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From: tim@amdcad.AMD.COM (Tim Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Request for human interface design anecdotes
Message-ID: <19391@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: Tue, 1-Dec-87 12:37:01 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.19391
Posted: Tue Dec  1 12:37:01 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 4-Dec-87 07:08:44 EST
References: <10579@brl-adm.ARPA> <421@minya.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@amdcad.UUCP (Tim Olson)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices
Lines: 27
Summary: User Interface Design @ Xerox (Alan Kay)

In article <421@minya.UUCP> jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
| Yeah, and have you noticed that most of the postings have casually ignored
| the original question, and just gone on to a trivial discussion of novices
| who can't handle rm?  This is a unix.wizards discussion?  I'm disappointed
| with y'all!  Here I was expecting some really juicy examples of bad system 
| design.  All that's appeared is a hacker's version of Trivial Pursuit.

Back to the original discussion, here is an example Alan Kay gave in a
talk at Stanford about 2 years ago (paraphrased by me and my potentially
faulty memory!):

To test out new user interfaces, Xerox would videotape novice users
working with the system.  In one particular instance, one person was to
perform a task that required a DoIt command at the end (from a pull-down
menu).  He kept repeating the cycle of performing everything up to the
DoIt, pulling down the menu, going to the DoIt entry in the menu,
muttering something under his breath, then quitting out of the menu.

Upon review of the tape, the researchers discovered that the person was
muttering "DOLT!..  I'm not a dolt".  They then realized that DoIt (with
an uppercase I) *did* look like the word "dolt" in the sans-serif font
they had for the system.  They later changed it to "doit" (lowercase
'i'). 

	-- Tim Olson
	Advanced Micro Devices
	(tim@amdcad.amd.com)