2000s. Also, someone starts snatching up those early design tools…
- Remember those early-mover consultancies? In the 2010s they were mostly acquired. Remember those snatched-up design tools? New kids on the block are making them outdated (Innovator’s Dilemma, anyone?)
- Niches start appearing, like a need for consistent certifications, a focus on sustainable UX, or 24 Hours of UX’s effort to bring local communities to a global stage, mixing unsung experts with big names.
- Recency almost skewed our view. Microsoft’s recent partially failed but certainly rushed rollout of chat AI was almost added. But we realized we didn’t include any earlier case studies, so we kept consistency and skipped this one too.
What now?
Equipped with this knowledge, you can start looking into the future on our May 3rd event on The Futures of UX well-prepared, knowing where we are coming from.
Let’s iterate together!
Obviously, our effort is not perfect. This is where you come in! We probably left some gaping holes (maybe on purpose to spark your desire to contribute…?), because at one point we need to bring our baby into the world, and let it develop on the outside (saying this as a new father makes this sound very true).
So please, add comments to the miro board, and show us where we made mistakes or forgot something important. Also, feel free to add insights that you gained so we can include them here in this article. Remember, the whole world is watching, so be gentle 🤗
