UX stories: the evolution of “A”
The story of simplicity stretches deep into the roots of our society; whether it’s simplifying logos or entire alphabets, humans have been making tools more accessible to the masses for thousands of years!
What do the UX process and ancient civilisations have in common?
They both slowly chipped away at visual designs to create a more robust, understandable and accessible tool for their respective communities. You may be thinking to yourself: “but what tools… hammers and stuff?”, to which I say YES! But in this particular case, no. I am referring to probably the most explosively world-altering tool that has ever existed, language.
What does language have to do with UX, and why is it so important?
First off, language has given us the base to achieve everything; how would you present your design decisions to stakeholders without communicating it with language, and how would anyone understand anything if we didn’t have the words for them. In essence, we all agree something means what it means due to language. To contextualise this we can look at the English language; it’s a relatively new language in comparison to Chinese and Latin, it has adopted several words and phrases from other languages (specifically Latin languages), and it has quickly grown to be one of the most widely spoken languages in human history. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that English is a simpler language, the essence of simplicity can be found in our use of the Roman alphabet, numbers, and even in other collections as complex as the Chinese alphabet.
This brings me to the title, namely the letter “A”, where an incredible transition that took place over the course of millennia gave us the neat, universally recognisable letter we know and love. The letter “A” was originally derived from a hieroglyph, you know, like those embossed images of eagles and people on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs? It resembled the head of an ox, which in Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon) was referred to as “aleph”, hence why it represents the sound “a”.
(The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2018)
This big old cow head with horns atop its crown was quite a big effort to write, imagine you’re a busy merchant in 1000BC and you need to keep track of where your shipments of dates are going. You probably won’t be too keen on drawing hundreds of ox heads on paper or clay every week, would you? … thought not. So what is the natural response? SIMPLIFY!
This also made it easier for us to communicate and read things, paving the way for languages to evolve into what we know now.
As the years pass from 2500BC to year 1, all the way up to 2021AD, we can see a clear evolution of the letter “A”. People must have thought “hmm, I’m tired of drawing cows today, why not just make a quick cow-shaped squiggle instead? Close enough!”. And thank the UX gods they did, because I can’t imagine having to write this article in hieroglyphs, I don’t have that kind of energy, no matter how many sugary dates I eat.
So I am super glad humans transitioned from the Egyptian, Sinai, Hebrew, Phoenician, and Greek letters all the way to the familiar Roman letters we have today! (this is not a linear scale of course).
We can see similar transitions occur in the Chinese alphabet too, where a character thousands of years in the past may have looked like a field of crops, but now is recognised as the specific character with the meaning “field”. (yes I did pick this character because it represents my name, don’t judge me 😉).
That being said, every time you look at a letter, keep in mind how your ancient ancestors probably saw it. Realise the depth of meaning behind it, and how it spans several cultures all at once. Also keep in mind how alphabets have been constantly iterated upon again and again to create a more simplistic structure, one that is tailored to us (the users) as well as how we read & write (the experience). We have effectively created a visual tool that is designed to play neatly to our human nature of pattern recognition and recall.
Language could be seen as the longest-running UX project in human history, now go have some fun with this knowledge!
I would love to hear what you have to say about all this, all opinions and arguments are open to scrutiny! How does this article make you feel, and why does it make you feel that way? Let me know if I’ve made any errors or if you feel I’ve missed part of the story so I can provide a more accurate rendition.
Thanks for reading to the end, shoot me a message, leave a comment or find me online on LinkedIn or my Portfolio website!
Bye-bye 💃
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2018, October 24). A | letter. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-letter> [Accessed: 27 August 2021].
Images made with coolicons by Kryston Schwarze — coolicons.cool
