[NOISE] Hi, welcome to UX basics.

My name is Liz Hubert, and I am

an independent UX consultant in New York City.

Here, we'll talk all about user experience design, what

it is, what UX designers do, how UX designers think,

what tools UX designers use, and how to move forward

in the field of UX after you take this course.

We've got a lot to go through today.

So let's kick it off by kicking it old school with a brief history of UX.

UX, or user experience design, is a profession that stems from many roots.

Many claim that UX started back in the age of the machine, in the early 1900's.

During this time, many more people were using machines

to do their jobs, and of course, the better they

use those machines, the quicker their work would get done

and the more goods would come off the assembly line.

Thus, it was important to make the machines easy

and efficient to use in order to increase productivity.

A small slice of UX was born.

As we move forward from the age of the machine, we could UX's presence when it is

used to ensure better communication by improving the ease

of use of items like the telegraph and telegram.

Later, UX is spotted in the field of

ergonomics, later to become known as human factors, which

is the study of designing equipment and devices

that fit the human body and its cognitive abilities.

Here, UX can be seen in making a piece of equipment

more enjoyable to use, because it better fits the human body.

I.E. making a more comfortable chair for office work.

UX can next be seen in the often overlooked, but

perhaps best well-known experience designer

of the times, Walt Disney himself.

Who, by opening Disneyland in 1955, created

a true experience-centered place unlike any other,

and who thereby was one of the first to extend the idea of a

good experience from making a physical product

easier to use to creating a service

as an experience, as well as in making an experience evoke emotion or to like.

Next, we had the age of Xerox PARC and the

genesis of interaction and interface design as we know it today.

This was the place where the mouse, the GUI, or graphic user interface,

and pretty much anything else related

to interacting with modern computing, was developed.

And all of these inventions were due to the fact that

Xerox Park was putting to use something called user centered design.

User centered design, seen in some form since the

1970s, marked the beginning of the current foundation of UX.

And we'll get more into that in a bit.

[SOUND] But perhaps the first person to have UX on their business card was

Donald Norman in 1995, when while at Apple, he called himself a UX architect.

He described the role of the User

Experience Architect's office as one that helped to

harmonize the human interface, an industrial design

process, across the divisions of Apple and ATG.

Every since the 1990s, UX has grown exponentially,

and the term can be heard when referring to

the usability of a site, to the layout of

a page, to the overall customer journey and beyond.

And all of this history brings us to present day.

Today, we live in a world where the term, user experience, falls off

the lips of everyone from developers, to

designers, to executives, and even board members.

Everyone wants their products and services to have a great user experience.

Further, there are many people who want in to the UX

industry, which is probably why many of you are watching this today.

However, joining this UX journey can be confusing, and

for anyone new to the field and even those

of us that have been around the block, it can be quite hard to know where to begin.

You may find yourself thinking that as long as you learn

the tools to use to wire frame or prototype, or as long

as you understand Mobile First, or as long as you get

Lean UX, then you'll be able to call yourself a UX designer.

However, I must warn you, this course doesn't teach

you any of those things, at least in detail.

You see, before you can become a UX designer, you need to understand UX, the

reason it exists, what the goal of the UX designer is, and how they think.

And then, only then, can the tools and terms be of use in your journey.

The place to start on this road to UX knowledge is here, the theory.

Thus, the goal of this course is to talk about the theory behind UX.

What it is?

Why it is?

And to realize that although we'll

mention Multichannel, Mobile First, responsive and adaptive,

these are only implementations that help to lead to a great user experience.

They are not user experience driven methods.

Therefor, in order to understand these implementations, one must first understand

much, much more about why UX exists in the first place.