Product design
Design
27 rabbit holes · 15 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why did Clippy fail?
- Did Apple steal the graphical user interface from Xerox?
- Who designed the running man on exit signs?
- Why does a phone keypad have 1 at the top but a calculator has 7?
- Why is a 35mm frame 36x24mm?
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
- Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen in a backyard shed at 48
1958, Osaka. After months of trial and error in a shed behind his house, Ando landed on flash-frying the seasoned noodles, which dries them and leaves tiny holes so they rehydrate fast in hot water. Cup Noodles followed in 1971.
Noor Rahman · 5 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
- Comic Sans was made for a cartoon dog
Vincent Connare saw a beta of Microsoft Bob where a cartoon dog talked in speech bubbles set in Times New Roman and thought that was just wrong, so he drew a font based on comic book lettering. It wasn't ready in time for Bob and ended up shipping elsewhere in Windows. It's hated for being used in the wrong places, not for being badly made.
Chidi Eze · 5 sources
- the running man on exit signs, and the pictograms everyone copies
moth · 7 sources
- why phone keypads and calculators are upside down from each other
Hannah Kim · 5 sources
- F1's banned (and secret) innovations, a list that kept growing
Started with the fan car and couldn't stop. McLaren's F-duct in 2010. Renault's mass damper, a sprung weight inside the nose, banned in 2006. Mercedes' DAS in 2020, where pushing and pulling the steering wheel changed the front wheels' toe.
Sara Lindt · 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
- 35mm photo film is movie film turned sideways
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- the '7 plus or minus 2' rule is about something else
Someone at work said nav menus should have max 7 items 'because of Miller's law', so I read the actual 1956 paper. It's a funny, rambling essay about information channels and memory span. It says nothing about menus.
Chidi Eze · 6 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
- the tube map isn't a map
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- Polaroid exists because a 3-year-old asked why she couldn't see the photo yet
1943, on vacation in Santa Fe, Edwin Land's daughter asked why she couldn't see the picture he'd just taken. The first Land Camera went on sale in 1948. When Polaroid stopped making film, a small group bought the last factory in the Netherlands and had to reinvent the chemistry from scratch.
Hannah Kim · 6 sources
- The 1996 Space Jam website is still up
It stayed up basically untouched for 25 years and became a running joke about the old web. When the sequel came out in 2021 the studio gave the new film the main address but kept the 1996 site at /1996/.
Hazel Park · 6 sources
- the Swiss railway clock's second hand pauses at 12
It sweeps around in about 58.5 seconds, waits at 12 for the minute pulse from the master clock, then all the station clocks jump together. Apple got into trouble for using the design.
Hannah Kim · 3 sources
- why unfinished things nag at you
Hannah Kim · 5 sources
- the jam study: do more choices really make people buy less?
Lin Chen · 5 sources
- the 1958 Braun radio that looks exactly like an iPod
Rams designed the T3 pocket radio in 1958 and the resemblance to the first iPod is not subtle. Jony Ive has talked openly about Rams as an influence. His motto was 'Less, but better', which reads less like minimalism as a look and more like a rule about honesty and durability.
Wanjiru Kamau · 5 sources
- Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975
Fern Achterberg · 6 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
- why USB-A is never the right way up
Bhatt has said making it reversible would have doubled the wires and cost. The superposition joke (you always need three tries) is apparently quantum-mechanically sound.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- lateral thinking with withered technology
Yokoi's idea was to use cheap, well-understood tech in new ways instead of chasing the cutting edge. The Game Boy had a worse screen than the Game Gear or the Lynx and beat both easily, partly because it ran for ages on four AA batteries. People still point to the DS and the Wii as the same thinking.
Kaito Morimoto · 6 sources
- R.O.B. the robot was a trojan horse
After the crash, American stores didn't want to stock video games. So the NES launched in the US as an 'Entertainment System' with a robot and a light gun, so it looked like a toy and not a console. R.O.B. only ever worked with two games.
Quinn Harlow · 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