The internet was created in the 1960s, and it spread gradually from government and academia, to commercial and personal use. Important milestones include the emergence of secure online payments via encrypted browsers, Amazon's shopping cart, advances in warehousing and shipping logistics involved in the fulfillment of online orders, media streaming, the emergence of social networks, and a transition from slow dial-up to fast high-speed connections, which radically improved the experience of being online. In developed countries, a reliable and persistent internet connection has tremendous importance. It is comparable to utilities and is needed almost like water and electricity. We will expand this point later. 

Robust but relatively small, virtual communities formed in the 1980s through the early 1990s were propelled by the availability of personal computers and dialup connections to the network. The main form of interaction occurred on bulletin board forums offered by companies such as CompuServe and Prodigy. Many of the participants in these early virtual communities were hobbyists, who often built their own computers and had a high tolerance for the obscurities of going online.

The internet, which was treasured by many of its regular users as a noncommercial utopia, got quickly commercialized. The shift to a commercial internet placed a sudden and unexpected stress on the experience of millions of people:

• Secure and robust commerce demanded functionality that was not well supported by web browsers
• Monitors were expensive and small, with low resolution and limited colors
• Internet connections and computers were slow, especially in comparison to what we are used to today

Content creators attempted to limit the amount of information that could be displayed on the screen and minimize horizontal scrolling, since people were not used to it and it was considered a usability concern. The term "above the fold" was borrowed from the newsprint industry to signify important content that must be placed at the top part of the screen. Content had to be split into multiple pages to ensure faster loading and to avoid scrolling.

This approach backfired. It caused orientation and navigation problems, which in turn contributed to a fragmented and poor user experience:

• Navigating the websites of companies and organizations became a serious problem. Users bitterly complained about being unable to find the relevant information they need and getting lost in a maze of pages due to confusing navigation.
• Many paper-based forms, such as college or job applications, were ported unchanged to the Web, often resulting in a frustrating user experience:
  • Users lost time as well as the data they laboriously entered due to system time-outs, communication errors with the server, and other technical problems.
  • Data entry was tedious, confusing, and frustrating. For example, lack of instant field-level validation meant that a user could complete an entire form and, upon submission, receive an error message that the form cannot be processed due to input errors. In some cases, the error message did not identify the field/s that require corrections.
• For a while, browser manufacturers believed that dominating the web browser would lead to dominance over the internet. Browser wars ensued, resulting in the release of incompatible browsers by Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Netscape (Mosaic's successor), and Firefox (Netscape's successor). For a while, it became practically impossible to provide a consistent user experience for all users. Echoes of this problem still reverberate in modern browsers.
• Additionally, browsers made by a single vendor were not backward compatible. This meant that applications that worked in a certain version of a browser became useless on the next version. This was particularly true for Microsoft, which dominated the browser market for a few years. Microsoft IE 5, IE 5.5, and IE 6 were very different from each other and did not provide backward compatibility. We still see these issues today.
• Annoying advertisements polluted the user experience with unexpected and hard to remove popups, animations, and sound effects.

This list emerging issues in the early days of the commercial internet is just the tip of the usability iceberg that hit users. The situation posed serious challenges for companies and brought much frustration to their clients and customers.

As mentioned earlier, design was generally viewed as superficial beautification, or "eye candy", and not as a truly valuable investment in product quality. Budgets for user interface projects were small, schedules tight, and expectations unrealistic. Stakeholders had to be educated on the value and process of good user interfaces before they relented and approved design budgets.

A small group of people, who advocated for improving the usability of applications and websites, began to draw the attention of business and IT people. It took a couple of decades for the value proposition of design to sink in the corporate consciousness. Gradually, the recognition of design's importance propelled the business side, with marketing and sales often leading the charge to invest in user interface designers.