People who shaped UX

Don Norman helped popularize user experience as a broad design concern while working at Apple in the 1990s. His perspective includes the product, the surrounding service and the person’s experience of using both.

Jakob Nielsen is known for ten usability heuristics: practical principles for reviewing an interface. They grew from work with Rolf Molich in 1990 and Nielsen’s later refinement. For example, people should be able to tell what the system is doing.

Alan Cooper popularized personas in interaction design. A useful persona brings research about a group’s goals and behavior into design discussions. It is not simply a fictional biography or a list of demographic details.

These contributions help answer different questions. Look across the journey, inspect an interface or focus on a user group’s goals—then check your assumptions with evidence.