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The Historical Context of UX, UI and Product Design
This morning I found myself writing a long response to a question somebody posted on a design leadership Slack about the difference between UX, UI and Product Design. Yes, I know, we’re all fed up of conversations about “defining the damned thing”; something I find deeply ironic as most digital designers work in a domain where language and nuance is important. However the fact that these conversations still happen amongst us means that confusion still persists, so I thought I’d take another stab at this topic using a historical context. In order to do this I wanted to take you back to the early days of the Web.
Design and The Early Web
Early websites were generally created by a single person, leading early Web Designers to be multi-discipline individuals with a strong technical background. As Web capabilities started to allow more nuanced visual design (like improved CSS browser support), this started butting up against many Web Designers visual design abilities. At the same time this opened the door for traditional Graphic Designers who would focus on the visual design side of things. As such Web Design bifurcated into Visual Design and Front-end Development.
As sites started to get more complicated, new types of problem started to emerge, including how to structure large scale websites, how people would navigate around those websites, and how they would interact with things like buttons, forms and “DHTML elements”. This led to the rise of disciplines like Information Architecture, Interaction Design, User Research and Usability Engineering.
The Rise of UX Design
While larger institutions like Universities could bring in specialists from their Library Science, HCI and CogSci courses to tackle these issues, the new role of UX Designer emerged to cover these areas. As such, for a while it was common in large organisations and the agencies which served them to see UX Designers coming from these fields and UI designers coming from Graphic Design. This balance was maintained for a while, especially in Europe where large institutions dominated the early Web. However a few things happened to switch this up.
First, as Web Sites slowly morphed into Web Apps, people moved away from IA and…
