Designing Interactions

“The Mouse and the Desktop - Interviews with Doug Engelbart, Stu Card, Tim Mott, and Larry Tesler”

Bill Moggridge

Keywords:

mouse,desktop,interaction,easy-to-use, guided fantasies, participatory design,

usability testing, graphical user interface

-is best known as the inventor of the mouse.

-also invented the point-and-click text editor for the NLS system (oNLine System) that he developed at the Stanford Research Institute(SRI), and that system migrated with members of his design team to the fledging Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and became foundation of the Alto, the first computer with graphical user interfaces (GUI).

• Always wanted to create designs that enhance human performance and is not interested in ease of use for the beginner.• His influence has been limited by his decision to design for people as determined and proficient as himself, rather than for those who require an easy-to-use system.• His fixed idea that people should be able to interact with computers directly did not fit the prevailing view, so at first he got a reputation as an eccentric. (in Berkeley)

Doug Engelbart

Doug Engelbart tells the story of how he invented the mouse. While he was bored in a conference he got notes about his ideas and many years later he made use of those notes to invent the “mouse”.

Mouse turned out to be the pointing device that performed best for pointing and clicking on a display, outperforming light pens, cursor keys, joysticks, trackballs… The mouse won because it was the easiest to use.

The first computer mouse, held by inventor Douglas Engelbart, showing the wheels that

make contact with the working surface

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Areas in which human capabilities can be augmented:

1) Artifacts: physical objects designed to provide for human comfort, the manipulation of things or materials, and the manipulation of symbols.

2) Language: the way in which the individual classifies the picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model that world, and the symbols that he attaches to those concepts and uses in consciously manipulating concepts- “thinking”. (semiotics-icons)

3) Methodology: the methods, procedures, and strategies with which an individual organizes his goal-centered (problem solving) activity.

4) Training: the conditioning needed by the individual to bring his skills in using augmentation means 1,2, an 3 to the point where they are operationally effective.

Triumph Tragedy

-Powerful vision of a complete system

-People and computers are engaged in a symbiotic relationship for human benefit,

-working cohesively as an integrated system

- mouse and other elements of interactive computing has originated.

-Training is a necessary component of the system.

-Developed concepts for experts, and the Pursuit of the highest capability drove the Design criteria; it was therefore inevitable that training would be needed to reach levelof proficiency that would let people benefit from this capability.

-This proved a barrier to acceptance by ordinary people and as computers became less expensive and more accessible, barrier got in the way more.

Doug’s..

Doug’s conference on computer science community:-Real-time demonstration-High resolution links, graphics for schematic diagrams-Cursor controlled by two people (Bill English and Doug) simultaneously interacting on the screen

**Result of the demo:

The computer science community moved from skepticism to standing applause, and the ideas of direct manipulation of a graphical user interface became fixed in the communal consciousness.

Stu CardWhen he joined PARC in 1974, he set out to invent a supporting science for the design of human-computer interactions.

-Conventional mouse that was flatter and more elegant, the next was a puck shape, like a top hat about an inch diameter, with a skirt at the base for the fingers to rest on.-The penlike device with a weighted base, causing it to stand upright on the desk, giving form to Stu’s idea of the pencil stuck into the eraser.

Tim Mott

He created the concept of “guided fantasies” to learn about user needs, and was one of the very first people to apply precise user testing to design of user interfaces.

**The Desktop (Office) Metaphor

Tim and Larry were struggling with the issue of how to think about the user interface for documents and files, and the actions that take place on an entire document.

Tim started considering about what happens in an office. He pictured the scenario in his mind and came up with an “Office Schematic”.

- It was a set of icons for a file cabinet, and a copier, or a printer and a trash can. The metaphor was that entire documents could be grabbed by the mouse and moved around on the screen.

-They didn’t think about it as a desktop, but as moving these documents around an office.

-Previously, people had tried to implement similar designs before, but they always attempted to do very complex simulations as opposed to Tim’s 2D iconic representation. This simplicity of representation was a breakthrough.

Larry Tesler

-interested in designing software that would be simple and easy to use-The best way to design the software is with participation from the customer= participatory design**-developed techniques for watching how people did things and designing software that allowed people to use new technology in familiar ways.-Invented cut-and-paste and editable dialog boxes. -Simplified the use of the mouse by reducing the controls to a single button.*“Best way to do things, always thinking from basic principles”.

The Future System Will Use Icons

Larry developed a publication language called Pub. On request,he distributed it in source-code, so it was actually one of the First open-source markup languages.

However he thought that having an interactive layout system, Instead of a language was the right thing, so that anybody could use it.

***Book about semiotics, signs and symbols:“Icons would be a really appropriate thing to use in an interface for a computer system, because they would remind people of a concept, and they would grasp the idea quickly by looking at the icon without having to read a word.”

Smalltalk Browser-is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language.

-Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human-computer symbiosis.”

-It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC during the 1970s.

Larry describes how he developed the browser for Smalltalk:“We programmers are always trying to understand other people’s code, scrolling through big files of source code all the time trying to find stuff, and we don’t know what it’s called, so we can’t use search command. I thought that if I could figure out a way to browse through code, we could maybe generalize it to work for other things too,so I decided to build a code browser.” (pg. 69)

• For the first time, Larry designed a code for himself, so instead of putting the secretaries in front of a blank screen and test how they will act towards the programmer’s tool, he was the subject.

-He describes that he behaved like a designer; closed his eyes and vision how the browser is going to look like.

*He had become so devoted to the ideas of participatory design and user testing that it seemed surprisingly straightforward to be designing for the user in the mirror.

-As a result, this was the first browser design.

In 1980, Larry Tesler left Xerox and starting working with Apple.

“I had been trying to convince people at Xerox about my belief in the future of personal computers, but Apple people appreciated everything in the demo that I thought was important…They think more like me than PARC people do… I should join a company like Apple.”