UX Maturity and the Normalization of Dysfunction

Interestingly, a lot of what I already said ties back to dysfunction.

But let's go back a little bit to start us off with this particular subtopic.

The history of UX is something that I talk about a lot.

I'll give you a quick overview and then we'll touch on a few things.

Again, UX as we know it, everybody knows the story about Don Norman being the first person to ever had user experience and their job title.

It did not become the norm for about the next 15 years close to, but we always talk about that as a starting point.

the internet, the advent of the internet is directly aligned with UX as we know it today with all the digital products.

Again, there was already human computer interaction.

There were already things that were being done that are aligned with and really could fall under the umbrella.

of UX as we know it.

But again, as we know it, we're looking at the mid nineties to be more precise.

We won't have to align ourselves necessarily with what Don Norman was doing.

from a standpoint of the practice, because it was happening at Apple when it was with them, and it was not being broadly practiced as of yet.

UX did not become very broadly practiced until sometime between 1995 and 1998.

But let's look at prior state.

I'm not going to spend much time on some of those historical aspects, but I do want to bring up some of the prior states of the discipline to help lay the foundation for helping everybody to see how we transitioned into a state of dysfunction, which is where we are today.

And it has been normalized and that normalization is being reinforced, is being encouraged, is being embraced.

It's preferred.

Really strange.

But until we understand the problem, we're not gonna do anything about it.

And there's a lot of people who do not see the problem at all, and they don't see where we are as being a problem at all.

Then there's a group of people who don't see it as a problem because it does not benefit them.

Some of those same people have been known to understand and identify something as a problem when they can be at the center of trying to address it.

It is interesting, but that's another problem in and of itself.