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Comment by eurleif | Hacker News Reader

UX, as a term, didn't really exist in the 1990s: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=user+interface...

That's consistent with your timeline of the decline of UI/UX though. My sense is that the birth of the term UX marked the beginning of the decline because it meant redefining the term UI as being purely about aesthetics, implying that no one was paying attention to all of the non-aesthetic work that had previously been done in the field.

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The term didn't really exist, but user experience was a thing. I took a human computer interface class in college about designing good UI. My first job out of college in 1996 I got permission from my boss and the boss of the corporate trust folks to go sit with a few of my users for 1/2 a day and see how they used the software I was going to fix bugs in and add features to. Apparently, no one had done that before. The users were so happy when I suggested and implemented a few things that would shave 20 minutes of busy work off their work each day that weren't on their request list because they hadn't thought it was something that could be done.

UX was Ergonomics back them, but current term also implies some "desire" to return to application, a tint of marketing maybe?

UX was Human Factors Engineering, Usability research, and library science. UX was the rebranded label after the visual designers took over everything.

I remember it as "human-machine interaction" and "HMI design" or "interaction design". It was mostly about positioning interface elements, clear iconography, and workflows with as little surprises and opportunities for errors as possible. In industrial design, esp. for SCADA, it is often still called HMI.

Yeah, if you wanted to study usability (or what we call UX today), you'd take the ergonomics course, and there'd be usability classes. So you'd learn about how to sit at a desk, how to design a remote control, and where to put the buttons in an application.

It does seem a bit weird, but I feel like this bigger picture is what a lot of today's design lacks.

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