The origin of UX and world war II
It was widespread that User Experience is only for Digital products but to your notice that's not completely true, the origin of UX or User Experience soiled its roots in world war II during the invention of nuclear power.
In 1942 during the second world war, US gathered all their best scientists together to develop a functional atomic bomb in response to fear of German scientists who had been working nuclear technology since 1930 and Adolf Hitler who already well prepared to use it.
Three years later in 1945 the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the technology they developed from the Manhattan project which brought the world war 2 to an end.
Post the war, the Manhattan program influenced other nuclear programs which contributed to the development of peaceful nuclear innovations which included nuclear power plants.
After 1970, the US started building nuclear power plants across the country to develop a viable alternative to fossil fuel for generating electricity.
This nuclear power plants generate electricity by heating fluid via a nuclear reaction. It is one the cleanest energy sources without emitting greenhouse gases. But this technology also has a major downside: "Nuclear Meltdown".
A nuclear meltdown is a severe nuclear reactor accident where nuclear reactor core gets damaged from overheating, which leads to emission of radioactive materials into the air and surroundings. One of the worst nuclear meltdowns in history is the Chernobyl Nuclear meltdown in Ukraine.
In 1979, the US saw a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor resulting in radiation leak. It was the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power plant history.
After the meltdown, the congress commissioned a report to analyze the accident and they came to know that the plant operators were unable to to understand the warning signals to take appropriate actions at the right time.
The nuclear reactor control room had over 1000 dials, gauges, switch indicators and more than 600 warning lights. Below images shows how it looks like
During the meltdown, each one of them was beeping, leaving the operators buried in chaos. They sprint 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.
Dan Norman (an engineer turned psychologist) is one of the crew members of the analysis team. He investigated the incident and came to the conclusion that poor control room design failure was the reason for this catastrophe.
Engineers and scientists spent too much time designing the technical system, but no one thought what it was 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 arts or advertising backgrounds and they prioritized 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".
The book popularized the term user experience to the public. Through 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.