Surely you're thinking of UI design. The term UX design was coined because it's not the same thing. You're right that UX design is not principally intended to benefit the user. That's by design.
I haven't heard that perspective before; the 'U' in "UX" stands for "User".
I think the term "User Experience" picked up in the late 90s (e.g. Don Norman et al's CHI95 paper) when folks felt that the term "interface" had become too narrow and implied a focus on screens and controls and excluded people and what they do with those screens & controls.
The "human-computer interface" originally referred to the boundary where those two systems interfaced and included hardware, software, and wetware. But nowadays if you ask someone to point to the "user interface" they'll probably point at the screen.
If you're interested, there seem to be a cottage industry of blog posts and infographics about the "difference between UI and UX" but in practice it seems that most people use them somewhat interchangeably and I'm not sure how much benefit the semantics debate provides in practice.
asoneth|5 years ago
I think the term "User Experience" picked up in the late 90s (e.g. Don Norman et al's CHI95 paper) when folks felt that the term "interface" had become too narrow and implied a focus on screens and controls and excluded people and what they do with those screens & controls.
The "human-computer interface" originally referred to the boundary where those two systems interfaced and included hardware, software, and wetware. But nowadays if you ask someone to point to the "user interface" they'll probably point at the screen.
If you're interested, there seem to be a cottage industry of blog posts and infographics about the "difference between UI and UX" but in practice it seems that most people use them somewhat interchangeably and I'm not sure how much benefit the semantics debate provides in practice.