Design of Everyday Things [125]
A compromise among existing approaches is generally not the result of the standards process, but an initial aim of the developers. Your tactful phrasing makes the process sound slightly more scientific and less political than it is, though I don’t object to it. On the other hand, the standards developers are surely always utterly convinced that they are producing a compromise that is superior, not inferior, to any of the contributions to it, and they are well aware of the camel-is-a-horse-designed-by-committee problem. I have not studied enough cases to know that they are wrong. I would have guessed that they might often be right.
4 One reason the Apple Macintosh computer is such a usable machine is because Apple enforced a set of standard procedures for all the people who wrote programs for the Macintosh. The procedures governed the look and style of the interface, most especially the way that information could be modified, the way the menus were used, the way information was displayed, the heavy use of the mouse, the ability to “undo” the just-previous action if the user wished to, and the format for working with text, working with windows, displaying choices, getting at files, and telling about errors. The result is that once the basic principles are learned, they carry over to most of the programs available for the system. Now if we could enlarge a similar spirit of standardization to the machines of all manufacturers, all over the world, we would have a major breakthrough in usability.
5 A computer mail question sent to me by a student, Dina Kurktchi. It is just the right question.
6 The company was FTL Games. The students were Dennis Walker, Rod Hartley, Steve Parker, and Joey Garon. An earlier study on games was performed by Tom Malone (1981), who examined how to develop educational programs that would be both interesting to students and of educational value.
7 These studies were carried out by Henry Strub at the University of California, San Diego.
8 P. Ceruzzi (1986), An unforeseen revolution: Computers and expectations, 1935—1985.
9 Hypertext can’t be defined; it has to be experienced. I will attempt to convey what it would be like. This note is a kind of hypertext, for it is a commentary on the text itself. That is what the “hyper” of the name means: a higher-level text that comments on and expands the main text, allowing the reader freedom to explore or ignore the material as interests dictate.Hypertext requires a computer with high-resolution display, good graphics, a pointing device, and a tremendous amount of memory. It is only today that technology is starting to make such systems affordable. At the time of this writing, only a few hypertext systems are available, but a lot have been talked about. In fact, as I travel from research laboratory to research laboratory across the country, everyone seems to be talking about doing a hypertext system. But there is a big difference between talking about doing something and actually doing it.
Hypertext was invented by Ted Nelson, although the basic idea can probably be traced to Vannevar Bush’s prophetic Atlantic Monthly article “As we may think” (1945). Nelson’s books are pretty good examples