Why UX Design Emerged — From Consumer to User

To understand how UX design differs from design as it existed before, we first need to look at the currents through which the field of design itself has changed over time. Revisiting the history of design is not mere reminiscence — it is a necessary step toward understanding why UX design had to emerge in the first place.

UX design did not fall from the sky one day. The growth of industry, the advance of technology, and shifts in the structure of society handed design a set of challenges qualitatively different from anything it had faced before, and UX design took shape naturally as a response to those challenges. Without understanding this flow, it is difficult to fully grasp the essence of UX design.

Abundance of Goods: From Ornamentation to Product Appeal

Let’s start from the beginning. The modern concept of industrial design is generally understood to have originated in craft. In the early stages of industry, goods were scarce, and what people needed most urgently was immediate functionality — usefulness. Whether a product properly performed its intrinsic function, whether it faithfully served its role as a tool, mattered more than anything else at the time.

Because of this, the functionality secured through the craftsman’s work was prioritized above any higher-order experience, and design as an activity was not yet recognized as independent — it remained a secondary domain attached to the realization of function. Against this backdrop, the earliest form of design served as ornamentation, delivering aesthetic value to a segment of the upper class who wanted a use experience beyond basic function. In simple terms, it was a division of labor in which the craftsman handled function and design layered beauty on top of it. This early division of roles left a surprisingly deep-rooted impression — it is precisely why, even today, hearing the word “design” tends to call to mind aesthetics or high added value before anything else.

“Higher-order experience” is a concept from the UX pyramid perspective, which we cover in more detail later in this series.

But this arrangement did not last. As industry matured and goods became abundant, satisfying functionality alone stopped being a point of differentiation. Once most products performed their basic functions well enough, consumers naturally began wanting something beyond mere functionality, and the consumer market expanded rapidly on that demand.

Aesthetics and emotional appeal began to occupy important metrics from a marketing standpoint, and meeting that demand clearly could not be achieved by the old approach of “adding ornamentation after the fact to a form built for function.” The form of the product itself had to embody aesthetic and emotional value from the very start, and that required design to take the lead at the front end of the process rather than trailing at the back end. Accordingly, the order of the industrial process itself began to reverse. Design started presenting form and blueprint ahead of the craftsman, and the craftsman’s role shifted to implementing function according to that plan.

This was the turning point at which design stopped being an accessory to function and took on a leading role in product planning. And in this process, design’s attention naturally shifted toward what would sell well on the shelf — that is, toward the “consumer.” Observing what draws consumers in, which trends and lifestyles dominate the market, and leading those trends became design’s core task.

The Advance of Technology: Interfaces Grow Complex

Design was settling into consumer-centered planning, but this alone was not enough. Design, which up to that point had remained a one-off exercise at the moment of marketing — an “appeal in front of the shelf” — was called on to undergo one more fundamental shift, and what triggered that shift was social change, and above all the rapid advance of technology.

The development of semiconductors and integration technology, for example, led to a movement of product convergence. Products that had previously existed as separate, individually specialized devices began merging into a single unit. In a world where the camera, the music player, the telephone, and the notepad had each existed on their own, these began converging into one device.

In the earlier environment of divergence, the physical form of an individual product was closely tied to its function, and that connection was generally intuitive. A camera looked like a camera and a phone looked like a phone, so one could infer roughly how to use something just by looking at its shape. But in an environment where multiple devices merged into one, the same interface now had to perform several different functions at once. As a result, interfaces inevitably became layered, and conveying this layered functional structure to users required a far greater volume of cognitive cues and guidance than before.

On top of the convergence problem, the advance of wireless technologies — RF, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi — and the spread of soft-key interfaces also played an important role in this shift. Previously, the user’s environment had been constrained by physical wires or fixed buttons, and that constraint, paradoxically, clearly defined how a device was meant to be used. But as wireless technology and soft keys freed users from these physical limitations, the user’s environment became far more open than before.

The trouble was that this freedom was a double-edged sword. From the provider’s side, it became much harder to guide and predict user behavior, and eliciting a desired action now demanded a wholly new level of effort. The same was true from the user’s side. The formal cues indicating which part to interact with, and how, to access a desired function had grown ambiguous, so users badly needed usage guidance they could sense and follow intuitively.

In short, the industry as a whole began to require closer observation of and greater care for the user’s cognitive process and procedure of use. And design — the field traditionally responsible for sensory perception and form — took this challenge on directly, and for the first time began looking at the “user” rather than the “consumer.” The spread of the smartphone stood as the emblem and symbol of this entire shift, driving transformative change.

A Declaration to Look at the “User,” Not the Consumer

UX design emerged out of this very upheaval. As mentioned earlier, design had always, even before this, given thought to the user’s experience in some form. And yet, coining the term “user experience design (UX design)” to explicitly separate this concept from existing design is itself a kind of declaration — a fundamental shift in perspective.

That is because the user’s experience that earlier design concerned itself with was largely confined to the user as a “consumer,” seen from a marketing standpoint. In other words, the focus was on the appeal felt at the moment of purchase. The core task was to present features that looked better than competing products on the shelf, and planning was largely driven by sensory appeal — what material the kettle’s handle should be made of, what sound it should make when the water boils, and so on. This is, of course, an important concern, but it is a different matter altogether from looking deeply into the ongoing relationship a user forms with a product after it has been purchased.

User experience design, by contrast, starts from a different depth altogether. It sets out to look at the procedure itself — how the user actually uses the product after it has been purchased. It declares an intent to synchronize with the user within the flow of use, to examine whether any procedure poses a problem from the standpoint of the user’s cognitive experience, and, if so, what solution is needed to resolve it. This amounts to moving past the surface-level appeal that the consumer perspective dealt with and diving deep into the water of the user’s underlying cognition. It is a shift that pulls even the cognitive processes taking place inside the user’s head into the domain of design, beyond the visible form and feel.

Let’s define the depth of this dive a bit more precisely. The core of user experience design lies in synchronizing with the environment of use, and in understanding — and deliberately manipulating — the cognitive procedures and events that occur within that environment. Grasping what the user sees, what they expect, and in what order they act, and designing the experience to fit that flow, is the essence of UX design.

If planning is carried out at this level, it can be called “UX design–oriented” regardless of what form it ultimately takes. Conversely, no matter how faithfully the methodology of UX design is followed, if it fails to genuinely empathize with the user and analyze their cognitive process, it has merely borrowed the tools and can hardly be said to have been carried out as UX design. It is perspective, not form, that defines UX design.

Not Progress, But a New Perspective

One balanced point is worth adding here. Just as the new is not always right and the old is not always wrong, it would also be a mistake to assume that UX design is unconditionally superior to consumer-oriented design. Design must always follow the goals and efficiency of the given project, and UX design should simply be adopted whenever the context calls for it.

For a project that genuinely calls for deep consideration of the user’s experience and cognitive flow, UX design should certainly be carried out — but forcing a logical framework onto a situation where the answer is already clear is, if anything, dangerous. To return to the diving metaphor used earlier: diving into shallow water gets you hurt. Pushing a UX design process through on a project that lacks the cognitive depth worth diving into produces results that fall well short of the cost and time invested. The value of UX design comes from the appropriateness of the context in which it is applied.

We have now looked at why UX design emerged and how it takes a different perspective from existing design. From here, the natural next question follows: what, exactly, is this “experience” — the object of the dive that UX design seeks to engage with? By what principle does it take shape, and how might we steer it in the direction we want?

The declaration of UX design is now complete. The next piece turns to the very thing that declaration is aimed at — what “experience” actually is.