Norm Cox | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 3, 1951 Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Louisiana State University (did not graduate) |
| Known for | Hamburger Icon, Xerox Star |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science, human-computer interaction, user interface design |
Norman Lloyd "Norm" Cox (born December 3, 1951) is an American interaction designer best known for inventing the hamburger icon.
Norm Cox is most known for his design of the Hamburger button, a stack of three horizontal black lines. [1] These lines resemble a list of items, which serve as a visual reminder of menu lists. [1] The hamburger menu was designed to be simple, functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. [1] Norm originally designed it as a "container" for contextual menu choices on the Xerox Star, similar to the contextual menu that's displayed today when we right mouse click on objects. [1] The symbol is still in extensive use today as an indicator of a hidden menus on websites and smartphone apps. Additionally, Cox designed the visual style of the Xerox Star user interface elements and icons, including the document icon with the dog-eared corner and folder that are still in use today. [2]
Cox was born in 1951 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States. [3] In his free time, Cox enjoys fly fishing, playing bluegrass music, creating art and woodworking. [4]
Cox pursued his undergraduate study at Louisiana State University, where he majored in Architecture. [4] During his time there, Cox enrolled in a wide variety of classes, with topics. [4] While Cox originally pursued an architecture degree, he did not graduate from college; after his junior year at Louisiana State, Cox put his education on hold and joined Xerox's Office Products Division in Dallas, TX in 1972. [4] He is also a college professor.
Cox started his career working as a draftsman and mechanical designer at the Dallas’ Xerox Office Products Division between designing parts and mechanisms for Xerox's line of electronic typewriters. [2] In 1975 Norm met Robin Kinkead, manager of Xerox's Industrial Design and Human Factors department, whose group needed a graphic designer to develop printwheel and display fonts for the typewriters. [2] After joining Kinkead's team, he was introduced to the Xerox Alto, a prototype computer based on a graphical user interface and desktop metaphor. [2] He helped test their software for user-friendliness and ease of use, and often, used native software called Markup to create digital caricatures. [2] Soon after, Xerox PARC needed someone to help design pictures on their screen (icons) that represented objects and machine functions. Norm sent in some samples of his digital work, which included “incoming mail”, and was invited to work at PARC as the visual designer. [2] In 1978 Norm arrived at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California to join the Xerox Star development team. [2] He worked alongside Wallace Judd, Bill Bowman, and Dave Smith over the next few years to design and user test the Xerox Star graphical interface and icons. [2] In 1982, Norm co-founded his design consultancy business Cox & Hall, which focuses on experience, usability, and design. [4] He served as a consultant for international clients and projects spanning diverse industries and products. [4] From 1988 to 1997, Cox was retained as IBM's corporate user experience design consultant to the IBM Design Program in Armonk, NY(]. [3] From 2007 through 2015, he was retained as consultant and Director of User Experience to Samsung Telecommunications America in Richardson, TX. [3] In 1988 he also served as an expert witness for the defense in the famous Apple v. Microsoft copyright infringement litigation. [5]
Norm Cox is named as inventor on 29 invention and design patents relating to UI design for his clients through his personal consulting firm, Cox & Hall. [6] He has also received numerous design awards, including the Xerox Opie award, IBM's Thomas J. Watson Design Excellence Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Design Thinking from the Dallas chapter of the Usability Professionals Association, and numerous industry awards for traditional graphic design. [3]
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard.
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.
PARC is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. It was founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, as a division of Xerox, tasked with creating computer technology-related products and hardware systems.
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, released on January 19, 1983. 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, the Xerox Alto was manufactured only for Xerox and select partners through Xerox PARC from the early to mid-1970s.
The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse, Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of the first computers to use a WYSIWYG text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems.
The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers, and email.
In computing, the desktop metaphor is an interface metaphor which is a set of unifying concepts used by graphical user interfaces to help users interact more easily with the computer. The desktop metaphor treats the computer monitor as if it is the top of the user's desk, upon which objects such as documents and folders of documents can be placed. A document can be opened into a window, which represents a paper copy of the document placed on the desktop. Small applications called desk accessories are also available, such as a desk calculator or notepad, etc.
The office of the future is a collection of ideas for redesigning the office. As technology and society have evolved, the definition of the office of the future has changed. Current concepts, dating from the 1940s, are now known as the "paperless office".
In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer", denoting a style of interaction using these elements of the user interface. Other expansions are sometimes used, such as substituting "mouse" and "mice" for menus, or "pull-down menu" and "pointing" for pointer.
Lawrence Gordon Tesler was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!.
Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr. is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementer of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap computer graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. He designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He made major contributions to the Squeak version of Smalltalk, including the original concept of a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator.
Ralph Kimball is an author on the subject of data warehousing and business intelligence. He is one of the original architects of data warehousing and is known for long-term convictions that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His bottom-up methodology, also known as dimensional modeling or the Kimball methodology, is one of the two main data warehousing methodologies alongside Bill Inmon.
In user interface design, an interface metaphor is a set of user interface visuals, actions and procedures that exploit specific knowledge that users already have of other domains. The purpose of the interface metaphor is to give the user instantaneous knowledge about how to interact with the user interface. They are designed to be similar to physical entities but also have their own properties. They can be based on an activity, an object (skeuomorph), or a combination of both and work with users' familiar knowledge to help them understand 'the unfamiliar', and placed in the terms so the user may better understand.
Metaphor Computer Systems (1982–1994) was an American computer company that created an advanced workstation, database gateway, unique graphical office interface, and software applications that "seamlessly integrate" data from both internal and external sources. The Metaphor machine was one of the first commercial workstations to offer a complete hardware/software package and a GUI, including "a wireless mouse and a wireless five-function key pad". Although the company achieved some commercial success, it never achieved the fame of either the Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows.
David Canfield Smith is an American computer scientist best known for inventing computer icons and the programming technique known as programming by demonstration. His primary emphasis has been in the area of human–computer interaction (CHI) design. His goal was to make computers easier for ordinary people to use. He is one of the pioneers of the modern graphical user interfaces (GUI) for computers, having invented such techniques as the desktop metaphor, dialog boxes, and universal commands.
William Maxwell Newman was a British computer scientist. With others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s Newman demonstrated the advantages of the raster display technology first deployed in the Xerox Alto personal workstation, developing interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. With Bob Sproull he co-authored the first major textbook on interactive computer graphics.
The hamburger button, so named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu or navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen. The icon which is associated with this widget, consisting of three horizontal bars, is also known as the collapsed menu icon.
A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features.
Magic Desk was a planned series of productivity software by Commodore Business Machines for the Commodore 64. Only the first entry, Type and File, was ever released. It was introduced at the summer edition of the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in June, slated for an August 31 release. Commodore developed the Magic Desk suite both in response to a perceived lack of productivity software for the Commodore 64 and to the graphical user interface of the Apple Lisa.