UX SPEAK: THE UNTOLD ORIGINS

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Many common UX buzzwords have surprisingly old and unusual origins. “User experience” was coined in the 1990s, but “writer” once meant to scratch or carve, “designer” originally implied a schemer, and “researcher” has meant to investigate since the 1500s. Methods like “A/B testing” stem from testing metals in clay pots, “brainstorming” once described delirium before being popularized in the 1940s, “case study” emerged from early 20th-century law, and “agile” comes from the Latin for nimble, later repurposed in software development in 2001.