The History Room
How interface design became a profession: from the first drawing on a screen to a design file people meet inside.
1963
Sketchpad — the first graphical interface
In his MIT thesis Ivan Sutherland presented Sketchpad, which for the first time let a person draw directly on a screen with a light pen. The idea that a human might point at a computer rather than only type at it begins here.
1968
The Mother of All Demos
On 9 December, in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the mouse, windows, hypertext and remote collaborative editing — in a single sitting. Most of what we still use was present in that ninety minutes.
1973
The Xerox Alto
The first personal computer built around a graphical interface with windows, icons and a mouse. It was never sold commercially, yet it set the shape that personal computing took a decade later.
1984
Macintosh — the interface reaches people
The first commercially successful personal computer with a graphical interface. The interface moved from the laboratory into the home, and with it came a new obligation: to design for someone who has not read the manual.
1990
The usability heuristics
Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich published a set of general rules for evaluating interfaces, later refined by Nielsen into ten. They turned interface critique into something teachable and repeatable rather than a matter of taste.
1993
"User experience" is named
Donald Norman joined Apple with the title User Experience Architect. He chose the term, he later explained, because "interface" and "usability" were both too narrow to cover everything a person goes through with a product.
2010
Responsive web design
In an article for A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte proposed that a page should adapt to the screen rather than a separate mobile site be built for it. The unit of design changed from a fixed page to a continuous range.
2016
Design becomes collaborative
Figma opened to the public, bringing design into the browser with several people in the same file at the same time. The design file stopped being a document that gets sent and became a place people meet.