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41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective
- amykhar 3y agoHis book made a big impression on me back in the day. And, to be honest, I still prefer the minimal and predictible style of web site that he recommended.
- christophilus 3y agoWhich book? There seem to be quite a few, and I wouldn’t mind picking one up, if you have one to recommend.
- kleiba 3y agoThe one he mentions in the article: "Designing Web Usability".
- dcminter 3y agoAmusingly that book had very poor usability. I forget exactly what it was about it; possibly printing the text too close to the binding? In practice I recall it being mostly a digest of his free content on useit.com
- amykhar 3y agoYes, this was the one. I think it was my first exposure to UX - probably around 2000, 2001.
- micheljansen 3y agoNielsen's usability heuristics, arguably his most impactful work, still hold up surprisingly well after more than 30 years. It's hard to understate the impact he has had on my own career, as well as the UX field as a whole (together with Don Norman, of course). Also sobering to read how much of his career seems obvious in hindsight, but also was shaped so much by randomness and chance (such as taking not taking the job at Apple).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lakpan 3y agoNitpick: interesting how a UX website doesn’t let me resize it since the font is likely set via viewport units.
- michaelcampbell 3y agoLooks like px if my inspector isn't lying to me. Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- work fine for me on desktop/chrome.
- amatecha 3y agoHuh, which browser? Scales flawlessly for me in Firefox. Actually one of the smoothest-scaling websites I've encountered in ages, wow. Nice!
- lakpan 3y agoiPhone Safari. Judging by the comments, they set the text via viewport units only on smaller viewports.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> The opportunity cost of going without industry experience for multiple years will hinder your advancement for decades. I suspect that goes for most creative/engineering vocations. However, one aspect of formal education, that is often missed, in OJT, is a very broad base, and an early understanding of “the basics.” Also, people with formal education, are often able to work in a very formal, structured manner, early in their career. This (IMO), is pretty important, in engineering and research. That said, I’m a high school dropout, with a GED. I ended up doing OK, but YMMV.
- zer00eyz 3y ago20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard Stallman to shame! They are apparently still dancing around the edges of this topic: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/ Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.
- wharvle 3y ago> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c. I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)
- zer00eyz 3y ago>>> users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c. Or we could just give the Product manager, designer, and JS engineer a 5 year old laptop with 8 gigs of ram at least 10 browser plug ins and every corporate security package... We have gone from "go fast, break things" to moving at the speed of stupid. Slowing these three groups down might help.
- hdaz0017 3y agoCongratulations Jakob on your Liberation Day :) Are you saying the UI is your fault ;-) Serious question though: how come over the last 15 to 20 years UI's have got considerably worse?
- BlueTemplar 3y agoIMHO a lot of this comes from : 1.) The move to the Web, where the browser's interface gets in the way once you start doing something more fancy than just viewing basic HTML documents. 2.) Trying to make a program work well both on a small touchscreen and on a large screen + mouse + keyboard : this is literally impossible without the result being a worse experience for both.
- m_2000 3y agoRegarding 1: I remember the internet of the 90s and find our current internet comparatively boring in terms of UX. Back then, websites were created manually, without using "abstractions" like wordpress or wix. This forced us to think freely about UX and to hack HTML+CSS as much as possible. The browser's interface you mentioned is quite powerful. And with HTML6 on the way it becomes even more powerful. Regarding 2: A paramount program utilizing responsiveness at it's finest won't take compromises for different screen sizes, but it takes longer to develop. Compromises like these usually emerge through the economic circumstances of software development.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago2. You will quickly end with two programs with different features, or maybe a single program that only offers a fraction of features depending on input/output capabilities : Screen size is just one aspect of this, consider how different programs might be optimized for a vertical screen layout, or the use of smartphone's accelerometers, or working best with precise mouse movement, or relying on the user learning to use keyboard shortcuts (ideally with an easy on-ramp phase) for effectiveness, or relying a lot on hovering your mouse over features for popups (which is very poorly translated as a press and hold on touchscreens - consider how rare hover text for pictures has become). (More extreme examples would be also being able to use the software from, for instance, a monochrome, low refresh rate watch with only a few buttons, at which point you get the option to use vibration feedback notifications that you can't expect to have on a desktop.)
- quantum_state 3y agoNice! Thanks for sharing your wonderful journey in UX.
- Findecanor 3y ago41 years ago, "UX" did not mean what it means today: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E&t=9s>
- DonHopkins 3y ago>The background is that Terry Winograd, a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, had invited me to lecture on some of my work in 1998. After my talk, Terry invited me to tour his lab and meet some of his graduate students. One of the Ph.D. students was a bright young fellow named Larry Page, who showed me his project to enhance the relevance of web search results. Many of those lectures are online. I was not able to find the 1998 one he mentioned, but here is one that Jakob Neilsen gave on May 20, 1994 called "Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces, Jakob Nielsen, Sunsoft". https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128 He gave another one on October 4 1996 entitled "Ensuring the Usability of the Next Computing Paradigm", but I can't find it in the online collection, although it exists in the inventory of video recordings, however I can't find any 1998 talks by Jakob Nielsen in this list: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_text/ https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex... Here is the entire online collection (it's kind of hard to search the 25 pages of the extensive collection, thanks to bad web site design!): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5... The oldest (most interesting to me) ones are at the end (page 25): https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a10637698&page=25 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a1... Here are some of the older ones that I think are historically important and especially interesting (but there are so many I haven't watched them all, so there are certainly more that are worth watching): R. Carr, GO, "Mobile Pen-based Computing", October 21, 1992: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jm095fy2355 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jm095fy2355 Cliff Nass, Computers Are Social Actors: A New Paradigm and Some Suprising Results [November 4, 1992]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jh333ht2903 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jh333ht2903 Unistrokes: Pen computing for experts, David Goldberg, Xerox PARC [November 5, 1993]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gw943dj4628 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gw943dj4628 Putting "Feel" into "Look and Feel": Interaction with the Sense of Touch, Margaret Minsky, Interval Research [October 1, 1993]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/kk938rh3332 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/kk938rh3332 Harry Saddler & L. Alba, Apple & Albert Farris, "Making It Macintosh: Interactive Media, Interpersonal Design" [October 15, 1993]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gs214qy7233 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gs214qy7233 Design of New Media Interfaces, Joy Mountford [May 12, 1993]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/rm437wv9779 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/rm437wv9779 Animated Programs, Ken Kahn, Stanford CSLI [December 3, 1993]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/fk686sy4072 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/fk686sy4072 The Magic Lens Interface, Eric Bier, Xerox PARC [December 9, 1994]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ss855db5288 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ss855db5288 Proactive and Reactive Agents in User Interface, Ted Selker, IBM [April 29, 1994]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pv655pr7635 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pv655pr7635 Computing in the Year 2004, Bruce Tognazzini, Sunsoft [February 18, 1994]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/nf237zt2615 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/nf237zt2615 Andy Hertzfeld, General Magic, "Magic Cap and Telescript" [January 21, 1994]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/mp885xf4366 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/mp885xf4366 An Academic Discovers the Realities of Design, Don Norman, Apple Computer [December 2, 1994]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/dd753rg7554 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/dd753rg7554 Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis [April 26, 1996]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999 I was working with Terry Winograd at Interval Research at the time of this talk, which he invited me to attend, and I asked Will some skeptical questions, and his amazing in-depth answers convinced me to go to Maxis to work with him on the "Dollhouse" game he demonstrated. I uploaded the video to youtube and proofread the closed captions, and updated my description of the video: Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk >Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996. >He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience. >This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update): https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s... >A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk! >Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winograd’s user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000). >At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, which this article elaborates on. [...] Bringing Behavior to the Internet, James Gosling, SUN Microsystems [December 1, 1995]: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047 I also uploaded this historically interesting video to youtube to generate closed captions and make it more accessible and findable, and I was planning on proofreading them like I did for this Will Wright talk, but haven't gotten around to it yet (any volunteers? ;): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k This is an early talk by James Gosling on Java, which I attended and appeared on camera asking a couple questions about security (44:53, 1:00:35), and I also spotted Ken Kahn asking a question (50:20). Can anyone identify other people in the audience? My questions about the “optical illusion attack” and security at 44:53 got kind of awkward, and his defensive "shrug" answer hasn't aged too well! ;) No hard feelings of course, since we’d known each other for years before (working on Emacs and NeWS) and we’re still friends, but I’d recently been working on Kaleida ScriptX, which lost out to Java in part because Java was touted as being so “secure”, and I didn’t appreciate how Sun was promoting Java by throwing the word “secure” around without defining what it really meant or what its limitations were (expecting people to read more into it than it really meant, on purpose, to hype up Java).
- radres 3y agoHow can you be happy that you did not join Apple in 1990?
- dave333 3y agoAll you need is Nielsen, Norman, and Tufte.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoI would be interested in the long perspective of constantly reinvented gui toolkits and what he thinks is progress vs reinvention. Early html was surely reinvention, but CSS gave us the first fine grained presentation customization mechanism. Material design? If I was a Soviet despot... Well anyway. Ui is alas more fashion than function. I remember the original iPhone and is realistic apps, which angered UI designers so much that we now have buttons with no visible feedback as to if they are clicked, and anonymous unicolor squares everywhere.