You certainly know now that I like Donald Norman. So here is another little story about him. When he joined Apple, he first had the title of “Fellow” and then the title of “User Experience Architect”.

In an interview with Adaptive Path, Norman said:

“I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.”

What I find interesting here is that the notion of user experience is not limited to the use of screens but extends to the general experience a user has had; back then, it had already found its way into a job title. In my opinion, the notion of User Experience as defined by Donald back then is not so far away from what a service designer does today.

I must admit that I am myself a bit critical of the typical User Experience (UX) specialists of today as they often tend to see services and products only as digital experience and their point of view regarding who the user is sometimes slightly extremist.

Some UX designers today have this nearly religious or sectary approach where they take only the end user into consideration. Business requirements that come from employees or other stakeholders are often seen as bullshit. The end user is the only user for them.

So, we can say that the term User Experience has, in a way, definitely lost the meaning that Donald, with his job title at Apple, wanted to give to it back in 1990.

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.