The famous design author Donald A. Norman first coins the term User Centered Design in his research laboratory in University of California, San Diego. But it’s in 1986 that the term became popular with the publication of his 1986 book “User-Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction”.
The guys at Trig consultancy explain this historical moment in the following words: “User-Centered Design was an ideological shift that placed the user at the center of the development process, which showed the benefits of understanding user experience.
When enacting a User-Center Design approach you emphasize increasing the customer’s capability over efficiency and adopt a more humanistic approach in the development of a product or system.”
Going further
This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.