Copyright: 2007
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0-262-13474-8
This book is fascinating! Over 700 glossy pages take you on a journey through the field of interaction design. (It's a heavy book.. be careful when you pick it up!) Bill Moggridge in Designing Interactions, does a masterful job of presenting the history, the personalities and the principles of the field of interaction design. If you write software, design hardware, design products or are just interested in some really cool stuff... this book is for you!
Watching People Work
One of the principles that was hammered home in this book was the notion that a good designer needs to watch people do their work. If you really want to understand how to design a better tool, you have to watch people doing their work and you have to watch them using your tool (or prototypes of your tool).
The Mighty Mouse
When Doug Engelbart and Bill English were developing the mouse, there were a number of pointing devices that they were researching. The light pen had been in use for years and there were other form factors of the mouse. In order to decide which one was the best, they simply brought people in and formulated a crude test. They had a "contest" to see how long it would take to locate and click on a given point on the screen.
Much, much later, when Microsoft was designing their own mouse, they did similar tests that led them to place the ball of the mouse in the front of the device rather than in the back. If you look at a wired mouse, the wire comes in the front of the mouse which means in order to put the ball there, the engineers needed to move the electronics to the back of the mouse. The tests they ran led them to build the best mouse up that time.
The Lowly Text Editor
Another example of watching people work was when Tim Mott and Lerry Tesler sat down to design a better publishing software interface. We have all used text editors... we type emails, we type Word documents, we type comments on web sites. All of these text editors have a set of idioms that we expect to be there.
For instance, let's say you want to insert a letter between two on a screen. Without a second thought, you place your cursor between them, click and start typing. It wasn't always so! It used to be that when you clicked on a letter, you selected that letter. So you could select a letter and then choose a command to insert something before that letter or after that letter, but you couldn't select the point between the letters.
All that changed when Mott and Tesler sat down with a publisher and said "how would you like this thing to work?" Out of that grew the notion of selecting and deleting text (similar to "striking" a technique used in publishing prior to text editors) and copying and pasting (literal actions that were done before text editors).
Round the Clock
The guys who brought us pull-down menus, did so as part of some intense collaboration on a system called Lisa. Bill Atkinson and Larry Tesler were working on designing some of the user interface. They developed a working schedule where each worked 14 hours, with an hour overlapping on each end of their shift. Bill work work nights and build the prototypes of ideas that they both had on what the UI should look like. During the day, Larry would pull in users and test things out live. At the ends of their shifts they would collaborate on what was working and what the next iteration should look like.
The key to any good design is interations!
How heavy is too heavy?
When John Ellenby was working on the design of the GRiD Compass computer, they knew they needed to design a small computer... small enough to fit in a briefcase. How heavy could they make it though? They outfitted the founders of the company with a set of weights to put in their briefcases and asked them to report back. There was a dramatic cross-over in the reported pain at 8 pounds, so the weight target was set!
Some People
Bill Verplank - Interaction design is summarized by answering three questions: How you act, How you feel and How you understand.
Underlying all of this is the question: What is a computer? Is it Intelligent? Is it a Tool? Is it Media? Is it Life? Is it a Vehicle? Is it Fashion?
Cordell Ratzlaff - It's not about the interfact; it's about what the user wants to do!
Alan Kaye (Influenced by Jerome Bruner) - Three stages of the learning process: 1) Enactive 2) Iconic 3) Symbolic
Seeing may be believing... but touching is reality!
Rob Haitani - Feature accessibility: You keep the stapler on your desk, you keep the staple remover in the drawer.
Dorothy Leonard - "Some customers are so used to an existing product, it does not even cross their mind to ask for a new solution."
Terry Winograd - The success of communication depends on the intelligence of the listener... AI is required for natural language computing. The real question that needs to be addressed is "How do you want to interact with your computer?"
Some Thoughts
I came across an interesting anecdote when reading about Bill Atkinson and Larry Teslers work on the Lisa. Many of the idioms we have in our GUIs today came from the work they did. One of the most widely used is the scrollbar.
In one of Alan Cooper's books, he disparages the fact that on a Windows computer, the arrows on a scrollbar are so far apart. The up arrows is at the top of the scrollbar and the down arrow on the bottom. He claims this is just horrible design because you have to move your mouse so far to scroll up and then down.
However when I read about Atkinson and Tesler's work, they pointed out something interesting. If you look at the arrow, we all know that when you click on the UP arrow, your document actually moves DOWN. Why is that? Tesler's observation with people using their prototypes was that the direction of the arrow was not as important as its location. When people clicked towards the top of the window, they expected to see more of what was at the top of the document.
Of course today, we know what behavior to expect when we click the arrows so it makes more sense to move them closer together. I found it interesting though that Alan Cooper made such a forceful argument and missed the most fundamental principle in UI design... do what the user expects, not what you (the designer) thinks is best!
Conclusion
When I first came across this book I wasn't too sure it was going to be worth my time. It's a huge book with a ton of information and yeah, it was interesting but I wanted to learn not just be entertained. Imagine my delight when Bill Moggridge managed to do both at the same time!