Human-computer interaction
Design
26 rabbit holes · 11 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why did Clippy fail?
- Did Apple steal the graphical user interface from Xerox?
- Was Three Mile Island caused by bad design?
- Is chat a good interface for AI tools or just the default we ended up with?
- Why does a phone keypad have 1 at the top but a calculator has 7?
Rabbit holes
- the guy who invented infinite scroll regrets it
Aza Raskin built infinite scroll around 2006 and has said since that he regrets how it's used: no natural stopping point means you never get the cue to stop. Loren Brichter, who made pull-to-refresh for Tweetie, has also said publicly he thinks it's addictive.
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- Clippy was built on serious research and everyone still hated it
Arjun Pillai · 6 sources
- Larry Tesler's license plate said NO MODES
He worked at PARC and then Apple and spent his career arguing against modes, where the same key does different things depending on a state you might not notice. Cut/copy/paste as we know it came partly out of his work on the Gypsy editor at PARC with Tim Mott.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- did Apple really steal the GUI from Xerox?
Callie Sutherland · 7 sources
- Three Mile Island was partly an interface problem
A relief valve stuck open, but the light on the control panel only showed that the valve had been told to close, not whether it actually had. The operators trusted the light while alarms went off by the dozen. Afterwards the industry got a lot more serious about control room design and human factors.
Pete Lindgren · 6 sources
- desire paths
Every dirt shortcut across a lawn is people telling planners where the path should have gone. Some campuses wait a year and then pave whatever people walked on.
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- is a chat box actually a good interface?
Started from an essay arguing chatbots aren't the future of interfaces. The main complaint: an empty text box tells you nothing about what it can do. Same discoverability problem command lines had, and GUIs won partly because menus show you your options.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- why phone keypads and calculators are upside down from each other
Hannah Kim · 5 sources
- why the Mac menu bar is glued to the top of the screen
Jonah Feld · 6 sources
- Susan Kare drew the original Mac icons on graph paper
One square of graph paper per pixel. She also drew the first Mac fonts, which were named after cities (Chicago, Geneva, New York...). The ⌘ symbol came from a symbol dictionary, where it marks a place of interest on signs in Scandinavia, after Jobs supposedly objected to the Apple logo being all over the menus.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- Hangul was designed on purpose, and the letters show your mouth
Created in the 1440s under King Sejong, explicitly so ordinary people could learn to read. The basic consonant shapes sketch the mouth: ㄱ is the back of the tongue raised, ㄴ is the tongue tip touching behind the teeth, ㅁ is the closed mouth. Reading it in a day is roughly true if you mean sounding out syllables. Understanding Korean is a much longer project.
Samuel Okafor · 5 sources
- the Start button exists because people didn't know where to start
From what I read, new users in testing would sit at Windows 3.1's Program Manager not knowing what to do. The 95 team went through round after round of usability tests and ended up with a button that literally says Start, plus a taskbar showing everything that's open.
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- if a door needs a PULL sign, the door is wrong
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- Google Wave died but its algorithms didn't
Google Docs collaboration runs on operational transformation, which Wave pushed hard. Wave itself was too many ideas at once.
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- Houston's airport fixed baggage complaints by making people walk farther
The story (from a 2012 NYT piece): people complained about waiting at baggage claim, so the airport moved arrivals farther from the carousels. Same total time, but now most of it was spent walking, and the complaints mostly stopped.
moth · 4 sources
- conversational interfaces were already a thing in 1970, with blocks
SHRDLU let you type to a simulated robot arm in a world of blocks and pyramids, and it could answer questions about what it had done and why. It looked like a huge leap but only worked inside that tiny world. A few years later text adventures put a (much dumber) parser in front of a lot of ordinary people.
Callie Sutherland · 7 sources
- the Photoshop dodge and burn icons are darkroom tools
The dodge icon is a little paddle on a stick, which is literally what you'd wave over the paper under the enlarger to hold light back from one area. Burn is a hand with a hole made by your fingers, to add light to one spot.
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- the Mother of All Demos was in 1968. 1968!
90 minutes, live, in San Francisco: a mouse, hypertext links, windows, and real-time collaborative editing with a colleague on a video link from Menlo Park, about 30 miles away. Apparently the audience gave him a standing ovation. Most of it took decades to reach normal people.
Lin Chen · 6 sources
- how airports tell you where to go
Schiphol's yellow signs are the reference everyone copies. The rule I learned: never make someone decide between more than a couple of options at once.
Maya Rivers · 4 sources
- the leather stitching in old iOS and why it disappeared overnight
Find My Friends had stitched leather, Game Center had green felt, Notes was a yellow legal pad. The textures were teaching people what a touchscreen app was by making it look like the thing it replaced. After Forstall left Apple in late 2012, Jony Ive took over interface design too, and iOS 7 went flat the next year.
Hannah Kim · 7 sources
- how do you build a typewriter for a language with thousands of characters?
The common design was a tray of a couple thousand metal characters with an arm that picked one at a time. Lin Yutang's MingKwai in the 1940s used keys to narrow things down to a handful of candidates you then picked from, which is weirdly close to how phone input and autocomplete work now.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- the 1997 debate over whether software should be a tool or an assistant
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- IBM tested a speech-to-text typewriter in 1983 by hiding a typist in the next room
The 'listening typewriter' study: people dictated letters to what they thought was a speech recognition system while a hidden typist typed what they said. The point was to find out if anyone would want it before building it. Faking the hard part with a human is still a standard trick for testing voice and AI products.
Arjun Pillai · 5 sources
- Jeff Hawkins carried a block of wood around to design the Palm Pilot
Before building anything he cut a block of wood to the size he wanted and carried it around, pretending to check his calendar on it in meetings. The Newton tried to read normal handwriting and got mocked for it (Doonesbury, The Simpsons). Palm went the other way: learn a slightly different alphabet in an afternoon, get near-perfect recognition.
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- dark patterns got their name in 2010
I knew the examples (prechecked boxes, fake timers, cancellation mazes) but not that someone had been naming and cataloging them since 2010.
Hannah Kim · 5 sources
- the crosswalk button probably isn't doing anything
In a lot of big cities the walk signal runs on a fixed timer for much of the day and the button does nothing, at least at those times. The New York Times reported in 2004 that most of NYC's buttons didn't work. Elevator door-close buttons in the US are a similar story in normal operation.
Jonah Feld · 4 sources