No, the term &quot;UI design&quot; has always meant the “usability” side of the design in professional circles. The aesthetic side has been called visual design or graphic design. However, the history of the whole field has been a fight to find authority inside organisations, and words has been weapons and casualties of this battle.<p>UI design was always about the “usability”, the “how” and “why” of the design, not the looks. For example, the first edition of Alan Cooper’s About Face (1995) had a subtitle &quot;The Essentials of User Interface Design”. It was more or less the UI design bible back in the 90s for the practitioners.<p>However, back then, most managers and technical people incorrectly thought that the job of UI designer was to “make this ugly thing we built pretty”. This caused a problem for UI design as a profession, and people inside the field started to use a term &quot;Interaction Design”. It was also a better term because it highlighted the temporal part of the design exercise: the user interaction flow. This is often the hardest part to design right and the term clearly separates the interaction design from designing visual surfaces. This change was reflected in the 2nd edition of About Face (2003), the subtitle was now “The Essentials of Interaction Design”. Also, IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, was founded the same year.<p>At the same time, there was another rising term, user experience design. It was used especially by Don Norman. While Interaction Designers tried to drive home the point that the interaction design was a separate profession than visual design, Norman took a more holistic approach. Instead of separating the fields, he actually highlighted the importance of aesthetics for the user experience, which culminated in his book Emotional Design (2005).<p>By the late 2000s, most of the leading software organisations had already understood the importance of UI design. Also, the rise of the startup culture and smaller teams meant that more and more people in our field worked on the product-level decisions, instead of working on the nitty-gritty of technical architecture. User experience design grew to mean a more holistic take on how the user experiences the product and became more or less the umbrella term for the field.