Mosaic, a free web browser with a graphical user interface (GUI), was first released in 1993 and quickly became the first web product to spread via word of mouth, a phenomena known today as a viral success--the panacea of every investor in technology start-ups.

It was not Mosaic's graphical user interfaces, nor its ability to access the internet that made it so successful--successful precedents were already established:

• Apple, Microsoft, and IBM brought personal computers within the reach of the general population. When Mosaic was launched, the graphical user interface featuring windows, icons, and the ability to interact with software using a mouse had already been well established.
• America Online dominated the online services market, offering millions of people a graphical user interface, affordable monthly subscriptions, and the now legendary "You Got Mail" audio announcement, which at the time delighted users--after all, who does not like to get mail?

Rather, what made Mosaic so successful was the ease of use it introduced--the ability to browse the WWW freely, in a standardized and uniform way. AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy were successful online services, which were also easy to use. However, they were also gated communities of sorts; Mosaic appealed to a growing audience who wanted independent access to the internet.

Another important development occurred in 1997, when Google introduced what at the time was a revolutionary user experience for search engines--a single search field, which had the most accurate search results ever experienced before.

"Accurate" is perhaps not the right word to describe Google's revolutionary search. Instead, it was the ease and speed with which the search returned the right result at the top or within the first page of the results list. A common experience with other search engines was often frustrating because of the following reasons:

• Users had to build a search query using the Boolean modifiers AND, OR, NOT (Flights AND Paris OR Rome), which many people found confusing
• The results often did not return what the user was looking for

That is why, prior to Google, performing internet searches has been a professional activity performed by librarians and research experts in specific domains, such as travel agents.

Sadly, these days the first page of Google's search results is almost exclusively filled by paid advertisements as opposed to "organic" results. This results in a poor user experience and offers a classic example of prioritizing profits over user needs.

With these and associated events, the floodgates of business opportunity burst wide open and it became apparent that the internet is the new frontier for individuals and business. The DOTCOM period between 1997 and 2001 that swept investors' imagination with the promise of fast and unimaginable riches was analogous to the US gold rush of the mid 1900s. While it turned out to be a bubble, which caused the industry a temporary setback when it burst, it was also a time of intense creativity that pushed forward the evolution of experience design.

Yet, throughout the first decade of this century, design was still considered an add-on rather than something that should be seamlessly integrated into the product development process.