He has written two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, published by Addison-Wesley, and he publishes the webzineAsktog, with the tagline "Interaction Design Solutions for the Real World".
Background
Tog (as he is known in computer circles) built his first electro-mechanical computer in 1957, landing a job in 1959 working with the world's first check-reading computer, NCR's ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting), at Bank of America, in San Francisco.
Tog was an early employee of Apple Computer starting in 1978. In June 1978, Steve Jobs, having seen one of Tog's early programs, The Great American Probability Machine, had Jef Raskin hire him as Apple's first applications software engineer. He's listed on the back of his book Tog on Interface (Addison Wesley, 1991) as "Apple Employee #66" (the same employee number he held later at WebMD).
In his early days at Apple, simultaneous with his developing Apple's first human interface, for the Apple II computer, he published Super Hi-Res Chess, a novelty program for the Apple II that, despite its name, did not play chess or have any hi-res (high-resolution) graphics; instead, it seemed to crash to the Applesoft BASIC prompt with an error message, but was actually a parody of Apple's BASIC command line interface that seemingly took over control of one's computer, refusing to give it back until the magic word was discovered.[1]
His work in user-interface testing and design, including publishing the first edition, in September, 1978, and seven subsequent editions of The Apple Human Interface Guidelines, played an important role in the direction of Apple's product line from the early days of Apple into the 1990s. (Steve Smith and Chris Espinosa also played a key role, incorporating the initial material on the Lisa and Macintosh computers in the fourth and fifth editions in the early 1980s.) [2]
He and his partner, John David Eisenberg, wrote Apple Presents...Apple, the disk that taught new Apple II owners how to use the computer. This disk became a self-fulfilling prophecy: At the time of its authoring, there was no standard Apple II interface. Because new owners were all being taught Tog and David's interface, developers soon began writing to it, aided by Tog's Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and reinforced by AppleWorks, a suite of productivity applications for the Apple II into which Tog had also incorporated the same interface.[2]
Others often report him as one of the fathers of the Macintosh interface, a claim he has always been careful to refute. Although he did consult with Jef Raskin in the early days of the Macintosh, during the later, critical development period of the Mac, he was assigned to scale down the Lisa interface, not for the Mac, but for the Apple II. Although he and James Batson were able to develop a viable interface for the Apple II that matched the mousing speed of the much faster Macintosh, the Apple executive staff elected not to ship a mouse with the Apple II for fear of cannibalizing Macintosh sales.
It was only after Steve Jobs' early departure from Apple, in 1985, that Tog came to oversee the interface for both machines. During this period, Tog was responsible for the design of the Macintosh's hierarchical menus and invented time-out dialog boxes, which, after a visible countdown, carry out the default activity without the user explicitly clicking. He also invented the "package" illusion later used by Apple for Macintosh applications:[citation needed] Applications, along with all their supporting files, reside inside a "package" that, in turn, appears to be the application itself, appearing as an application icon, not as a folder. This illusion makes possible the simple drag-and-drop installation and deletion of Mac applications. Tog left Apple in 1992.
While working at Sun Microsystems, in 1992 and 1993, he produced the Starfire video prototype, in order to give an idea of a usability centered vision of the Office of the future. The video predicted the rise of a new technology that would become known as the World Wide Web.[citation needed] Popular Science Magazine reported, in March 2009, that Microsoft had just produced a new video showing life in the year 2019: "The 2019 Microsoft details with this video is almost identical to the 2004 predicted in this video produced by Sun Microsystems in 1992."[3]
While at Sun Microsystems, Tog also filed for 58 US patents, with 57 issued in the areas of aviation safety, GPS, and human-computer interaction. Among them is US Patent 6278660, the time-zone-tracking wristwatch with built-in GPS and simple time-zone maps that sets itself using the GPS satellite's atomic clock and re-sets itself automatically whenever crossing into a new time zone.[4]
William "Bill" D. Atkinson is an American computer engineer, computer programmer and photographer. Atkinson worked at Apple Computer from 1978 to 1990. Some of Atkinson's noteworthy contributions to the field of computing include Macintosh QuickDraw and Lisa LisaGraf (Atkinson independently discovered the midpoint circle algorithm for fast drawing of circles by using the sum of consecutive odd numbers), Marching ants, the double-click, Menu bar, the selection lasso, MacPaint (FatBits), HyperCard, Atkinson dithering, and the app PhotoCard.
The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.
Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on users. This can be seen as an irreplaceable usability practice, since it gives direct input on how real users use the system. It is more concerned with the design intuitiveness of the product and tested with users who have no prior exposure to it. Such testing is paramount to the success of an end product as a fully functioning application that creates confusion amongst its users will not last for long. This is in contrast with usability inspection methods where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.
In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, while the machine simultaneously feeds back information that aids the operators' decision-making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to, or involve such disciplines as, ergonomics and psychology.
Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, produced from January 19, 1983 to August 1, 1986, and succeeded by Macintosh. It is generally considered the first mass-market personal computer operable through a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1983, a machine like the Lisa was still so expensive that it was primarily marketed to individual and small and medium-sized businesses as a groundbreaking new alternative to much bigger and more expensive mainframes or minicomputers such as from IBM, that either require additional, expensive consultancy from the supplier, hiring specially trained personnel, or at least, a much steeper learning curve to maintain and operate. Earlier GUI-controlled personal computers were not mass-marketed; for example, Xerox PARC manufactured its Alto workstation only for Xerox and select partners from the early to mid-1970s.
Jef Raskin was an American human–computer interface expert who conceived and began leading the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s.
In user interface design, a modal window is a graphical control element subordinate to an application's main window.
The Canon Cat is a task-dedicated microcomputer released by Canon Inc. in 1987 for $1,495. Its appearance resembles dedicated word processors of the late 1970s to early 1980s, but it is far more powerful, and has many unique ideas for data manipulation.
Andrew Jay Hertzfeld is an American software engineer who was a member of Apple Computer's original Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software.
An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as playing music, photography, or editing text.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:
Human interface guidelines (HIG) are software development documents which offer application developers a set of recommendations. Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. Most guides limit themselves to defining a common look and feel for applications in a particular desktop environment. The guides enumerate specific policies. Policies are genes sometimes based on studies of human–computer interaction, but most are based on conventions chosen by the platform developers preferences.
The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (ISBN 0-201-37937-6) is a book about user interface design written by Jef Raskin and published in 2000. It covers ergonomics, quantification, evaluation, and navigation.
Guy L. "Bud" Tribble is a software technologist known for his work on the original Apple Macintosh.
Archy is a software system that had a user interface that introduced a different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces. Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser.
Jerrold Clifford Manock is an American industrial designer. He worked for Apple Computer from 1977 to 1984, contributing to housing designs for the Apple II, Apple III, and early compact Macintosh computers. Manock is widely regarded as the "father" of the Apple Industrial Design Group. Since 1976, he is the president and principal designer of Manock Comprehensive Design, Inc., with offices in Palo Alto, California, and Burlington, Vermont.
In user interface design, a mode is a distinct setting within a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived results different from those that it would in other settings. Modal interface components include the Caps lock and Insert keys on the standard computer keyboard, both of which typically put the user's typing into a different mode after being pressed, then return it to the regular mode after being re-pressed.
A menu bar is a graphical control element which contains drop-down menus.
Starfire was a Sun Microsystems promotional video filmed in 1994, demonstrating Bruce Tognazzini's ideas for a 21st-century computer user interface. Inspired in part by Apple Computer's Knowledge Navigator film from 1987, Tognazzini and his team at SunSoft sought to create a more realistic look at how computer technology and interfaces would improve. The project drew together the talents of more than 100 engineers, designers, futurists, and filmmakers in an effort to both predict and guide the future of computing.
A user error is an error made by the human user of a complex system, usually a computer system, in interacting with it. Although the term is sometimes used by human–computer interaction practitioners, the more formal term human error is used in the context of human reliability.
References
↑ "Interview: Bruce Tognazzini," Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson, Interactions vol 7, number 2 (2000) pp41-46, ACM
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