9 ms·

Do It (2004)

283 points by kristianp 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adenozine 5y ago
I’ve had some users that definitely needed a “dolt” button……
LeoPanthera 5y ago
A (poor quality) image of the "Do It" screen: https://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dolt.jpg https://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dolt.jpg
- gpt5 5y ago
  Given the random spaces in "R ename" and "R emove", I'm not surprised that they ignored the space in "Do It"
- raverbashing 5y ago
  It would have been better to have it as "Do it" But yeah, OK is better
- skrebbel 5y ago
  I'm not convinced that this is the one, the article says it was in a sans serif font.
na85 5y ago
Bad keming strikes again.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  But the issue wasn't kerning. There was a space between Do and It, kerning is how two letters look next to each other.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Keming is also how two letters not adjoined to each other look like they are.
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      I've never heard it used that way but it makes sense. Thanks!
  - boondaburrah 5y ago
    I also think that at the time computer users may have been used to dismissing extra space around letters, since the computers they commonly interacted with would use monospaced fonts for technical reasons.
neilv 5y ago
It could've been worse: http://trans.onionmixer.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=File:Smalltalk80LanguageImplementation_17-7.png http://trans.onionmixer.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=File:S...
- chrisco255 5y ago
  That's interesting, it shows the context menu, and it looks like the camel case function names from the code were directly copied over, as it shows 'printIt' and 'doIt' among the options.
  - neilv 5y ago
    I found that in quick search for a screenshot of the context menu. I thought I remembered "do it" from a ParcPlace Smalltalk implementation.
KronisLV 5y ago
That's a funny story, but i can't help but to feel that there's another problem to be solved: > It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l' Why couldn't most fonts be designed in a way as to not mix up o and O and 0, l and I and L as well as other symbols like that? Of course, there are often historical constraints to deal with but it surprises me that this isn't some rule of font design that would need to be followed in 99% of the cases.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  The limited resolution of the time was a big constraint on the design space. The first Mac had a resolution of 512 × 342, and that was considered generous.
  - Someone 5y ago
    The original font had the additional constraint that it had to be legible after “graying out” characters by AND-ing their pixels with a 50% gray grid (the screen was black and white, so that’s how you got gray) That’s why characters in Chicago 12 (http://kare.com/apple-icons/ http://kare.com/apple-icons/) have ‘fat’ stems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy) I don’t think there was much room for making lowercase l different from both uppercase L and uppercase I while keeping the font look nice.
    - masswerk 5y ago
      I think, this must have been about the LISA System font. (Easily identified by the characteristic "v" and "w" glyphs. "I" and "l" actually look the same and both have a bit of a kerning problem, probably because of the requirement to match said 50% gray grid in a certain way.) Compare: https://www.applefritter.com/content/lisa-font-charts https://www.applefritter.com/content/lisa-font-charts (Mind that the LISA didn't have square pixels and that the font would have appeared more condensed on the screen than in the printed sample due to pixel aspect ratio.) Edit: For an on-screen sample with word spacing in button text as eventually released compare: http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos1Clock_Close_Dialog_Large.jpg http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos1Clock_Close_Dialog_Large.j...
justatdotin 5y ago
I worked on a public facing project with many retiree users. We had a code audit to remove the word 'Invalid' so that users would not think they had been identified as 'a person made weak or disabled by illness or injury'
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I similarly wince every time I use software which inflexibly uses “disabled” or especially the more affirmative “disable”.
  - smcin 5y ago
    What one-word replacement would you use? ('Deactivate'?)
    - scns 5y ago
      Activate would make sense for opt-in, no?
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Thank you for engaging this with curiosity and good faith! Yes, I think de/activate is a great alternative.
  - adwn 5y ago
    Tree [1], master [2], submission [3], abort [4], driver [5] – words can have different meanings in different contexts. Do you feel the need to "wince every time" you submit a link on HN? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_submission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_submission [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver
guiriduro 5y ago
Reminds me of cockpit recordings of the automatic callout from the Airbus landing system: "50...40...30...Retard! Retard! Retard!"
- rzzzt 5y ago
  I think it's a Family Guy episode where the callout also gets called... names in reply to the announcement.
- ciphol 5y ago
  Is it RE-tard (noun) or re-TARD (command)?
  - JadeNB 5y ago
    Is that difference in stress universal across English dialects? I thought there were some dialects that stressed nouns and verbs with the same spelling in the same way.
    - mod 5y ago
      Isn't this a special case, because isn't the noun actually just short for "retarded"? Which I think just has one pronunciation.
- smoyer 5y ago
  See my comment above (I have a handicapped son ...) - I don't think that use of retard is offensive. The other common non-pejorative use that I can think of is talking about the timing of the spark igniting the fuel in your (gasoline) ICE.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Trucks and buses for continuous, smooth braking (which would require stepping on the pedal for an extended amount of time, but this is discouraged because brake pads wear out and/or lose grip when engaged for too long) use a mechanical or electric assisting device that has the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake
pdevr 5y ago
>>The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room featuring a one-way mirror, so observers could watch the tests without being intrusive. The tests were conducted by a moderator who made sure the user felt comfortable and showed her the basics of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction, users were asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator, like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged each user to mumble under her breath while doing the tasks, revealing her current thinking as much as possible. Each session was audio or videotaped for later analysis. Amazing to see the importance they gave to UX/UI and the level of sophistication they had forty years back.
- Animats 5y ago
  That's what people did before cheap TV cameras. That's still the right way to do UI testing. You bring in people, you give them a list of tasks to do, and you take video of screen and user. Someone then has to watch the video and mark the places where people got stuck, had to back up, or gave up. Then create a highlights reel of every problem seen more than once. The devs have to watch this.
  - robin_reala 5y ago
    This is generally correct, but it’s often better to go to the user rather than bringing them in. People can have quite different reactions in their own homes, especially if they have specific setup needs, than in a research lab.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    True, it's much easier now, and you can get a much wider sample of end-users and a more accurate representation of their behavior in their natural context. It's absolutely worth doing most of your usability testing remotely. But to be honest there's still something powerful about having the development team watch a real person through a one-way mirror that I haven't managed to replicate using video. It reminds me of the difference between live theater and watching a movie at home. The closest I've come to replicating the impact is to have a conference room where the team sits together and watches the usability test being streamed live.
pengwing 5y ago
This was a very interesting connection between headline and content. Based on the headline I assumed an article about entrepreneurship and tech. Even the first paragraph seemed to support my hypothesis. Snobby academics not getting what technical progress combined with market demand looks like. Ultimately that was not the topic of the article. Yet, reading between the lines it still confirmed the my underlying bias that lead me to interpret the headline in the way I did.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
That’s a riot. I can’t see using “Do It,” anyway. It’s an awkward phrase. Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is difficult. I’m actually reviewing the ones in the app that I’m writing, now. Some of them are quite weird.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is difficult. I’m actually reviewing the ones in the app that I’m writing, now. Some of them are quite weird. Especially egregious when you are confirming a cancellation. I hate when I try to perform an action that is semantically a cancellation, and I am warned of its potentially deleterious effects and then asked "OK" / "Cancel". (Where, of course, "OK" means "OK, cancel", and "Cancel" means the opposite.) EDIT: mlok (or, ironically for this thread, do I mean mIok?) made the same point an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30587293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30587293 .
- smoyer 5y ago
  Adding a word to the beginning does however make a good marketing slogan. And as the parent of a child who's highly-skilled as a procrastinator (don't put that in the skills section of your resume), adding a fourth word to the end of the marketing slogan is a common way to give someone a verbal push.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Tesler's work was already on the HCI (human-computer interaction) syllabus in 1988. So only 6 years after that work at Apple it was already considered exemplary research and taught to undergrads. I remember we did stuff on Ivan Sutherland, David Canfield, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay and so may others, but that course actually had a profound impact on me because the lecturer had a way of getting into the psychology and philosophy - if you think about it most UI advances are _technologically_ unremarkable. I think what the OP article is talking about we called "Structured Observation" and there was something like "mind state" analysis. I visited the HCI lab at Imperial where they had the one way mirror and talk-back microphones, like a recording studio but set up for recording computer user behaviours. What this accords with in psychological language is mentalisation and intersubjectivity. In other words "getting inside th user's head and feeling and thinking what they are feeling and thinking". Early HCI people spent a lot of time in that zone. An important _negative_ shift is that we now use telemetry and logging, because today (as another comment says "who can be bothered?") we are interested in what is happening from the _application's_ viewpoint, not the user's. That is a subtle but massive change of priority. Look at those videos of early HCI today and you will be amazed at the intensity of engagement and excitement. Using a computer was like driving a car. Structured observation on users today would show very long periods of zombie like behaviour, one finger twitching, dribbling, eyes half closed and body almost motionless, neck bent over a phone screen. Then occasional outbursts of high expressed emotion, almost existential angst, throwing the device on the floor and crying, calling the developers "Nazis" and "Monsters". Then back to long period of passive dribbling and swiping. Some quote by Englebart I remember was that we must amplify humankind's intellect to cope with the raid changes and challenges of the world. But in shifting our concern from the users to the manufacturers, sellers and profiteers of technology we have betrayed that mission. In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all industry, the move from human-computer interaction to user experience (UX) has effected an equally imperceptible but devastating outcome upon technology. We live in a time where the computer user is the _target_ (to have "experiences" imposed upon) not an active component of a system with greater ends.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all industry, …. I read recently, though where I can't remember, that this was not just a gradual change but a specific one championed by, among others, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey), co-author of Cheaper by the dozen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen). The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#Origins_of_the_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#Origins_of_the... does not mention her, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#History suggests that her work at Macy's was around the right time.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
what did the user interfaces at Xerox Parc say? Do it, OK, or something else?
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  Might have been a Smalltalk influenced thing. "Do it" is a menu option in the smalltalk scratch pad like thing called a workspace, you can type in a bit of code, select it with the mouse and "do it" which means run the code, or "inspect it" which will open a display of what was returned from your code when it ran.
noduerme 5y ago
>> The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking "Cancel" when they should have clicked "Do It", but it wasn't clear what they were having trouble with. Let me tell ya... people are still having problems with this. Red/green buttons, "OK" instead of "Do it"... doesn't matter. We're dealing with apes here, people. Goddamn apes.
- mlok 5y ago
  Well, in 2022 I still stumble upon dialog boxes in the vein of : Do you really want to cancel ? [OK] [Cancel]
jzer0cool 5y ago
Which do you prefer? (Which is better design) [ OK ] [Cancel] or [Cancel] [ OK ]
- mewse-hn 5y ago
  There seems to be a lively debate across the internet on this one. I've always preferred the "action" button to be on the right like this example: https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*RSGWrWvqA0ubbg7BW8rz8w.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*RSGWrWvqA0ubbg7BW8rz8w.pn... I've noticed a lot of webpages recently (eg government sign ups, "confirm payment" screens) are putting the action button on the left which mildly irritates me, maybe they're considering that people read left-to-right and aren't total degenerate computer users like I am.
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  I prefer [ᶜᵃⁿᶜᵉˡ] [ OK ] I think more visual weight should be given to the action you expect/wish the user to take. Also I always put the happy path on the right, but I can't articulate a reason for this.
Sydneyco 5y ago
This shows why it's so important to be with the person or at least be able to talk to the user directly when conducting user research. I've seen too many founders write by email/instant messaging, or worst sending forms when asking questions about their product. Talking to a person directly will get you so much further !
benreesman 5y ago
To sort of butcher a great line from Layer Cake: “Only very stupid backend people think that the front end is simple.” Being a more backend-type person myself I have to remind myself that less equations on the human factors side means that side of things is harder, not easier than the “math-y” stuff.
- smoyer 5y ago
  If you've designed a good front-end from an HCI perspective, you'll still end up with sooooo many edge cases. Human behavior is much more variable than the calls sent to an API or SQL sent to a database. (It also helps that there are syntax requirements that limit what's considered valid.)
vivegi 5y ago
That reminds me of the first Windows program I wrote at my first job on Windows 3.11 in early 1995. IIRC, I referenced Programming Windows (I think) by Charles Petzold and it had a basic Windows program that had two menu items - "Do It", "Quit". I adapted that program to build my prototype and perform the task in the "Do It" menu handler. :)
smoyer 5y ago
One of my HCI favorite books is "TOG on Interface" by Bruce Tognazzini because it's filled with stories about why certain GUI elements work and the failures that were tried as they finally adopted working GUI concepts. TOG was instrumental in making the Mac OS UI consistent - https://amzn.to/3sKKKvA https://amzn.to/3sKKKvA.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I wonder if the newness of kerning in a computer interface threw those few people off. It was after all a monospace world for computers (and typewriters, for that matter — the other keyboard people likely sat down in front of at that time). Or we can blame the Chicago 12 font.

Do It (2004)

283 points by kristianp 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

adenozine 5y ago

I’ve had some users that definitely needed a “dolt” button……

LeoPanthera 5y ago

A (poor quality) image of the "Do It" screen: https://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dolt.jpg https://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dolt.jpg

gpt5 5y ago
Given the random spaces in "R ename" and "R emove", I'm not surprised that they ignored the space in "Do It"
raverbashing 5y ago
It would have been better to have it as "Do it" But yeah, OK is better
skrebbel 5y ago
I'm not convinced that this is the one, the article says it was in a sans serif font.

na85 5y ago

Bad keming strikes again.

jonny_eh 5y ago
But the issue wasn't kerning. There was a space between Do and It, kerning is how two letters look next to each other.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Keming is also how two letters not adjoined to each other look like they are.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    I've never heard it used that way but it makes sense. Thanks!
- boondaburrah 5y ago
  I also think that at the time computer users may have been used to dismissing extra space around letters, since the computers they commonly interacted with would use monospaced fonts for technical reasons.

neilv 5y ago

It could've been worse: http://trans.onionmixer.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=File:Smalltalk80LanguageImplementation_17-7.png http://trans.onionmixer.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=File:S...

chrisco255 5y ago
That's interesting, it shows the context menu, and it looks like the camel case function names from the code were directly copied over, as it shows 'printIt' and 'doIt' among the options.
- neilv 5y ago
  I found that in quick search for a screenshot of the context menu. I thought I remembered "do it" from a ParcPlace Smalltalk implementation.

KronisLV 5y ago

That's a funny story, but i can't help but to feel that there's another problem to be solved: > It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l' Why couldn't most fonts be designed in a way as to not mix up o and O and 0, l and I and L as well as other symbols like that? Of course, there are often historical constraints to deal with but it surprises me that this isn't some rule of font design that would need to be followed in 99% of the cases.

jonny_eh 5y ago
The limited resolution of the time was a big constraint on the design space. The first Mac had a resolution of 512 × 342, and that was considered generous.
- Someone 5y ago
  The original font had the additional constraint that it had to be legible after “graying out” characters by AND-ing their pixels with a 50% gray grid (the screen was black and white, so that’s how you got gray) That’s why characters in Chicago 12 (http://kare.com/apple-icons/ http://kare.com/apple-icons/) have ‘fat’ stems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy) I don’t think there was much room for making lowercase l different from both uppercase L and uppercase I while keeping the font look nice.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    I think, this must have been about the LISA System font. (Easily identified by the characteristic "v" and "w" glyphs. "I" and "l" actually look the same and both have a bit of a kerning problem, probably because of the requirement to match said 50% gray grid in a certain way.) Compare: https://www.applefritter.com/content/lisa-font-charts https://www.applefritter.com/content/lisa-font-charts (Mind that the LISA didn't have square pixels and that the font would have appeared more condensed on the screen than in the printed sample due to pixel aspect ratio.) Edit: For an on-screen sample with word spacing in button text as eventually released compare: http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos1Clock_Close_Dialog_Large.jpg http://toastytech.com/guis/lisaos1Clock_Close_Dialog_Large.j...

justatdotin 5y ago

I worked on a public facing project with many retiree users. We had a code audit to remove the word 'Invalid' so that users would not think they had been identified as 'a person made weak or disabled by illness or injury'

eyelidlessness 5y ago
I similarly wince every time I use software which inflexibly uses “disabled” or especially the more affirmative “disable”.
- smcin 5y ago
  What one-word replacement would you use? ('Deactivate'?)
  - scns 5y ago
    Activate would make sense for opt-in, no?
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Thank you for engaging this with curiosity and good faith! Yes, I think de/activate is a great alternative.
- adwn 5y ago
  Tree [1], master [2], submission [3], abort [4], driver [5] – words can have different meanings in different contexts. Do you feel the need to "wince every time" you submit a link on HN? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_submission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_submission [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver

guiriduro 5y ago

Reminds me of cockpit recordings of the automatic callout from the Airbus landing system: "50...40...30...Retard! Retard! Retard!"

rzzzt 5y ago
I think it's a Family Guy episode where the callout also gets called... names in reply to the announcement.
ciphol 5y ago
Is it RE-tard (noun) or re-TARD (command)?
- JadeNB 5y ago
  Is that difference in stress universal across English dialects? I thought there were some dialects that stressed nouns and verbs with the same spelling in the same way.
  - mod 5y ago
    Isn't this a special case, because isn't the noun actually just short for "retarded"? Which I think just has one pronunciation.
smoyer 5y ago
See my comment above (I have a handicapped son ...) - I don't think that use of retard is offensive. The other common non-pejorative use that I can think of is talking about the timing of the spark igniting the fuel in your (gasoline) ICE.
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Trucks and buses for continuous, smooth braking (which would require stepping on the pedal for an extended amount of time, but this is discouraged because brake pads wear out and/or lose grip when engaged for too long) use a mechanical or electric assisting device that has the same name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake

pdevr 5y ago

>>The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room featuring a one-way mirror, so observers could watch the tests without being intrusive. The tests were conducted by a moderator who made sure the user felt comfortable and showed her the basics of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction, users were asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator, like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged each user to mumble under her breath while doing the tasks, revealing her current thinking as much as possible. Each session was audio or videotaped for later analysis. Amazing to see the importance they gave to UX/UI and the level of sophistication they had forty years back.

Animats 5y ago
That's what people did before cheap TV cameras. That's still the right way to do UI testing. You bring in people, you give them a list of tasks to do, and you take video of screen and user. Someone then has to watch the video and mark the places where people got stuck, had to back up, or gave up. Then create a highlights reel of every problem seen more than once. The devs have to watch this.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  This is generally correct, but it’s often better to go to the user rather than bringing them in. People can have quite different reactions in their own homes, especially if they have specific setup needs, than in a research lab.
- asoneth 5y ago
  True, it's much easier now, and you can get a much wider sample of end-users and a more accurate representation of their behavior in their natural context. It's absolutely worth doing most of your usability testing remotely. But to be honest there's still something powerful about having the development team watch a real person through a one-way mirror that I haven't managed to replicate using video. It reminds me of the difference between live theater and watching a movie at home. The closest I've come to replicating the impact is to have a conference room where the team sits together and watches the usability test being streamed live.

pengwing 5y ago

This was a very interesting connection between headline and content. Based on the headline I assumed an article about entrepreneurship and tech. Even the first paragraph seemed to support my hypothesis. Snobby academics not getting what technical progress combined with market demand looks like. Ultimately that was not the topic of the article. Yet, reading between the lines it still confirmed the my underlying bias that lead me to interpret the headline in the way I did.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

That’s a riot. I can’t see using “Do It,” anyway. It’s an awkward phrase. Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is difficult. I’m actually reviewing the ones in the app that I’m writing, now. Some of them are quite weird.

JadeNB 5y ago
> Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is difficult. I’m actually reviewing the ones in the app that I’m writing, now. Some of them are quite weird. Especially egregious when you are confirming a cancellation. I hate when I try to perform an action that is semantically a cancellation, and I am warned of its potentially deleterious effects and then asked "OK" / "Cancel". (Where, of course, "OK" means "OK, cancel", and "Cancel" means the opposite.) EDIT: mlok (or, ironically for this thread, do I mean mIok?) made the same point an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30587293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30587293 .
smoyer 5y ago
Adding a word to the beginning does however make a good marketing slogan. And as the parent of a child who's highly-skilled as a procrastinator (don't put that in the skills section of your resume), adding a fourth word to the end of the marketing slogan is a common way to give someone a verbal push.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Tesler's work was already on the HCI (human-computer interaction) syllabus in 1988. So only 6 years after that work at Apple it was already considered exemplary research and taught to undergrads. I remember we did stuff on Ivan Sutherland, David Canfield, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay and so may others, but that course actually had a profound impact on me because the lecturer had a way of getting into the psychology and philosophy - if you think about it most UI advances are _technologically_ unremarkable. I think what the OP article is talking about we called "Structured Observation" and there was something like "mind state" analysis. I visited the HCI lab at Imperial where they had the one way mirror and talk-back microphones, like a recording studio but set up for recording computer user behaviours. What this accords with in psychological language is mentalisation and intersubjectivity. In other words "getting inside th user's head and feeling and thinking what they are feeling and thinking". Early HCI people spent a lot of time in that zone. An important _negative_ shift is that we now use telemetry and logging, because today (as another comment says "who can be bothered?") we are interested in what is happening from the _application's_ viewpoint, not the user's. That is a subtle but massive change of priority. Look at those videos of early HCI today and you will be amazed at the intensity of engagement and excitement. Using a computer was like driving a car. Structured observation on users today would show very long periods of zombie like behaviour, one finger twitching, dribbling, eyes half closed and body almost motionless, neck bent over a phone screen. Then occasional outbursts of high expressed emotion, almost existential angst, throwing the device on the floor and crying, calling the developers "Nazis" and "Monsters". Then back to long period of passive dribbling and swiping. Some quote by Englebart I remember was that we must amplify humankind's intellect to cope with the raid changes and challenges of the world. But in shifting our concern from the users to the manufacturers, sellers and profiteers of technology we have betrayed that mission. In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all industry, the move from human-computer interaction to user experience (UX) has effected an equally imperceptible but devastating outcome upon technology. We live in a time where the computer user is the _target_ (to have "experiences" imposed upon) not an active component of a system with greater ends.

JadeNB 5y ago
> In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all industry, …. I read recently, though where I can't remember, that this was not just a gradual change but a specific one championed by, among others, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey), co-author of Cheaper by the dozen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen). The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#Origins_of_the_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#Origins_of_the... does not mention her, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#History suggests that her work at Macy's was around the right time.

LAC-Tech 5y ago

what did the user interfaces at Xerox Parc say? Do it, OK, or something else?

smackeyacky 5y ago
Might have been a Smalltalk influenced thing. "Do it" is a menu option in the smalltalk scratch pad like thing called a workspace, you can type in a bit of code, select it with the mouse and "do it" which means run the code, or "inspect it" which will open a display of what was returned from your code when it ran.

noduerme 5y ago

>> The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking "Cancel" when they should have clicked "Do It", but it wasn't clear what they were having trouble with. Let me tell ya... people are still having problems with this. Red/green buttons, "OK" instead of "Do it"... doesn't matter. We're dealing with apes here, people. Goddamn apes.

mlok 5y ago
Well, in 2022 I still stumble upon dialog boxes in the vein of : Do you really want to cancel ? [OK] [Cancel]

jzer0cool 5y ago

Which do you prefer? (Which is better design) [ OK ] [Cancel] or [Cancel] [ OK ]

mewse-hn 5y ago
There seems to be a lively debate across the internet on this one. I've always preferred the "action" button to be on the right like this example: https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*RSGWrWvqA0ubbg7BW8rz8w.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*RSGWrWvqA0ubbg7BW8rz8w.pn... I've noticed a lot of webpages recently (eg government sign ups, "confirm payment" screens) are putting the action button on the left which mildly irritates me, maybe they're considering that people read left-to-right and aren't total degenerate computer users like I am.
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
I prefer [ᶜᵃⁿᶜᵉˡ] [ OK ] I think more visual weight should be given to the action you expect/wish the user to take. Also I always put the happy path on the right, but I can't articulate a reason for this.

Sydneyco 5y ago

This shows why it's so important to be with the person or at least be able to talk to the user directly when conducting user research. I've seen too many founders write by email/instant messaging, or worst sending forms when asking questions about their product. Talking to a person directly will get you so much further !

benreesman 5y ago

To sort of butcher a great line from Layer Cake: “Only very stupid backend people think that the front end is simple.” Being a more backend-type person myself I have to remind myself that less equations on the human factors side means that side of things is harder, not easier than the “math-y” stuff.

smoyer 5y ago
If you've designed a good front-end from an HCI perspective, you'll still end up with sooooo many edge cases. Human behavior is much more variable than the calls sent to an API or SQL sent to a database. (It also helps that there are syntax requirements that limit what's considered valid.)

vivegi 5y ago

That reminds me of the first Windows program I wrote at my first job on Windows 3.11 in early 1995. IIRC, I referenced Programming Windows (I think) by Charles Petzold and it had a basic Windows program that had two menu items - "Do It", "Quit". I adapted that program to build my prototype and perform the task in the "Do It" menu handler. :)

smoyer 5y ago

One of my HCI favorite books is "TOG on Interface" by Bruce Tognazzini because it's filled with stories about why certain GUI elements work and the failures that were tried as they finally adopted working GUI concepts. TOG was instrumental in making the Mac OS UI consistent - https://amzn.to/3sKKKvA https://amzn.to/3sKKKvA.

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I wonder if the newness of kerning in a computer interface threw those few people off. It was after all a monospace world for computers (and typewriters, for that matter — the other keyboard people likely sat down in front of at that time). Or we can blame the Chicago 12 font.