[HN Gopher] Do It (2004)
___________________________________________________________________
Do It (2004)
Author : kristianp
Score : 270 points
Date : 2022-03-07 06:04 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.folklore.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.folklore.org)
| justatdotin wrote:
| I worked on a public facing project with many retiree users. We
| had a code audit to remove the word 'Invalid' so that users would
| not think they had been identified as 'a person made weak or
| disabled by illness or injury'
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I similarly wince every time I use software which inflexibly
| uses "disabled" or especially the more affirmative "disable".
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'm not aware of any community of disabled people or disabled
| person who finds the usage of the term "Disable" offensive in
| any context.
|
| I've never actually heard any controversy over the word
| "Disabled" EXCEPT in the specific context of it being used to
| refer to disabled people (person-first vs identity-first
| language debate, but that's a digression)
|
| There's quite a long history people arbitrarily deciding they
| speak on behalf of all disabled people and know that language
| must change to protect their dignity and feelings. Inclusive
| language is actually plain language, since that's the easiest
| for people with certain disabilities to understand, so the
| inclusive thing to do is to avoid arbitrarily stigmatising
| words.
| smoyer wrote:
| I have a disabled son and agree that using the word
| "disabled" or "disable" isn't an issue. Please DON'T use
| the word retarded (unless you're talking about the timing
| of the spark plugs in your car) - this word originally had
| a clinical connotation which was largely synonymous to
| "disabled" but it is now offensive because people use it to
| disparage an able-bodied, able-minded person who's acting
| stupidly by comparing them to someone who's legitimately
| disabled.
| justatdotin wrote:
| personally I have very little exposure to the realm of
| disability. So if someone suggested to me that 'disabled'
| might not be a good term to be customer facing, although
| its not obvious to me, I know I do not have basis to
| disagree. I might just accept the suggestion and keep
| moving. I don't think it would occur to me to suspect
| someone of inventing nonsense.
|
| actually I'm not even sure that 'disabled' is a clear term.
| In some contexts, 'unavailable' or 'not ready' might be
| more clear / less complicated. Kinda like how I don't
| personally recognise 'master' as a problematic term (n lst
| mryky) but in many situations I find 'main' is a better fit
| anyway
| faeriechangling wrote:
| With disabilities things get very complicated very fast
| because disabled people are a very diverse group. You'll
| have different groups of disabled people having different
| views on things, given they're often in pretty distinct
| and unique situations. This has resulted in a number of
| linguistic disputes over the years.
|
| "Not ready" has a space in it which is frequently
| annoying in software. I think it also implies that thing
| may become ready after some time elapses or a condition
| is met, which disabled does not imply.
|
| "Unavailable" and "Disabled" are already used adjacent to
| eachother in software, the former implies something
| becoming unusable for reason outside of the software's
| control, and "disabled" tends to imply something being
| made unusable intentionally. Here's F5 using the two
| words in this way
| https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K12213214
|
| I agree with you regarding master vs main. Main is a
| syllable less, two letters shorter, and more clear. I
| feel people mostly resist the change to STICK IT to the
| politically correct.
| justatdotin wrote:
| ah yeah rite,
|
| I'm horrible at naming things, which is another reason I
| wouldn't push back on this kind of change, even if I
| didn't see an issue.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| As a (partially) blind person, I agree with you, and I know
| that some prominent blind people have spoken out against
| person-first language, for example:
| https://mosen.org/person-first-language-it-does-more-harm-
| th... (seems to be down at time of writing)
| noduerme wrote:
| I don't get it. If it says something's disabled, why would
| you think the software is talking about you? Or personally
| insulting you?
|
| I mean, I also don't understand the guy who thought the
| software was calling him a "Dolt"
| justatdotin wrote:
| we don't need to understand it or agree:
|
| either we are interested in and sensitive to how users
| react, or not.
| dncornholio wrote:
| Depends.. there's always this one user who seems to take
| things differently. can't please everyone
|
| I think society is losing the concept of context, which
| is pretty worrying. Can't even make jokes I used to,
| because people seem to take things a lot more literal
| these days. If I do any self-mockery, people look at me
| like I'm crazy for example. Most sarcasm is lost too..
|
| In this light, I think we should KEEP the words master,
| slave, disabled, etc. So we can educate the meaning of
| context back to society.
| justatdotin wrote:
| edit: said something rong?
| adwn wrote:
| You're arguing in bad faith [1][2]. Please don't do that
| here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:
| Assume_...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_faith
| syntheticnature wrote:
| You have an understanding of how the computer means things
| and what everything on the screen represents. This is by no
| means universal. To you it is like breathing, beneath
| thought.
|
| Those who lack context as to what they're seeing,
| especially if frustrated and unable to parse what is visual
| noise to them, are likely to take it as the computer
| judging them negatively.
| adwn wrote:
| Tree [1], master [2], submission [3], abort [4], driver [5] -
| words can have different meanings in different contexts. Do
| you feel the need to "wince every time" you _submit_ a link
| on HN?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(data_structure)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_submission
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver
| justatdotin wrote:
| some of us are interested in taking small simple steps to
| make our users more comfortable.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| You mean virtue signaling. Replacing an established and
| perfectly fine word has never helped a single user in the
| history of the universe.
| justatdotin wrote:
| hmm yeah I dunno, I don't think my boss was 'virtue
| signalling' by asking me to replace instances of
| 'invalid'.
|
| I suspect by 'virtue signalling' you mean he was angling
| to impress me with how virtuous he was. (because the
| users never saw my code before the audit)
|
| Why would he try to impress me? or think it would?
|
| I never noticed the quixotic reaction against perceived
| 'virtue signalling' until sometime this century, and that
| code audit was back in the 90s.
|
| I'm not certain but I do think it was actually prompted
| by a previous experience with a confused user who had the
| word printed on a receipt and mistakenly thought the term
| referred to them!
| Aeolun wrote:
| Depends on what you replace it with, I don't mind
| replacing 'master' with 'main', but all the hubbub around
| it made me obstinately stick with 'master'.
|
| Replacing 'invalid' with something like 'incorrect' seems
| much less likely to set people off.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I think it's more that if users actually have mistakenly
| read a word and taken offense, it's easier to just use a
| different word than have to deal with the occasional
| upset person.
|
| I do think the people going round proactively trying to
| change all the words with alternative negative meanings
| are a bit ridiculous though; if nobody's offended, you
| don't need to pretend to be offended on others' behalf.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Polysemy is a fundamental concept in most (all?)
| languages. I am not aware of a language without
| polysemes.
|
| Should we replace "driver", because people might confuse
| them with people driving cars? How about "tree"? Are you
| confused by river "banks"?
|
| "What, commit trees don't grow on soil?"
|
| "What do you mean? I can't sit on the same bank that
| manages my money?"
|
| You cannot and should not design for the lowest common
| denominator, which is a person not familiar with basic
| language concepts.
|
| If you think that "master" branch is offensive, YOU are
| the problem, not the language.
| asoneth wrote:
| Polysemy is orthogonal to the cases I am aware of in
| which people are concerned about the primary meaning, an
| example being "slave" to refer to an item that is bound
| or subservient.
|
| And even in that case I think it depends on the word and
| how prominent the negative association is. "Disabled"
| seems a stretch to me, so I'd want to dig deeper and
| confirm it's actually a concern with some subset of users
| as opposed to trolling. But on the other end of the
| spectrum people who insist on using terms like "slave" at
| this point seem to be mostly using it as an excuse to
| virtue signal their adherence to principles of free
| speech.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Well yeah, people can be unreasonable sometimes - but
| from a business perspective, changing a word is better
| than having a few upset customers. That's literally what
| I was saying above.
| criddell wrote:
| I might not find "master branch" to be offensive, but if
| somebody I'm working with asks to rename it, I'm okay
| with that.
| smcin wrote:
| What one-word replacement would you use? ('Deactivate'?)
| scns wrote:
| Activate would make sense for opt-in, no?
| noduerme wrote:
| Dude. I wrote a piece of software for a company that takes
| online signups, and then matches them to customers who purchase
| things in the store. Many years ago they asked me to write a
| report that output local customers who had signed up online,
| but never bought anything.
|
| The database table for transactions is called `trans`. So the
| report I coded was labeled "No_trans_customers".
|
| Last year I get a call from the company CEO -- can we rename
| this report? Apparently someone saw the name of it and freaked
| the fuck out.
| seanw444 wrote:
| That's golden
| adenozine wrote:
| I've had some users that definitely needed a "dolt" button......
| noduerme wrote:
| >> The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at
| the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking "Cancel" when
| they should have clicked "Do It", but it wasn't clear what they
| were having trouble with.
|
| Let me tell ya... people are _still_ having problems with this.
| Red /green buttons, "OK" instead of "Do it"... doesn't matter.
| We're dealing with apes here, people. Goddamn apes.
| mlok wrote:
| Well, in 2022 I still stumble upon dialog boxes in the vein of
| :
|
| Do you really want to cancel ?
|
| [OK] [Cancel]
| guiriduro wrote:
| Reminds me of cockpit recordings of the automatic callout from
| the Airbus landing system: "50...40...30...Retard! Retard!
| Retard!"
| smoyer wrote:
| See my comment above (I have a handicapped son ...) - I don't
| think that use of retard is offensive. The other common non-
| pejorative use that I can think of is talking about the timing
| of the spark igniting the fuel in your (gasoline) ICE.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Trucks and buses for continuous, smooth braking (which would
| require stepping on the pedal for an extended amount of time,
| but this is discouraged because brake pads wear out and/or
| lose grip when engaged for too long) use a mechanical or
| electric assisting device that has the same name:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake
| rzzzt wrote:
| I think it's a Family Guy episode where the callout also gets
| called... names in reply to the announcement.
| ciphol wrote:
| Is it RE-tard (noun) or re-TARD (command)?
| JadeNB wrote:
| Is that difference in stress universal across English
| dialects? I thought there were some dialects that stressed
| nouns and verbs with the same spelling in the same way.
| mod wrote:
| Isn't this a special case, because isn't the noun actually
| just short for "retarded"?
|
| Which I think just has one pronunciation.
| vivegi wrote:
| That reminds me of the first Windows program I wrote at my first
| job on Windows 3.11 in early 1995. IIRC, I referenced Programming
| Windows (I think) by Charles Petzold and it had a basic Windows
| program that had two menu items - "Do It", "Quit". I adapted that
| program to build my prototype and perform the task in the "Do It"
| menu handler. :)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I wonder if the newness of kerning in a computer interface threw
| those few people off.
|
| It was after all a monospace world for computers (and
| typewriters, for that matter -- the other keyboard people likely
| sat down in front of at that time).
|
| Or we can blame the Chicago 12 font.
| pdevr wrote:
| >>The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room
| featuring a one-way mirror, so observers could watch the tests
| without being intrusive. The tests were conducted by a moderator
| who made sure the user felt comfortable and showed her the basics
| of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction, users were
| asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator,
| like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged
| each user to mumble under her breath while doing the tasks,
| revealing her current thinking as much as possible. Each session
| was audio or videotaped for later analysis.
|
| Amazing to see the importance they gave to UX/UI and the level of
| sophistication they had forty years back.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Equally remarkable is the amount of stuff we take for granted
| today that the Mac team got right the very first time.
|
| Had it not been for that user feedback, Windows might have
| copied the Mac and gone with "Do It" as well and we would be
| living in a slightly more awkward UI timeline.
|
| I always think about this when I look at current Apple's UI.
| Just a little user feedback would have gone a really long way.
| Animats wrote:
| That's what people did before cheap TV cameras.
|
| That's still the right way to do UI testing. You bring in
| people, you give them a list of tasks to do, and you take video
| of screen and user. Someone then has to watch the video and
| mark the places where people got stuck, had to back up, or gave
| up. Then create a highlights reel of every problem seen more
| than once. The devs have to watch this.
| robin_reala wrote:
| This is generally correct, but it's often better to go to the
| user rather than bringing them in. People can have quite
| different reactions in their own homes, especially if they
| have specific setup needs, than in a research lab.
| asoneth wrote:
| True, it's much easier now, and you can get a much wider
| sample of end-users and a more accurate representation of
| their behavior in their natural context. It's absolutely
| worth doing most of your usability testing remotely. But to
| be honest there's still something powerful about having the
| development team watch a real person through a one-way mirror
| that I haven't managed to replicate using video. It reminds
| me of the difference between live theater and watching a
| movie at home.
|
| The closest I've come to replicating the impact is to have a
| conference room where the team sits together and watches the
| usability test being streamed live.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's still possible today, but nobody can actually be
| bothered, because there's plenty of other stuff to do as well.
|
| I do recall ~8-10 years ago, we were building an app and did a
| user test; we had a phone with a webcam rigged to it so we
| could see from the user's point of view.
|
| But for this you need dedicated (in multiple senses of the
| word) UX people, and they are both rare, and companies seem to
| be reluctant to hire them.
| michaelt wrote:
| They also had a target user base who'd literally never used a
| computer before, making UX testing critical for product
| adoption.
|
| There was a time when tech products would start with a
| tutorial on the differences between clicking, right-clicking
| and double-clicking.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| > But for this you need dedicated UX people
|
| Tesler was a computer scientist. He worked on AI and
| Smalltalk at Xerox, and was a manager at Apple at this time.
|
| What we need to do instead, is bring down the wall between
| design and development that was built up in the past decade,
| encourage developers in the UI field to have multi-
| disciplinary skills, and stop assuming every minute not spent
| coding or in meetings is wasted.
| Vinnl wrote:
| As a UI engineer, I wish it was more common for UI
| engineers to learn about accessibility and how to
| contribute to doing UX research, rather than trying to pick
| up some back-end and calling that "full-stack". There's
| much more useful cross-pollination to be gained when
| branching out that way.
| andi999 wrote:
| But this might break the beautiful visual design.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| That would be the equivalent of a car designer complaint
| that engineering ruined it. You cannot produce quality
| work without that collaboration in either direction.
| scns wrote:
| Form over function? Or beautiful but useless (snark
| intended) The citrus press by Philippe Starck comes to
| mind. Many bars own it and display it but don't use it
| because it sucks. The last sentence came from a bartender
| who has it on the shelf.
| andi999 wrote:
| If you look at GUI/web at least since a decade it is form
| over function.
| bmn__ wrote:
| They just hadn't figured out that one can get results of the
| same quality from a usability testing room without one-way
| mirror. I don't blame them, the standard literature on how to
| run tests on the cheap appeared one decade later.
| andi999 wrote:
| could you point to that literature?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The goto place is the Nielsen Norman Group1. You can get
| any of their books, it will describe how to do tests. It's
| basically catch up to 5 users from your target audience,
| ask them to do the tasks you want, observe without saying a
| word, and don't ever come out with any variation of "users
| are stupid" explanation because even if they are, they are
| the ones you are creating the software for; fix your
| software, and repeat.
|
| But if you want details about why those large "record the
| user" sessions aren't worth it, you'll have to dig into
| their papers.
|
| 1 - https://www.nngroup.com/
| mjw1007 wrote:
| That description should also supply a warning about a
| difficulty that UX designers, and Apple in particular, have
| struggled with over the years: they're going to a great deal of
| effort to optimise their designs for the first hour of use.
| kragen wrote:
| In 01981 if users didn't like your design in the first hour
| trying it out in the computer store they wouldn't buy your
| computer. Now if they don't like your design in the first
| five minutes of downloading it from the app store they'll
| uninstall your app. There's a real tradeoff between ease of
| use and ease of learning, but software merchants are in a
| real bind here.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >In 01981
|
| Any reason for the leading zero? Is it a native language
| thing?
| mahathu wrote:
| The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra
| zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come
| into effect in about 8,000 years.
|
| https://longnow.org/about/
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Honestly, a leading zero in human-readable text is a non-
| solution.
|
| Year numbers are variable length decimal strings, not a
| four or five digit fixed length field. Any historian
| concerned with 6 AD-999 AD will likely not include a
| leading zero in any year figures they use. I don't see
| why the people of the present or the future should do any
| different.
|
| Machine readable implementations, sure. Have as many
| digits as you wish. But for human written material, it
| just looks weird.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| Certainly. They were also optimising for positive reviews
| in newspapers and magazines, which were also typically
| based on a short period of use.
|
| I don't remember seeing this one on the usual lists of
| forms of market failure, but it's real.
| asoneth wrote:
| Over-optimizing for the walk-up-and-use experience at the
| expense of a more realistic subset of usage is sometimes
| referred to as the "Pepsi Challenge" or "sip test"
| observational bias. You might even consider it a special case
| of the "streetlight effect" where people choose their
| research methods primarily based on how easy it is to collect
| that kind of data. (When I used to teach UX I had a whole
| lecture dedicated to alternate approaches to avoid falling
| into the trap of over-optimizing for novices, things like
| GOMS/KLM, log analysis, heuristic evaluations, diary studies,
| cognitive walkthough, surveys, etc.)
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| Most of us have probably violated all sorts of good UI
| principles out of either haste or ignorance, but our crimes are
| mitigated by the fact that for the overwhelming majority of
| software the number of users, and hence the number cursing the
| idiot who designed this crappy interface, is extremely low
| and/or constrained by the bespoke nature of the application;
| hence the investment in time and money to perform this level of
| rigour is not justified.
|
| The only time I've seen UI work carried out with this level of
| care was for an air traffic control system, where of course the
| consequences of a poor design can have significant and fatal
| consequences.
| [deleted]
| bsenftner wrote:
| Don't forget flight simulators, the flip side of the same
| crucial situation, have equally elaborate design UI/UX
| simulations. And I believe power plants, especially nuclear
| power, have this type of elaborate design simulation, as well
| as everything in the (outer) space industry.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a riot.
|
| I can't see using "Do It," anyway. It's an awkward phrase.
|
| Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is
| difficult. I'm actually reviewing the ones in the app that I'm
| writing, now. Some of them are quite weird.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Picking good names for confirmation/cancellation buttons is
| difficult. I'm actually reviewing the ones in the app that I'm
| writing, now. Some of them are quite weird.
|
| Especially egregious when you are confirming a cancellation. I
| hate when I try to perform an action that is semantically a
| cancellation, and I am warned of its potentially deleterious
| effects and then asked "OK" / "Cancel". (Where, of course, "OK"
| means "OK, cancel", and "Cancel" means the opposite.)
|
| EDIT: mlok (or, ironically for this thread, do I mean mIok?)
| made the same point an hour ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30587293 .
| smoyer wrote:
| Adding a word to the beginning does however make a good
| marketing slogan. And as the parent of a child who's highly-
| skilled as a procrastinator (don't put that in the skills
| section of your resume), adding a fourth word to the end of the
| marketing slogan is a common way to give someone a verbal push.
| [deleted]
| pengwing wrote:
| This was a very interesting connection between headline and
| content. Based on the headline I assumed an article about
| entrepreneurship and tech. Even the first paragraph seemed to
| support my hypothesis. Snobby academics not getting what
| technical progress combined with market demand looks like.
|
| Ultimately that was not the topic of the article. Yet, reading
| between the lines it still confirmed the my underlying bias that
| lead me to interpret the headline in the way I did.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| A (poor quality) image of the "Do It" screen:
| https://usability.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/dolt.jpg
| skrebbel wrote:
| I'm not convinced that this is the one, the article says it was
| in a sans serif font.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Given the random spaces in "R ename" and "R emove", I'm not
| surprised that they ignored the space in "Do It"
| raverbashing wrote:
| It would have been better to have it as "Do it"
|
| But yeah, OK is better
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Tesler's work was already on the HCI (human-computer interaction)
| syllabus in 1988. So only 6 years after that work at Apple it was
| already considered exemplary research and taught to undergrads. I
| remember we did stuff on Ivan Sutherland, David Canfield, Douglas
| Engelbart, Alan Kay and so may others, but that course actually
| had a profound impact on me because the lecturer had a way of
| getting into the psychology and philosophy - if you think about
| it most UI advances are _technologically_ unremarkable.
|
| I think what the OP article is talking about we called
| "Structured Observation" and there was something like "mind
| state" analysis. I visited the HCI lab at Imperial where they had
| the one way mirror and talk-back microphones, like a recording
| studio but set up for recording computer user behaviours.
|
| What this accords with in psychological language is mentalisation
| and intersubjectivity. In other words "getting inside th user's
| head and feeling and thinking what they are feeling and
| thinking". Early HCI people spent a lot of time in that zone.
|
| An important _negative_ shift is that we now use telemetry and
| logging, because today (as another comment says "who can be
| bothered?") we are interested in what is happening from the
| _application's_ viewpoint, not the user's. That is a subtle but
| massive change of priority.
|
| Look at those videos of early HCI today and you will be amazed at
| the intensity of engagement and excitement. Using a computer was
| like driving a car.
|
| Structured observation on users today would show very long
| periods of zombie like behaviour, one finger twitching,
| dribbling, eyes half closed and body almost motionless, neck bent
| over a phone screen. Then occasional outbursts of high expressed
| emotion, almost existential angst, throwing the device on the
| floor and crying, calling the developers "Nazis" and "Monsters".
| Then back to long period of passive dribbling and swiping.
|
| Some quote by Englebart I remember was that we must amplify
| humankind's intellect to cope with the raid changes and
| challenges of the world. But in shifting our concern from the
| users to the manufacturers, sellers and profiteers of technology
| we have betrayed that mission.
|
| In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to
| "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all industry,
| the move from human-computer interaction to user experience (UX)
| has effected an equally imperceptible but devastating outcome
| upon technology. We live in a time where the computer user is the
| _target_ (to have "experiences" imposed upon) not an active
| component of a system with greater ends.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > In a similar way that changing the "personnel department" to
| "human resources" shifted the focus of practically all
| industry, ....
|
| I read recently, though where I can't remember, that this was
| not just a gradual change but a specific one championed by,
| among others, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernestine_Gilbreth_Carey), co-
| author of _Cheaper by the dozen_
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheaper_by_the_Dozen). The
| Wikipedia page
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#Origins_of_the...
| does not mention her, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources#History suggests
| that her work at Macy's was around the right time.
| benreesman wrote:
| To sort of butcher a great line from Layer Cake: "Only very
| stupid backend people think that the front end is simple."
|
| Being a more backend-type person myself I have to remind myself
| that less equations on the human factors side means that side of
| things is _harder_ , not easier than the "math-y" stuff.
| smoyer wrote:
| If you've designed a good front-end from an HCI perspective,
| you'll still end up with sooooo many edge cases. Human behavior
| is much more variable than the calls sent to an API or SQL sent
| to a database. (It also helps that there are syntax
| requirements that limit what's considered valid.)
| na85 wrote:
| Bad keming strikes again.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| But the issue wasn't kerning. There was a space between Do and
| It, kerning is how two letters look next to each other.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Keming is also how two letters not adjoined to each other
| look like they are.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I've never heard it used that way but it makes sense.
| Thanks!
| boondaburrah wrote:
| I also think that at the time computer users may have been
| used to dismissing extra space around letters, since the
| computers they commonly interacted with would use monospaced
| fonts for technical reasons.
| KronisLV wrote:
| That's a funny story, but i can't help but to feel that there's
| another problem to be solved:
|
| > It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and
| the 'I' in 'Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using,
| a capital 'I' looked very much like a lower case 'l'
|
| Why couldn't most fonts be designed in a way as to not mix up o
| and O and 0, l and I and L as well as other symbols like that? Of
| course, there are often historical constraints to deal with but
| it surprises me that this isn't some rule of font design that
| would need to be followed in 99% of the cases.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| The limited resolution of the time was a big constraint on the
| design space. The first Mac had a resolution of 512 x 342, and
| that was considered generous.
| Someone wrote:
| The original font had the additional constraint that it had
| to be legible after "graying out" characters by AND-ing their
| pixels with a 50% gray grid (the screen was black and white,
| so that's how you got gray)
|
| That's why characters in Chicago 12 (http://kare.com/apple-
| icons/) have 'fat' stems
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface_anatomy)
|
| I don't think there was much room for making lowercase l
| different from both uppercase L and uppercase I while keeping
| the font look nice.
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, this must have been about the LISA System font.
| (Easily identified by the characteristic "v" and "w"
| glyphs. "I" and "l" actually look the same and both have a
| bit of a kerning problem, probably because of the
| requirement to match said 50% gray grid in a certain way.)
|
| Compare: https://www.applefritter.com/content/lisa-font-
| charts
|
| (Mind that the LISA didn't have square pixels and that the
| font would have appeared more condensed on the screen than
| in the printed sample due to pixel aspect ratio.)
|
| Edit: For an on-screen sample with word spacing in button
| text as eventually released compare: http://toastytech.com/
| guis/lisaos1Clock_Close_Dialog_Large.j...
| neilv wrote:
| It could've been worse:
| http://trans.onionmixer.net/mediawiki/index.php?title=File:S...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| That's interesting, it shows the context menu, and it looks
| like the camel case function names from the code were directly
| copied over, as it shows 'printIt' and 'doIt' among the
| options.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| what did the user interfaces at Xerox Parc say? Do it, OK, or
| something else?
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Might have been a Smalltalk influenced thing. "Do it" is a menu
| option in the smalltalk scratch pad like thing called a
| workspace, you can type in a bit of code, select it with the
| mouse and "do it" which means run the code, or "inspect it"
| which will open a display of what was returned from your code
| when it ran.
| Sydneyco wrote:
| This shows why it's so important to be with the person or at
| least be able to talk to the user directly when conducting user
| research.
|
| I've seen too many founders write by email/instant messaging, or
| worst sending forms when asking questions about their product.
|
| Talking to a person directly will get you so much further !
| smoyer wrote:
| One of my HCI favorite books is "TOG on Interface" by Bruce
| Tognazzini because it's filled with stories about why certain GUI
| elements work and the failures that were tried as they finally
| adopted working GUI concepts. TOG was instrumental in making the
| Mac OS UI consistent - https://amzn.to/3sKKKvA.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| Which do you prefer? (Which is better design)
|
| [ OK ] [Cancel]
|
| or
|
| [Cancel] [ OK ]
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I prefer [nl] [ OK ]
|
| I think more visual weight should be given to the action you
| expect/wish the user to take.
|
| Also I always put the happy path on the right, but I can't
| articulate a reason for this.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| There seems to be a lively debate across the internet on this
| one. I've always preferred the "action" button to be on the
| right like this example:
|
| https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*RSGWrWvqA0ubbg7BW8rz8w.pn...
|
| I've noticed a lot of webpages recently (eg government sign
| ups, "confirm payment" screens) are putting the action button
| on the left which mildly irritates me, maybe they're
| considering that people read left-to-right and aren't total
| degenerate computer users like I am.
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