[HN Gopher] Susan Kare Explains Macintosh UI Ergonomics (1984) [...
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Susan Kare Explains Macintosh UI Ergonomics (1984) [video]
Author : hypertexthero
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-11-29 14:02 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| stephanerangaya wrote:
| The clarity Susan Kare has introducing these brand new UI
| concepts is amazing. She's awesome.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's amazing to me to hear the shift in American accents over
| time. I've very recently listened to some home videos of my
| mother talking in the early 80s and her accent is similarly
| different in the way that they all were then. To me when I hear
| it everyone sounds like they're from a Woody Allen movie in their
| speech patterns. It's not just word pronunciation, but also the
| cadence that has changed. I'd love to know how/why that happens.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| How much of it is accent shift and how much of it is the
| response to being recorded? Being on TV or Radio was a Really
| Big Deal, and people also were taught diction and public
| speaking in school.
|
| It's not just the US, BTW, I find it even more pronounced here
| in Canada. Listening to Canadian radio broadcasts from the 60s
| ... it's almost like they're from the UK. Different cadence and
| quite a bit more British Isles going on.
| azinman2 wrote:
| As I said, I notice this in home movies, so I know for my own
| family this is the case. Because it's consistent with actual
| movies and TV programs, and it's ubiquitous across all of
| them, I cannot see how it could be something non-natural.
|
| We know accents change over time. Just listen to radio from
| the 30s or 50s to hear changes between then and the 70s or
| 80s. Then again to now. This is a human phenomena, and not
| one that would be isolated to just the US. However, for both
| Canada and the US immigrants should have an outsized impact
| on accent shifts compared to populations that are more
| stable.
|
| I'm curious to know the impetus for the change over time.
| diskzero wrote:
| When I listen to current tech podcasts and interviews, I
| notice a lot of manufactured excitement and rapid fire
| interjection. There is more use of words like "Listen..",
| "Look...", "Absolutely..." etc. Perhaps this is a phenomena
| that is a result of an attempt to create entertainment and
| improve the marketing of the individual or brand. I am sure
| Susan wasn't thinking about creating content or marketing
| buzz. She was just thoughtfully discussing a project that
| she had great interest and passion in.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Agreed, it is as fascinating as it is ineffable. Glad to see
| someone else finds it interesting.
| diskzero wrote:
| I worked with Susan at three different companies and never
| really noticed an accent. Perhaps I am too familiar with here
| voice? What I do hear is a highly educated and thoughtful
| person who carefully articulates her thoughts.
| azinman2 wrote:
| We all have an accent, and when I listen to this it sounds
| very period-specific to me.
| musicale wrote:
| The Control Panel design is brilliant.
|
| (And why doesn't modern macOS have a convenient way to change the
| cursor blink rate - and one that works consistently/reliably
| across applications including Terminal and Safari?)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Funny: starting the word processor was no instantaneous:
| https://youtu.be/x_q50tvbQm4?t=295 !
| foodstances wrote:
| Of course not, it's reading the entire program from a floppy
| disk
| Someone wrote:
| Not the entire program; that wouldn't have fitted in memory.
| The Segment Loader in classic Mac OS supported something
| similar to program overlays
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_(programming)) in the
| sense that it allowed programs to be larger than available
| memory, but with an extra feature that, if memory permitted
| (it rarely did in the 128k Mac) segments could stay in
| memory.
| fnord77 wrote:
| getting Bob Ross vibes from her voice
| tbranyen wrote:
| All Computer Chronicles of that era are like this, check em
| out!
| olyjohn wrote:
| The Mac in the video does have a happy little icon when it
| boots up...
| xtracto wrote:
| Yes!! I got slight ASMR while listening to her voice. I could
| listen to her for hours.
| rlawson wrote:
| I put the computer chronicles on in the background while I
| code. It brings back happy memories of a time when the industry
| was a little less cynical.
| racl101 wrote:
| Every unintentional click is a happy little accident.
| js2 wrote:
| Macintosh was the first consumer oriented computer designed
| entirely around a graphical user interface. It's remarkable how
| little has changed in the basic design since 1984. This very
| young Susan Kare was Apple's graphical designer at the time and
| is responsible for all of its icons among other things, many
| which survive to this day.
|
| The modern Macintosh Finder is a usability disaster compared to
| the original Macintosh Finder.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > The modern Macintosh Finder is a usability disaster compared
| to the original Macintosh Finder.
|
| Can you expound on this or link to someone who does? I've read
| this many times, along with comparisons to some sort of utopic
| "spatial Finder", but I've never seen it explained. As someone
| who only started using Macs around Tiger I'd be curious to hear
| what was so good about the old Finder. (I don't find the modern
| one to be that bad, especially in comparison to Windows
| Explorer, although admittedly that's a very low bar)
| leejoramo wrote:
| John Siracusa wrote the definitive posting about the spatial
| Finder back in 2003. He returned to this issue many times in
| his annual macOS reviews
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Although I am something of a "fan" of Siracusa (enjoyed his
| MacOS reviews for years, and still listen to a couple of
| his podcasts), I think he's just dead wrong about this
| Finder thing.
|
| The spatial Finder was a great idea when someone's
| collection of files was, say, the size of the contents of a
| set of desk drawers or a small filing cabinet. We busted
| through that limit over a decade ago. The typical computer
| user now has file collections the size of a municipal
| library.
|
| I don't think anyone would agree that a city library could
| be organized "spatially," where one librarian remembered
| where they left that copy of _Twilight: New Moon_.
| Libraries need a dewey decimal system. Likewise, modern
| file systems are best searched via keyword search
| (Spotlight), and organized via a file browser. And it
| appears that the contemporary evolution of all this is iOS
| and ChromeOS, which throw in the towel on organization
| altogether.
|
| I personally arrived at this conclusion all the way back
| with the release of Windows 95, where I decided that
| Windows Explorer, warts and all, just worked better for a
| big file collection than OS 7 Finder, and only came back to
| Mac with the advent of OS X. I certainly appreciate the
| beauty and psychological theory of the spatial Finder, but
| it just doesn't scale.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Thank you! I was thinking of John's reviews when I wrote
| that comment actually, I wasn't aware he wrote a whole
| article on it.
| thought_alarm wrote:
| When Apple ported the classic Finder to OS X they added a
| NeXT-style "browser" mode (browse between folders inside of a
| single window) in addition to the Classic MacOS mode (each
| folder is its own window).
|
| Unfortunately, they did a very poor job of trying to blend
| the two modes into a single user interface, to the point that
| ruined both modes.
|
| A signature feature of the classic mode is that each folder
| window saves its own customizable view state. Whenever you
| return to a folder is looks exactly the way you left it.
|
| Unfortunately, browser mode clobbers the classic view state
| of any folder you visit. There's no way to customize the look
| of a specific folder (like /Applications) and have it stick,
| because the settings are always getting rewritten by the last
| browser window to visit the folder.
|
| Similarly, there's no way to set a preferred browser window
| size or style. Instead, it always adopts the classic view
| state of the first folder you open. And as you browse around
| the view state of that first folder spreads to all other
| folders you visit.
|
| If you open a folder that has no classic view state, you get
| a hard-coded default browser window. You see this tiny hard-
| coded default browser whenever you create a new folder on
| your desktop and open it.
| diskzero wrote:
| I was part of the team that "ported" the classic Finder to
| OS X. I left Apple in 2006, but was there at the time of
| the NeXT acquisition. Trying to appease the spatial Finder
| advocates and at the same time trying to appease Steve's
| desire to never have to know where a file existed in the
| filesystem was a constant source of grief.
|
| The seeming utopia of the System 7/8/9 Finder was possible
| because the job of the Finder, and the system itself, was
| relatively simple. The current Finder is managing a ton of
| features that are quite complex. If you were to say that
| many of these features are not needed, or detract from some
| pure vision of the Finder, I would probably agree with you.
|
| It is always interesting to get feedback, positive or
| negative, on the Finder. In general, most users seem to
| interact with it in a shallow way, using the Desktop as a
| giant catch all storage location.
|
| We were always aware of the various bugs involving the loss
| of layout preferences and fixes ended up being fragile and
| exposing confusing bits of UI. The team tried (tries) hard
| to balance all of the competing requests for Finder
| functionality. Working on the Finder team could be joyous
| and miserable at the same time.
| thom wrote:
| The "spatial finder" is a thankfully long dead idea that your
| file system is a series of places you want to revisit,
| instead of just another component in whatever task you're
| performing. It survives in your desktop and nowhere else, and
| despite the hushed, reverent tones in which it's discussed in
| some circles, would be the first thing any user switched off
| in their preferences on any modern machine.
| bitwize wrote:
| The spatial Finder treated files and folders like physical
| objects. There was only one window on the screen for a given
| folder because a physical folder can only be at one place at
| a time. The location of each file and folder on the desktop
| or in a window was saved, as is the size and location of each
| open window, because objects remain where you left them
| unless moved.
|
| It's not something that surfaces in conscious memory, but
| subconsciously this takes advantage of millions of years of
| evolution of the human brain to cope with and manipulate
| objecrs in the physical world, something other file managers
| don't do. Apple invested millions of dollars and thousands of
| user-hours of experimentation into making the OS take
| advantage of innate human psychology like this, something NO
| other computer manufacturer (including Xerox) had done at the
| time. It's a big part of why the original Mac OS was,
| objectively, the easiest operating system to use in the world
| (and far easier than many operating systems that postdate it
| including modern macOS).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > There was only one window on the screen for a given
| folder because a physical folder can only be at one place
| at a time. The location of each file and folder on the
| desktop or in a window was saved, as is the size and
| location of each open window, because objects remain where
| you left them unless moved.
|
| You could just live update icon positions in both windows,
| particularly on modern machines. Just like how if you
| rename a file in one window, it appears renamed in the
| other window.
| AlanYx wrote:
| The problem with updating icon positions in both windows
| (to preserve the spatial metaphor) is that doing so also
| breaks the spatial metaphor. You switch to the second
| window and suddenly something that you thought was in one
| place suddenly isn't, and you're not sure why for a
| second or two.
|
| Eastgate Tinderbox is an example of software that
| actually implements this behavior, and it ends up being
| more frustrating than it seems, to the point where most
| users seem to only keep one spatial view open at any one
| time. Which seems to be where the original Mac UI settled
| too. I'm not sure why Tinderbox never moved to a model
| where a complete set of spatial positions are maintained
| per spatial view, so users could have two windows open
| with the same object in different positions, but
| presumably that would also have the potential for user
| confusion.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I'm conflicted about this spatial interface thing
| (alternatively known as the "object-oriented user
| interface"). On one hand, for file managers it sounds like
| it should make sense, even if the overwhelming majority of
| file managers I've used (from Norton Commander to Windows
| 98+ Explorer to Far Manager to mc to Nautilus) don't follow
| it. Even in general I'd very much like it to work, if
| nothing else because it pleasantly constrains the design
| space for GUIs.
|
| On the other, for text editors and similar apps not
| following it ( _i.e._ being capable of displaying multiple
| views of a single buffer) is a killer feature; people
| _rave_ about split editing every time it is first
| implemented in a given app category (text editors, word
| processors, spreadsheets, online spreadsheets, you name
| it). I'd also probably be less than enthused about a web
| browser that could only open a single view of a given URL.
| Now that I'm thinking about it, "Open a Copy" is perhaps my
| favourite feature in Evince and the main think I miss in
| other PDF viewers.
|
| The problem is, to some extent you _want_ the view to be a
| separate "thing", for example so that it can serve as a
| conceptual host for navigation history. _Maybe_ the
| responsibility of maintaining said history could be hoisted
| onto the window manager, but I can't say I've heard anyone
| mention this option, even if only to say it's dumb and
| won't work for such-and-such simple reason.
|
| I'd very much this to work, it's just that all the
| gravestones (CUA, Cairo, _etc._ ) make me wary and half the
| questions (that now seem obvious) don't appear to even have
| been asked (many years ago, when people actually tried
| making this).
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I would argue iOS is the easiest operating system. Toddlers
| are often very good at it.
| Someone wrote:
| Yes, it was great, but that feature doesn't work with
| multi-user systems or network storage.
|
| Say user 1 has a large screen, and sizes the window of a
| folder accordingly, keeping spacing of icons in it large.
| Next, user 2 opens the folder on their desktop. Firstly,
| should it disappear from user 1's screen, as it would if it
| were a physical object?
|
| That probably is undesirable.
|
| Also, if the window doesn't fit on user 2's screen, what
| should the UI do? Resize the window? On user 2's screen or
| on both screens? If user 2 changes the looks of the window,
| and user 1 opens it again, should user 1 see it the way
| user 2 left it behind?
|
| Access rights introduce other problems with this metaphor.
| What should happen if user 2 doesn't have write rights to a
| networked folder? Should they be allowed to move icons
| within a folder? Change window sizes? If so, where should
| the information about icon layout be stored?
|
| Those physical folders also don't work well with disks with
| millions of files.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| There's no reason a spatial layout shouldn't be
| remembered (by default) per-user on a multiuser system.
| chongli wrote:
| I wonder how many users of MacBooks and even iMacs and
| Mac Pros actually set up multiple user accounts on their
| machines? I would conjecture that the number is pretty
| low, perhaps below 10%. Furthermore, I think the majority
| of home users (the bulk of Apple users) have no network
| storage at all. Why go to the trouble of setting up and
| maintaining a file server at home when your files get
| backed up to iCloud and you can AirDrop anything you want
| to your friends? Traditional file sharing is more of a
| power user feature.
|
| But besides that, there is a solution to the problem you
| described: make the spatial information local. Each user
| gets a different view of the world.
|
| As for dealing with millions of files, the classic Mac
| Finder had list view with disclosure triangles on the
| folders. If you added a modern indexing search to that it
| would be better than anything we have today.
| mietek wrote:
| List view remains available in the modern macOS Finder.
| chongli wrote:
| Yes it does, but spatial orientation does not. The modern
| Finder uses browser windows that allow me to look at the
| same folder in multiple windows at the same time. It also
| constantly forgets what a folder looked like the last
| time I opened it.
|
| This means I can no longer rely on my spatial memory to
| navigate my computer. I am reduced to navigating entirely
| by abstract hierarchy plus search. If you've ever tried
| cooking in someone else's kitchen you've experienced
| first hand the huge decline in productivity that comes
| from not knowing where everything is. Compared to cooking
| in your own kitchen, the experience can be quite jarring
| and uncomfortable. The modern macOS Finder forces
| everyone to cook in someone else's kitchen.
| anton96 wrote:
| Those things are still possible in the current Mac OS. Is
| there some important characteristics that were lost in Mac
| OS X ?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's not just that a new window is opened each time, it's
| that the interface actually remembers where you
| positioned the window for that item the last time you
| opened it. So in theory you could develop a muscle memory
| around it.
|
| This might make even more sense now with our very large
| monitors. But we also deal with a _lot_ more files now.
|
| I'm frankly not sure that spatial organization is really
| the reason the classic Mac Finder is superior. I also
| think the placement of window gadgets and other details
| is key. It was just very coherent.
|
| The Lisa Office System' desktop was also excellent, and
| potentially superior as well. A was the Xerox Star, which
| at least partially inspired it. But many of theses things
| (which focus on documents and office tasks and metaphors
| around them) make a lot less sense now that most people
| mostly just use their computer through a web browser and
| little else.
|
| Our computers are less and less "office automation
| systems" and more just an end in themselves.
| wmf wrote:
| In the classic spatial Finder, every folder always opened
| in a new window. I'm not sure if it's possible to force
| that behavior under the current Finder.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| I think the closest you can get is holding down CMD when
| you open a folder. There doesn't seem to be a way to get
| that to be the default.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Seems there is an option?
|
| https://www.igeeksblog.com/open-folders-in-new-windows-
| inste...
| marcellus23 wrote:
| That seems to just control whether holding down CMD and
| opening a folder will open in a tab or a window. Even
| with that unchecked, folders still open in-place by
| default.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| The current Finder does that thing sometimes, and other
| times it doesn't. I'm not sure what the rule is, it might
| be related to whether it's a folder you double-click
| directly from the desktop.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It does it on read only filesystems. So you'll see it if
| you plug in an ntfs drive, for example (unless you've
| installed third party ntfs drivers).
| dingosity wrote:
| Stewart Cheifet has repeatedly pointed out he prefers people to
| reference copies of Computer Chronicles on archive.org. Computer
| Chronicles is still under copyright and the Internet Archive has
| the only license to host it as a free[*] stream / download.
|
| Here's the URL to the IA's copy of Jerry Manock and Susan Kare
| talking about the ergonomics of the Mac:
|
| https://archive.org/details/Computer1984_3?start=758
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've changed the URL to that from
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_q50tvbQm4 above. Thanks!
|
| (I changed the timestamp to where they start interviewing Susan
| Kare.)
| dingosity wrote:
| cool. the other cool thing about the archive's copy is you
| can move backwards to hear other people chat about ergonomics
| or forward to hear tech news from the era (like the Japanese
| consortium that fabbed a 1Mbit ROM. 128kbytes! WHAT WILL YOU
| DO WITH ALL THAT CAPACITY!)
| reaperducer wrote:
| I've always found it amusing that she got kare.com first, and the
| TV station down the street from her had to settle for kare11.com.
|
| +1 for the nerds.
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