The Real Origin of User Experience

If you ask the internet who invented user experience, it will say Don Norman, in the early nineties, at Apple. That's true, and it's incomplete. Don gave us the title. The thing the title named had already existed for years, built by a woman from Ohio with purple and blue hair who had been quietly seeing the future since 1976.

Her name is Brenda Laurel. I spent two hours with her last summer for my book, and what she told me has reshaped the way I think about the work we do.

D.R.E.

I asked her, notebook ready for the creation myth, where the term user experience came from.

She laughed. Not the polite laugh. The real one. "I used to have a term I used in my writing. I would have a little annotation: D.R.E. Nobody ever asked me for years what that meant." She paused, eyes twinkling. "What it meant was direct rectal extraction. Which means I pulled it out of my ass."

The term that launched a thousand departments, that justified billions in investment, that became the North Star for an industry, was pulled from the mysterious place where necessity meets imagination.

But here is what every UX professional should understand. Brenda could pull it from thin air because she had already lived it. In 1976, at a company called Cyber Vision in Ohio, she was designing interactive fairy tales with two kilobytes of RAM. Loading from cassette tape. She was asking what interactive really meant when Pong was still a novelty, when most people thought computers were fancy calculators. The language came after the understanding. The word came after the world had already changed.

This is the lesson under the joke. A field can't be named until somebody has lived it long enough to know its shape.

Theater Is the Original UX

To understand Brenda's vision you have to understand where she came from. She holds an MFA in acting from Ohio State. Her doctoral work, which became the book Computers as Theatre in 1991, argued that the human computer interface is not a tool. It's a stage.

This was not a metaphor. It was a method.

Aristotle wrote the Poetics around 335 BCE. He laid out the structural laws of dramatic action. How a story works on a body sitting in the dark. How attention is built and released. How catharsis is earned. Brenda read Aristotle and saw, in those ancient pages, the blueprint for designing experience itself.

"You can find the fractal signature of the entire shape of Hamlet in one scene," she told me, still excited by the discovery decades later.

Every screen you have ever designed is a stage. Every flow is a play in three acts. Every moment of friction is a scene that asks too much of the audience. Brenda did not invent this. She remembered it for the rest of us.

The Apple Naming

Don Norman, working at Apple in the early nineties, gave the practice the title we use today. He has been generous about this. He wanted a phrase that captured what his team did, which was not interface design and not industrial design and not human factors alone. It was all of those things together, in service of something larger. The whole encounter between a person and a thing.

He called it User Experience.

The name traveled fast because it described what people were already doing. It also traveled fast because it described what they wanted to be doing, but had no permission to call work. The phrase gave permission. That is what good language does.

Don named it. Brenda lived it first. Both are true. The field has room for both.

What Brenda Has Been Trying to Tell Us

Here is the part most of the industry has forgotten.

Brenda Laurel was never just designing interfaces. She was designing what she calls possibilities for human experience. Her work at Purple Moon, founded in 1996 to make games for girls, was built on interviews with more than one thousand girls across the country. She did not assume she knew what they wanted. She asked. She listened. She found that girls navigate virtual space differently than boys. That under time pressure their mental rotation performance drops, then equalizes when the pressure is removed. That the industry had not failed to include them. The industry had designed them out.

Purple Moon shipped its eighth product, about to turn a profit, when Paul Allen's board pulled the plug. He sold it to Mattel. The work made for girls became the property of what Brenda calls "the hegemon of objectified femininity."

This is the pattern of her career, and it is the pattern of our field. Visionary work, met with incomprehension. Innovation, met with quarterly earnings. A woman who could see thirty years ahead, watching her own future get sold to the people she had been building against.

She has never stopped. At seventy-four, she writes poetry daily, consults on AR projects that help children understand nature, and is asking a question that should be the next assignment for our entire field.

What if we thought of the planet as a client?

The Question She Is Leaving Us

In her last keynote at IxDA, Brenda asked the audience to redesign their relationship with the earth itself.

"Maybe it's not just the earth serving us. Maybe we're serving the earth for a change. Maybe we're designing how we interact with the earth for the sake of the Earth as a constituent, as a stakeholder."

A stakeholder.

Think about what that means for the practice. The user research interview now includes a river. The persona document includes a forest. The success metric is no longer engagement or conversion. It is whether the system, taken as a whole, can sustain itself for another generation.

This is the vision the woman who helped name our field has been offering us all along. Not better screens. Not faster flows. A quiet, radical redesign of what design is for.

What I Want You to Take from This

The next time someone tells you UX is dying, that AI will replace it, that the field has lost its way, remember this.

We did not inherit a methodology. We inherited a mission.

The term came from a woman who pulled it out of thin air because she had already done the work. The work was theater. The work was listening. The work was refusing to design as if only one perspective counted. The work was asking who the system serves, and being willing to be wrong, and starting again.

That work is not done. It is more urgent than it has ever been.

I asked Brenda toward the end of our conversation whether the term user experience should die.

"Does it really fucking matter?" she said. "Let's just do the work. Let's make the world better."

So that is the assignment.

The name is just a name. The work is the thing.

This post draws on a two-hour conversation with Brenda Laurel conducted in July 2025 for the book Conscious UX. Find her ongoing work at neogaian.org.