Design of Everyday Things [123]
11 Sommer (1983, pp. 128-129).
12 “Wait a minute,” you might say, “what has the design of the cafeteria got to do with the Design Centre? That isn’t the purpose of the Centre. You are missing the whole point.” I don’t think so. The lack of concern for the user of the Centre reflects the attitude of the Centre as a whole. The exhibits are tasteful, pleasing to the eye. They emphasize artistic qualities and ease of manufacture. Those qualities are indeed important, but they aren’t sufficient. The cafeteria was aesthetically pleasing but functionally inadequate. How many of the designs on display had the same characteristics? It isn’t unreasonable to expect the Centre to show how design can be applied to all the relevant dimensions.
13 Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1987.
14 Most designers today work in teams. Nonetheless, the comments I make about “the designer” apply. In fact, the better the teamwork, the more apt members are to share common modes of thinking and common sets of approaches, and thereby to fall prey simultaneously to the same problems.
15 Mike King, a telephone company designer, commenting on an early draft of POET.
16 Dan Rosenberg, a design engineer, commenting on an early draft of POET.
17 Richard W. Pew, an authority on human factors and industrial design (personal communication, 1985).
18 There are some technical problems facing the programmer. It is up to each individual programmer to develop an appropriate system for representing the actions to be performed, to find out what is possible, and then to discover what has happened—to make judicious use of feedback, of intelligent interpretation. There should be a natural dialog, a comfortable interaction between computer and user in which both parties cooperate to reach the desired solution. All of this is too much of a burden to put upon the individual programmers. After all, the person skilled in a problem area or at programming is not likely also to be skilled in the psychology of human-computer interaction. The picture won’t improve until there are better packages of tools for the user to make it easier to do things right. These packages are called “toolboxes,” “workbenches,” “rapid proto-typing tools,” and “user interface management systems,” and they are now coming out.Literature on how to do things right exists. A good starting point is Baecker & Buxton’s (1987) Readings in human-computer interaction; Shneiderman’s text, Designing the user interface: Strategies for effective human-computer interaction (1987); and my User centered system design (Norman & Draper, 1986). The book by Card, Moran, and Newell, The psychology of human computer interaction (1983) provides a beginning toward a set of computational design tools; it is also the most technical. For the most current work, see any of the proceedings of the annual conferences sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s subgroup, SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction). Several international conference series meet at various locations in the United States and throughout Europe. Surely computer manufacturers can’t be ignorant of all these activities.
19 Xerox did indeed make significant innovations in the usability of computer systems, but many of the basic ideas originated elsewhere. There is a long history of research on this topic. Light pens had been used as a pointing device for many years. Doug Engelbart invented the mouse in his project on augmented human reasoning at the Stanford Research Institute. It is not clear where the emphasis on graphics came from, but computer-aided design programs had already exploited the idea. Windows may have come from several sources, but Alan Kay, then at Xerox (now at Apple), commonly gets the credit.
20 Smith, Irby, Kimball, Verplank, & Harslem (1982), Designing the star user interface.
21 The understanding of these different modes of interaction has developed slowly: it still remains an active research topic. Ben Shneiderman (1974, 1983,