Furniture, of course, tends to stay put. But the leap to automobiles seemed less far-fetched once Hackett and I were sitting side by side in the foam-and-aluminum cockpit of a self-driving-car prototype in one of Ford’s Dearborn design studios. “We may have to leave that there,” he said, pointing to a notional steering wheel emitting a blue glow, “just so that you’re comfortable.” But the driver’s seat can swivel around—like an office chair, he noted. Hackett and I rotated so that we were facing two more Ford employees in the back seat.

The choice of Hackett to lead Ford confounded both those analysts who expected a dyed-in-the-wool carmaker and those who expected a high-tech hand to manage the company as cars morph into rolling computers. But his selection suggests a third way—which may, in fact, capture the times. We don’t live in the age of the automobile, or even the age of the computer. We live in the age of user experience.

Our lives are made up of human-machine interactions—with smartphones, televisions, internet-enabled parking meters that don’t accept quarters— that have the power to delight and, often, infuriate. (“Maddening” is Hackett’s one-word description for 90-button TV remotes.) Into this arena has stepped a new class of professional: the user-experience, or UX, designer, whose job is to see a product not from an engineer’s, marketer’s, or legal department’s perspective but from the viewpoint of the user alone. And to insist that the customer should not have to learn to speak the company’s internal language. The company should learn to speak the customer’s.

LinkedIn lists tens of thousands of UX job openings; the role has become a fixture on those year-end “hottest job” lists. If you want to study UX, you now have the option at some three dozen institutions in the United States, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington. But Ford is one of the few major industrial companies in the U.S. to put a UX guru in charge.

At present, the question hovering over the car industry is basically whether high-tech entrants such as Tesla and Google can learn crankshafts and drivetrains faster than Ford, GM, and other carmakers can learn software and algorithms. But Hackett reflects Ford’s bet that the winner won’t be the best chassis maker or software maker, but the company that nails the interaction between man and machine. “One of the things that drew me to Jim was his commitment to design thinking, which puts the human being at the center of the equation,” Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman (and great-grandson of Henry), explained to me.

The term UX originated in Silicon Valley. Don Norman, a UC San Diego professor and the author of the seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, worked at Apple during Steve Jobs’s exile in the 1990s. “I thought the quality of the Apple computer was going downhill a little bit,” he told me recently. “We’d reach the tail end of a project, and the engineers would have their say, the marketing people would have their say.” But no one at the table was advocating for the user. In 1993, Norman suggested to then-CEO John Sculley the need for “someone who took the overview of what it was like to use these machines.” He formed a UX office and styled himself as Apple’s user-experience architect.