Before UX had a commonly defined process and best practices, the newly minted term was only familiar to initiates in design and product management. For those who had long been designing interactive products, they could finally name succinctly what they’d been doing.
Mid 2010, when catching up with my sister, she asked me “So what do you do again, now?”. My attempt to explain only drew from her an uncertain “Right. Got it”. I decided to take a different approach.
As research wasn’t yet an established starting point to UX, designers just set out to seduce the user with interactive creativity. The path to a deliberate user experience wasn’t clear back then. Rather, it was something that revealed itself after the UI was designed, implemented, and in use. At times, the two seemed like a chicken and egg conundrum. So I told my sister that story.
(Posted to YouTube 7/2010 – 80k+ views)