Seth Nickell

January 22, 1984: the Apple Macintosh is unleashed on the world. The world blinks and keeps on turning.

The release of the Macintosh wasn’t the revolution, it was a symbol of the revolution. It wasn’t merely the introduction of an “insanely great” product line but of the debutante ball of the process that birthed it. And at the heart of that process (human-centered design) was a paradigm shift. The question was no longer “What will this computer’s specs be?” but “What will people do with this product?“. That question is as relevant (and almost as frequently overlooked) today as it was twenty years ago. The importance of the revolution was less in Windows Icons Menus and Pointer and more in approaching product development from the right direction. Until widespread development and design in the computer industry is focused on a question like that, the Macintosh revolution is far from over.

The Star desktop, circa 1981

There is widespread disagreement as to when and where this revolution began, but it is not contentious that the ideas took root in the feracious ground of Xerox PARC in the 70s. The end result was the Xerox 8010 (aka Star) desktop, released in 1981. To a large extent the Star interface is extant in modern desktops, but this belies the importance of the Star: it was the result of human-centered design. Engineers and researchers at Xerox tried to create a computer that could be used to “do people things” rather than just crunch numbers. Focus was not on specs and technology but on what Star could accomplish.

The Alto’s “Executive”, circa mid 1970s

It is interesting to compare the Star interface with the interface of the Executive program from the equally famous Xerox Alto (from the mid 70s). The Alto was a technical marvel, with a bitmapped display, windows, a mouse, and ethernet. But while the Star really adds nothing to this impressive list of technology, the difference between the two, in terms of user experience, is like night and day. Technological invention can enable real improvement, but its not enough (usually its not even necessary). Anyway, enough historical meandering. The story of the Macintosh, Star and Alto is very interesting, and there’s a lot of period documents dealing with that subject… maybe I’ll post a list of links another day. But back to my agenda: 🙂

At best I think most people ask “What could people do with this computer”. That’s a very different question from “What people will people do with this computer”… there are so many nifty features that if people pushed themselves they could use, but have a high enough barrier to entry that people don’t bother.

Example: I have a nice thermostat in my apartment. Its fairly well designed and has quick push buttons for “Daytime”, “Night” and “Vacation”. It was even straightforward to set these to my preferred temperatures for “In the apartment, awake”, “Out of the apartment or asleep”, and I haven’t bothered with the vacation button. Now I have noticed that I don’t like to get out of bed in the morning because it is sort of cold. In fact, sometimes I’ll lie in bed for 30+ minutes because its cold, which is a big waste of time (I’m not very rational when I’m waking up). I have noticed that my thermostat supports scheduling changes between day and night temperature. I even looked at the instructions beneath the faceplate, and it looks like it’d be fairly easy to program. But I haven’t done it. The device is usable in the sense that if I wanted to, I could program it, and probably get it right on the first or second try. Its not hard to use. But its a little too inconvenient, because I’d have to special case my weekend schedule, I’d have to set several different times using the fairly slow “up”, “down”, “next item” interface for setting time (on most alarm clocks etc). The point is, its not hard to figure out, but its stills too much hassle. So while I could program the thermostat, I won’t. There’s always something that seems better to do with my time, and I can’t be bothered (even though rationally I know it’d be better overall if I just program the silly thing).

The Macintosh revolution, at least how I see it, was about conceiving your (computer related) product in terms of what people will do with it. Sometimes we need to “get back to the basics”…