With today's web and mobile technologies with varying user interfaces of all shapes, sizes and colors, it is easy to forget that once upon a time when someone said "computer" they meant facing a drab, single color, single font-size terminal that tends to hurt your eyes.
This dull vision of technology was changed by a young Steve Jobs, who in January 24, 1984 came out with a computer that was able to display much, much more than text. The Macintosh was the first in a long line of products that up to this day bear (almost) the same name.
It is probably reasonable to say that the term Graphical User Interface was, for the general consumer and personal computers, born that day.
Prior to the Macintosh user interfaces were merely textual, and the only other product on the market that had a GUI was the Xerox Star, which was a client-server system that required an office to shell out $50,000 to $100,000 and was definitely out of reach of the common user. Of course there was the Xerox Alto, basis for the Star and famous prototype at Xerox PARC where Jobs got his ideas in the first place -- that one never made it to market.
However, aside from just being a fancy computer with pictures, Steve Jobs was also very particular about "look and feel", and how the menus and buttons of an app worked together, and how layouts affected use, aside from how aesthetically appealing the Macintosh's appearance was. Now, while the term "User Experience" may have been coined in the mid-90s, it is clear that the concept of having an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use application, not just in terms of visuals but in terms of how it affected working with the software, was started way before it, and perhaps championed by Jobs with the Macintosh.
I'd like to wonder out aloud: was user experience invented with the Macintosh? Did Steve Jobs invent user experience? Or have I have been RDF'ed to think that way?
I don’t think he did. People usually attribute a lot of things to SJ-things that somebody else did. Of course, that does not take away his genius of being a tweaker. Basically, what I am saying, while he may contributed and improved the idea, he most likely did not invented it. Also, while “user experience” was indeed termed in the 90′s, should the concept strictly be chained to computing GUI’s? I mean, broadly speaking, should it be more about human-system interaction (between the user (human) and the system/product/service).