Chicago Camps

How The Evolution of Usability in Chess Can Influence User Experience Design Today

​What does an old game like chess have to do with user experience? It’s a great example of long standing user experience and design—it transcends time and languages, and moved across empires. A player in the 1600s would be able to play the same we play today. In this post-Queen’s Gambit world, chess is even more popular than ever online, in part due to the pandemic.

UX continues to evolve as technology quickly develops, but there are still mental models that users expect online. Similar to chess—we all know what the pieces look like, the ways the pieces move, but how a player gets to their goal is up to an individual player. We’ll examine the history of this great game and explore the many attempts to modify and customize the game over centuries as popularity grew, but there is always a return to its original form—and what user experience designers can learn from this and apply to our work today.