Bruce Tognazzini

If you’re interested in Apple UX design, check out this blog [0] from Apple’s first HCI engineer. This one [1] is one of my favorites, about the MacOS dock when it was first released. [0] https://www.asktog.com/ [1] https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

Bruce Tognazzini also has a great web site http://asktog.com/ see his short course on interaction design http://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ and http://asktog.com/menus/designMenu.html

A couple of usability sites, which are a big part of design: - http://www.useit.com/ (Jakob Nielsen) - http://asktog.com/ (Bruce Tognazzini) Bruce publishes rarely and seems to be more interesting. Jakob has some great posts, but also a lot that feel more like "please buy my book" than "this is helpful".

In addition to his book, I am constantly linking to "Intuitive Equals Familiar:" https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html A short must-read for people designing (via prompt or any other tool) user experiences. It is timeless (so far!)

Ok, except operating a commercial airliner literally takes thousands of hours of training, requires an extremely detailed mental model for how air flight works, and heavily relies on external procedures like checklists to ensure safe operation. And fatal accidents due to poorly thought out control systems do occur. https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design-crashed-a… Also fwiw using the word "intuitive" is an instant sign of someone not being a great designer. https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

The title is misleading. The message is really: Stop using unlabeled icons in data tables. It says, "Norman Nielson argues that text + icon has the highest cognitive recall and lowest error rate" Here's what the Nielsen Norman Group says about Icon Usability: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/ The conclusion: "Always include a visible text label. As Bruce Tognazzini once said, 'a word is worth a thousand pictures.'" Here's the quote in context: https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html "In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto 'A word is worth a thousand pictures.' This still holds true."

It's been almost 25 years since Mac OS X launched, when Tog (Apple's first Interaction Designer and only Human Interface Evangelist), lamented that "it makes for a great demo, but not a great product." https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

"A word is worth a thousand pictures". — Apple HIG In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures. https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html Linked from Daring Fireball back in the day. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/12/tog-word

Design is how it works, not how it looks. This article seems to mainly be talking about the "polish" of a design. There are more important principles which don't have anything to do with polish, such as not putting the Cancel button next to the Ok button. More like this: https://lawsofux.com https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles I recommend prototyping the flow/feel of the app before working on the polish, or the functionality: https://principle.app/

Without taking a strong position either way on this topic, whenever I see tools or ideas like this I am reminded of this piece [0] by Tog [1] from 1989: “Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1”. Even today (as a curmudgeonly old Emacs user for long form text, and a Vi user for the command line) I still find that my intuition (which aligns with result #1 in Tog’s study) collides pretty firmly with the data (result #2 in Tog’s study). After ~30 years of working on both the command line and the GUI, I’m still not sure where the truth lies. [0]: https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html [1]: https://www.asktog.com/

I'll definitely be digging into this more! Poking around the repo, and I stumbled onto this great resource, First Principles of Interaction Design[0]. Great stuff. [0] https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/

>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough. I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking. You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve. Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!" This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

https://www.asktog.com Is also a big contributor to this field.

Edward Tufte made a great case that data visualization could have prevented the launch... and that PowerPoint was to blame. https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

Jeff Raskin has a great essay on why “intuitive” usually means “familiar”, and while we think something like the mouse is intuitive, people were baffled by it when it was first employed. [1] It’s a good read — one of my favorites on human computer interaction. 1: https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

That may be your opinion. But 30 years of HCI research and recommendations on the subject say otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface)#Assessment https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/

Great! Even if you disagree, just the existence of a Gov standard will: 1) Create a minimal common language for all sites that the citizens are forced to use. Now we can all can use these patterns in our sites knowing that more users will know them. Remember that software isn't intuitive, but familiar: http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html 2) Force software developers for public services to put up a minimal decent interface, instead of just a list of features. The best page is their Design Principles: https://standards.usa.gov/design-principles/

The touch bar is the type of gimmick that Apple loves though, because that's what sells hardware. When OS X was released, the Dock was that gimmick. It added "curb appeal" and demoability according to Bruce Tognazzini, an ex-Apple employee who wrote the first five editions of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines - http://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

Also worth reading Bruce Tognazzini on Magic and Software Design: http://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html

"When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next." Love the quote, and something to bear in mind when evaluating less drastic forms of hazard. Anyone care to comment on Tufte's take on the graphics used by the Thiokol engineers? See http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

I love it. It's the Starfire project come to life: http://asktog.com/starfire/index.html (If you haven't seen Tog's vision for the future of computing from 1992, take a moment - it's eerily close.)

Apple discovered fairly early on that while using a keyboard shortcut seems faster, using the mouse is almost always quicker, even for very advanced users. The illusion stems from how we perceive time when performing the different tasks - we remember time spent searching for the correct target to click, but we forget time spent remembering the right incantation. This paradox is one of the big reasons why I don't use Vi or EMACS - I think that the productivity gains are nowhere near as great as users make out, but the sense of mastery over such arcane tools is inherently satisfying to the kind of person that spends a lot of time in a text editor. http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

That is what I got out of it. A big clue was his "git commit filename". git is not svn. Is git's greatest sin really that it uses a few of the same words with different meanings from how they have been used in the past? Someone in another post mentioned revert. svn revert file == git checkout file, while git revert patches out a whole change. It actually makes sense if you forget about cvs and svn's version of the API. I saw the word "intuitive" thrown around... http://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html

I didn't read this article because the web design was so bad. Native scrollbars. We have them. They're 25 years old. For the last decade or so, we've even had these handy scroll wheels that work with them. When you attempt to replace them with your cutesy home-rolled Javascript version and force me to navigate to a button and click it to scroll, you give me every incentive to ignore you. See (e.g.) the classic Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

The only thing I can come up with off the top of my head is the correlation between the displayed progress of a loading bar and the perceived speed. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html That article also links to a great article called "Maximizing Human Performance" (http://www.asktog.com/basics/03Performance.html) which goes over a few topics, including response times and their perceived meaning and optimizing user flows for the human thinking process.

"The best that we can say is that both approaches provide advantages." The best we can say is that Fitts's Law says that the one menu bar approach is better, and I do not know of any UI research or design principles at all favoring the one-menu-bar-per-window approach. http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html#fittsLaw "Fitts' law (properly, but rarely, spelled "Fitts's Law") dictates the Macintosh pull-down menu acquisition should be approximately five times faster than Windows menu acquisition, and this is proven out."

> looks like a ">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right .. and to think that earlier in the Mac's history the mantra for GUI design was "a word is worth a thousand pictures" (see: http://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html). If Apple still followed that mantra railsjedi would have actually noticed that Web Inspector had all these awesome features.

> But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent. Well yes, I do agree with this. Internally it's mostly consistent, at least more so than Windows. Never analysed its UI structures though. > I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible). As a platform, ensuring applications running on top of it stay consistent to varying degree is the job of the desktop/OS IMO. To what degree depends on the context, https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/#consistency is a great read. Even games need it, missing input field features has plagued PC games for decades and can be crippling for input method users, Skyrim's console needs mods to support copy and paste. Custom mouse acceleration curves is the reason everyone disabled it, zero acceleration is the easiest way to make different games handle mouse input consistently. A shame Linux isn't standardised enough.

Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead. Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design! https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/ Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-people-who-hav… >When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.) >Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the…

I think this is something apple doesn't realize. They used to have a really good human factors/ui team. I remember Bruce Tognazzini and reading his blog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini https://www.asktog.com/ I think I noticed around ios 7 things were getting bad. buttons didn't look like buttons, on-screen controls started being hidden, and form trumped function. Then like you said, ports disappeared and to me "do the wrong thing correctly" started winning. but the worst thing is that apple sets an example. The same "simplify for sales, but not usability" technique has happened to countless other products in many industries. all laptops have elegant looking keys that have no curve to fit and center your fingers. Tesla cars have a pleasing-looking design, but when you drive them, you can't lean on the touchscreen to hit targets, you don't have drive selection or turn signal stalks to help you get into a parking space easily, and "elegant simplicity" is "cost cutting for the peons". sigh.