From punch cards to touch screens - evolution of UI/UX design

In India people are thinking that UI/UX design is an industry that recently emerged out of nowhere in the middle of last decade and has been booming since then, but the actual truth is not so. UI/UX design has been in existence and has been improving our lives and experiences since several decades. In this article, we are going to see how it all started and what is the current status of the UI/UX design field.

Even before the computing era existed there were punch cards. These punch cards were stocks of cards with holes in them in a particular pattern which were interpreted by card readers as a stored data. For example these punch cards were used in the weaving industry during in early 1800s as weavers able to store a particular weaving pattern in these punch cards and automate the complete weaving process as it was repetitive and did not require human effort or intervention.

Later during the 2nd industrial revolution punch cards were used in industrial settings, such as factories and offices, where repetitive tasks and data processing could be automated. Punch cards were also used to for marking labor attendance. Laborers would punch in and out of work using time clocks that had punch card readers. The cards will store hours worked, overtime, and other relevant information and the cards would be processed to calculate at the end of the pay period to calculate how much should be paid to each employee. The processed data would also be used to generate payroll checks or other forms of payment.

The punch cards would have to be fed into a output punches which would punch holes in the blank cards. Later these punched cards will be inserted into a card reader or an input reader which would translate these holes into electrical signals that computers could understand. From late 19th century to slightly beyond mid 20th century these punch cards were used for taking census data, scientific calculations, business data processing and voting systems. As technology advanced, punch cards were gradually replaced by magnetic tapes, floppy disks and eventually hard drives, pen drives and cloud storage. By the 1980s, their use had significantly declined and currently they are not in use at all.

Until the start of 1980s computers were used by government organizations only for defence and research related activities or by scientific and academic institutions. Later during the 80s when computing became commercialized and was becoming a common thing for home and business uses human computer interaction was mainly through command prompts like MS-DOS, which is an acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System. During these periods computers were primarily focused on task completion and not user experience. During that time Xerox's Alto was experimenting with graphical interface but Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows were the first two to successfully create and implement the concept of GUI - Graphical User Interface.

Although the internet existed for decades before the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, it was primarily used for research and academic purposes. However, the creation of the WWW and the subsequent development of user-friendly web browsers led to a significant increase in the widespread adoption of the internet in the 1990s. This made the internet a household name in many parts of the world. So the rise of graphical user interface and internet becoming available for common public both put together resonated very well and propelled the rise of websites and web designing. By the end of 90s almost every business had an official website.

When people started to find out businesses, products and services through internet and search engines the competition for establishing the online presence of businesses started which eventually turned into war for online domination of businesses. So in order to attract viewers and to retain those viewers into prospects and potential customers businesses started stepping up their ui/ux game. Day by day every website had something new to contribute to the user interface and user experience for the online community which brought in more innovations and uniqueness. Trying to out beat and compete against each other these websites were feeding and complimenting its audience with more user-friendly, easily navigable and a memorable user experience.

On the other hand, there was a rise in software industry, where people preferred user interface based software over command based software. In order to acquire more people and businesses to use their software there was a sharp shift towards GUI based software during the digital transformation era. That's why Microsoft office was a huge hit during the 90s and is still irreplaceable even 30 years later. Other software which are still proclaiming their dominance in their respective fields like MS-Office are Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Though there are many alternatives to these two still people prefer these two.

Simultaneously, many other GUI based operating systems started arising such as Ubuntu and Linux which came up with alternate GUIs which gave users a completely different user experience, because of which industry leaders like Microsoft and Apple had to better their Windows and MacOS user interfaces respectively in order to maintain their market dominance. Though both Apple and Microsoft adopted different GUI approaches in their operating systems both were undeniably good in their own ways. The animating icons in the dock of MacOS was its iconic move whereas the metro style minimalistic flat style rotating cubes was windows equivalent reply to it. Like this in every other aspect of computing UI and UX designing was constantly improving and evolving.

Competition in making their products more preferable just did not confine to websites, software and operating systems it also spread and also became a deciding factor in the second browser wars. Chrome, Firefox, Netscape Navigator and Opera were the major contenders of the 2nd browser war which was mostly led by Firefox and Chrome. While Firefox brought in personalization features, Chrome's multi-tab feature gave the final blow to Firefox and ended the 2nd browser wars. This multi-tab feature gave users to access and navigate multiple websites at the same time, this was the user experience that was liked by a lot of users and was preferred over Firefox's personalization features.

When internet became accessible through mobile phones many businesses made their official websites accessible through mobile phones and mobile phone friendly. Banking industry was the first one to make online transactions through mobile phones through their websites. But people had to load the entire website and its database just to do one transaction which easily emptied their mobile data. I am mentioning the period when we had only 2G network. So, now banking industries software that could be installed on mobile phones and users can do transactions through those software installed on mobile phones which was later called or named as mobile apps. With the introduction of smartphones mobile apps were developed left, right and center and started accumulating our smartphones. Developing and hosting an app is several times expensive than developing a website. So, if somebody has to earn money through an app then obviously it needs a large user base. If such a large user base is required then the user experience and user interface has to be on point. So this was around 2010s and now the ui/ux designing field really boomed as every businesses and organizations started paying deep attention on what and how they are putting out on their websites and apps. Consumers hunger to get something new everyday and firms constant improvement to stay relevant and to be the best in the business fed the ui/ux design industry more and more such that it became a household name in a very short span of time within 2 years and since 2012 ui/ux industry has been booming.

Introduction of android in the smart phone industry which was basically an open source mobile operating system brought down the price of smartphones and almost around 2013 everybody were able to afford smartphones. Before 2010 we need to pay a large amount to get 256 MB of 2G data per month, but after 2010 we were able to afford at least mobile data of 1GB/day at 3G and 4G speeds. So lots of people start accessing websites through smartphones. Meanwhile in early 2010s the advent of HTML 5 and bootstrap made development of responsive ui more easy with which mobile first designs became more prominent. Prior to this in many parts of the world developers would directly create websites without the consultation or any form of inputs from ui/ux designers. Once the rise of demand for mobile first designs increased due to the above said factors companies started realising the need for ui/ux designers and their inputs. Now the rise for ui/ux designer job roles happened since then, there were many ui/ux design training institutes started up. Therefore all of this led to the creation of an economical ecosystem around ui/ux designing.

Rise of netflix and other streaming services in mid 2010s forced consumer electronics to integrate these streaming services into their televisions and related products. This led to the creation of smart TVs. Smart TVs were initially controlled by remote controls like traditional TVs but later on adopted to take touch inputs, voice inputs and gesture inputs. This eventually led to creating newer forms of human-computer interaction and user interfaces and user experiences to accommodate these new features. By placing the smart TVs vertically businesses were able to change them into kiosks with better user experience. Those ticket vending machines or food order placing machines that you see in self serving hotels are those smart TVs turned into kiosks. After covid-19 no contact kiosks got accelerated in order to avoid further spreading of the pandemic which became possible by voice inputs and gesture inputs. These where the next advancements in ui/ux design field.

In early 2010s refrigerators started coming with displays on their door handle so that consumers could see what was contained inside the refrigerator. Then as technology grew these displays turned into touch enabled screens using which people could do temperature control, inventory management, recipe suggestions and even at times they were used to play music or browse the internet. This feature was introduced to other home and kitchen appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, stoves, ovens, air fryers, vacuum cleaners and etc. UI/UX designing which was previously confined to computers and TVs now spread to home appliances too because of introducing these additional features through touch screens.

The awareness of keeping the planet more sustainable and livable pushed people more towards electric vehicles over classic IC engine powered vehicles. Tesla popularizing the use of electric vehicles with stylish designs and touch screen dashboards forced other vehicle manufacturers also to bring in these features to stay in the market. Adopting the same feature even in the two wheeler market digital dashboards were introduced containing speedometer, odometer, fuel gauge, and other essential information for the riders. UI/UX designing spread its boundaries into the vehicle industry also with these upgradations.

Apple then introduced wearable devices such as apple watch in the first half of 2015, which created a new branch in ui/ux designing called wearable UI. As many other brands such as Titan, Moto and Samsung also launched similar products, ui/ux designing for wearable devices became an added necessity.

So, this is how UI/UX designing has evolved over decades and has silently become a part of our life and making our lives easier with better experience.