This is a brief personal, professional, industrial history of the development of the professions in software industry in the United States that can be put under the umbrella, "user experience design professions." Mayhew's account crosses a period from the 1960s to 2008. According to Mayhew, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was no real division between labor and design. The 1980s saw the emergence of specialized roles such as the "business analyst" in software industry and these specialized roles kept expand to the "user experience designer" and the "human factor" specialist. In the 1990s, specialization and standardization became commonly accepted in the industry. As usability engineering grew in practice and research, a new profession "graphic designer" emerged to share responsibilities with the usability specialist. In the 2000s, a new type of user experience specialist, "persuasion architect," emerged, focusing on the "conversion" of users. Mayhew argues that the traditional usability specialists should embrace this new breed of specialists.
The article offers some historical background knowledge of the development of the usability/user experience design professions. One of the characteristics of this piece is that it is a narrative that includes a lot of the author's personal experience. The author has been in the usability/user experience profession for more than three decades, and therefore has valuable first-hand experience and insight in the industry. However, this is also the downside of the piece. It is not a research and well supported historical research paper.
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