User experience, or UX, is now used to describe almost anything to do with digital products. It covers wireframes, slick user interfaces and tiny lifts in conversion rates. Yet that was never the original idea. When Don Norman coined the term in the early 1990s, he wanted to push design beyond what happens on a screen. He was interested in the whole experience of a person in a real situation, including the physical product, the instructions, the service around it and how it fits into everyday life (Norman, 2013).
This essay argues that UX design started as a practical form of human-centred design, firmly rooted in accessibility, ergonomics and cognitive psychology. Over time, the label has been narrowed and turned into a marketable job title and deliverable. Norman’s more recent call for “humanity-centred design” can be seen as an attempt to bring back a wider ethical purpose. That move also lines up with ideas from behavioural psychology and behavioural design about how people actually think and act.
What UX Design Was Supposed To Mean
Long before “UX designer” appeared on job descriptions, fields like human–computer interaction and ergonomics were trying to make technology fit human abilities and limits. Human-centred design standards, especially ISO 9241-210, define human-centred design as an approach that makes systems “usable and useful” by focusing on users, their needs and requirements, and by applying knowledge from human factors and ergonomics. This approach aims to improve effectiveness, efficiency, well-being, satisfaction, accessibility and even sustainability (ISO, 2010; ISO, 2019).
Norman’s work sits firmly in this tradition. In The Design of Everyday Things, he uses cognitive science to explain how good design makes a system’s state easy to see, links controls clearly to outcomes, reduces what people have to remember and gives feedback they can act on (Norman, 2013). These are, at heart, accessibility principles. They make it easier for a wide range of people, in messy real-world situations, to build accurate mental models and to act without unnecessary effort or error.
When Norman later used the job title “User Experience Architect” at Apple, he chose “user experience” precisely because “human interface” and “usability” felt too narrow. UX, as he framed it, was meant to cover all aspects of a person’s experience with a system, from their physical interaction to their emotional response (Norman, 2013). The ideology behind UX was to design around people’s capacities, constraints and contexts, including disabled users, rather than treating those people as edge cases to be handled at the end.
How UX Was Narrowed and Fragmented
Once UX became a hiring category and a set of deliverables, its meaning started to drift. Nielsen’s “100-year view of UX” shows that experience design has deep roots in industrial design, human factors and information architecture. In practice, though, UX is often reduced to digital look and feel or a set of isolated usability tasks carried out late in a project.
This narrowing has clear effects. First, accessibility is often treated as a simple checklist or legal requirement, rather than as a core value woven through the whole design process, even though human-centred design standards explicitly highlight accessibility and the inclusion of all affected users, not just main operators (ISO, 2019; Digital NHS, 2022). Second, UX work is frequently bounded by local performance metrics, such as click-through rates or time on page, instead of looking at the wider human, social and environmental consequences of the systems being built (Meyer and Norman, 2020).
In many organisations, UX has therefore become a thin layer on top of digital touchpoints. It is often detached from the deeper questions that human-centred design was meant to address: whose needs actually matter, who is left out and what kind of world a product or service is quietly helping to create.
Human-Centred and Humanity-Centred Design
Recent writing on human-centred design stresses that it is not just about feeling empathy for individual “users”. It also involves systems and multiple stakeholders. In healthcare, for example, Melles et al. (2021) identify three core traits of human-centred design: understanding people and their needs, involving stakeholders throughout the process and taking a systems view that links small, everyday interactions to wider structures and shared interests. This is a much broader perspective than screen-level UX.
Norman has become one of the strongest critics of a narrow version of human-centred design. In more recent work and interviews, he argues that focusing only on individual users can lock us into local optima and make us blind to long-term social and environmental impacts. His idea of “humanity-centred design” calls for design that is meaningful, sustainable and focused on humanity as a whole, addressing systemic issues such as climate change, equity and ageing populations (Norman, 2023).
Humanity-centred design asks more than whether a product is easy to use or pleasant for its direct users. It asks whether the wider system is good for people in general and for the ecosystems they depend on. In that sense, it can be read as a return to what UX was meant to be in the first place: design that puts humans, in their full social and environmental context, at the centre of decision making.
Behavioural Psychology and the Reality of Human Users
Human-centred and humanity-centred design rely on a picture of “the user” that comes from psychology, not from idealised rational models. Behavioural psychology and behavioural economics offer a detailed view of how people really perceive, decide and act.
Kahneman’s dual-process theory, described in Thinking, Fast and Slow, splits thinking into a fast, automatic “System 1” and a slower, effortful “System 2” (Kahneman, 2011). System 1 uses shortcuts and is highly sensitive to framing and surface cues. System 2 can think more carefully, but it is slow, effortful and easily overloaded. This has obvious implications for UX. First impressions, visual hierarchy and familiar patterns strongly shape how interfaces are understood. Heavy cognitive load or confusing flows make it harder for people to make reflective choices.
Behavioural economists such as Thaler and Sunstein (2008) build on this by showing how “choice architecture” – the way options are laid out and presented – can “nudge” behaviour without removing choice. Because humans are predictably irrational, they argue, there is no neutral design. Every layout, default and process pushes behaviour in some direction.
At the same time, Fogg’s Behaviour Model suggests that behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt come together. Persuasive design deliberately shifts these three elements to encourage particular actions (Fogg, 2009). Behavioural design and persuasive technology sit exactly where psychology and UX meet, using models of human behaviour to shape digital experiences.
Taken together, these behavioural views support the original human-centred spirit of UX. They remind us that people have limited attention and memory, follow habits, show biases and have strong emotional reactions. Designing “for the user” means simplifying tasks, avoiding traps that exploit cognitive blind spots and supporting both quick, intuitive use and slower, more deliberate decision making when it is needed.
Where Behavioural Design and Humanity-Centred Design Meet
The same behavioural insights that are used for “growth hacking” and dark patterns can also be used in more positive ways, to support autonomy, accessibility and long-term well-being. Melles et al. (2021) stress that human-centred design should involve stakeholders and systems, moving from the individual to the collective. This connects strongly with humanity-centred design’s view that design should serve communities and ecosystems, not just short-term engagement numbers (Norman, 2023).
From a behavioural point of view, this might mean, for example:
- using nudges to encourage inclusive and accessible choices, instead of simply maximising time on site
- lowering cognitive load for people with limited mental bandwidth or impairments, rather than assuming an endlessly patient, highly resourced “ideal” user
- building transparency and meaningful consent into data flows, while recognising that defaults and framing have a strong effect on people’s decisions.
Behavioural design already faces questions about the ethics of influencing behaviour through design (Lockton et al., 2010; Fogg, 2003). Humanity-centred design adds weight to this ethical discussion by insisting that designers optimise not for short-term clicks or sign-ups, but for human dignity, fairness and the health of the planet.
Reclaiming UX
If UX design was supposed to stand for anything, it was that designers take responsibility for the real humans affected by their decisions. The human-centred design tradition, as set out in standards such as ISO 9241-210 and developed further in recent research, offers a clear process: understand people and their contexts, involve them throughout, iterate and think about system-level effects (ISO, 2010; Melles et al., 2021).
Behavioural psychology adds a realistic model of how people think and behave to that process. Humanity-centred design then widens the frame again, reminding us that “users” are not isolated individuals, but members of communities living within fragile social and ecological systems (Norman, 2023; Meyer and Norman, 2020).
To reclaim UX from its current, sometimes “butchered”, state is not to invent a brand new field. It is to reconnect three strands that always belonged together: accessible, standards-based human-centred design; behavioural insight grounded in evidence; and a humanity-centred ethical horizon that asks what, and who, our designs are really for.
References
Fogg, B.J., 2009. A behavior model for persuasive design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology. New York: ACM.
ISO, 2010. ISO 9241-210: Ergonomics of human–system interaction – Human-centred design for interactive systems. Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
ISO, 2019. ISO 9241-210: Ergonomics of human–system interaction – Human-centred design for interactive systems (revised edition). Geneva: International Organization for Standardization.
Kahneman, D., 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Lockton, D., Harrison, D. and Stanton, N.A., 2010. The Design with Intent Method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour. Applied Ergonomics, 41(3), pp.382–392.
Melles, M., Albayrak, A. and Goossens, R., 2021. Innovating health care: key characteristics of human-centered design. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 33(S1), pp.37–44.
Meyer, M.W. and Norman, D., 2020. Changing design education for the 21st century. She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 6(1), pp.13–49.
Norman, D.A., 2013. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Basic Books.
Norman, D.A., 2023. Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C.R., 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.