SWIPING

FROM TYPING TO

Karen McGrane @Digitrix6

INTERACTION DESIGN HAS COME A LONG WAY!

INTRODUCTION•Here to talk about interaction design•Which is how we invented the way we interact with computers

•how the language we use to communicate with them has evolved over time

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HOW WE TALK TO COMPUTERS HOW MACHINES TALK BACK

HOW WE TALK TO COMPUTERS•Don’t think of this as the history of technology, even if I show you pictures of old computers

•Think of it as how we learned to speak a foreign language, the language of machines

•How over time we taught the machines to speak our language

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ENIAC

ENIAC•The first computers weren’t very easy to talk to.

•They were the size of a 2-story building and you had to run around and physically unplug cables to communicate.

•But these computers could do something that people could not: they could calcuate the trajectory of a missile in 1 second.

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GIANT CALCULATOR

GIANT CALCULATOR•Something that would take a person 20 hours to do using a slide rule

•But there’s a big gap telling the computer something and getting a response

•Imagine if you wanted to use a pocket calculator, but instead of punching in numbers and getting an answer

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TAPE AND PUNCH CARDS

TAPE AND PUNCH CARDS•You had to type your request into a teletype

•It would be stored on tape or cards to be sent later to the actual computer

•The computer would respond hours or even days later.

•Not interactive!

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GIANT BRAINS•Because there was such a gap between taking action and getting a result

•People began to imagine what if computers were less like giant calculators and more like giant brains

•Tighter interactions would help us solve problems

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“AS WE MAY THINK”

VANNEVAR BUSH AND MEMEX

AS WE MAY THINK•One major problem was that there was more knowledge published than people could access in physical books

•In The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, Vannevar Bush imagined the memex or “memory extender”

•A way to navigate through hypertext links between books on microfilm

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WHIRLWIND

WHIRLWIND•The first computer that had real-time interaction was developed at MIT in 1949

•You did something and got immediate feedback on a video display

•Whirlwind led to two parallel paths in how we talk to computers

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WHIRLWIND

COMMAND LINE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

COMMAND LINE•The first path was the typing model or the command line interface

•Path of least resistance because it built on the way that computers already worked

•Goal was to reduce costs•Get machines into the hands of business professionals as quickly as possible

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APPLICATION INTERFACES

APPLICATION INTERFACES•Still, it was 30 years between the launch of Whirlwind in 1949

•And the launch of the spreadsheet program Visicalc, the first “killer app” for the personal computer, in 1979

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PINK COLLAR LABOR

PINK COLLAR LABOR•In the meantime, there were still lots of expert users of computers

•Businesses like financial services and engineering employed legions of trained data entry operators

•Whose job was to talk to computers by memorizing dozens of arcane commands

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WHIRLWIND

COMMAND LINE GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE

GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE•Second path was the graphical user interface

•Based on the idea of directly manipulating objects on a display using a pointing device

•Much more costly and time-consuming to develop but eventually made it possible for more people to talk to computers

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IVAN SUTHERLAND + SKETCHPAD

SKETCHPAD•First graphical user interface enabled drawing shapes on a display with a lightpen

•He said interaction is slowed down by having to convert all our ideas to typed statements

•“We have been writing letters to rather than conversing with our computers”

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X/Y POSITION INDICATOR

“adapt people's basic information-handling capabilities to the needs, problems, and progress of society”

THE MOUSE•The graphical interface gives you a new way to talk to the computer using a pointer

•Doug Engelbart and his team tested a number of devices, like joysticks, light pens, and even a weird knee controlled device

•Before settling on the mouse that everyone is familiar with today

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THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS

THE MOTHER OF ALL DEMOS•The mouse was just part of a larger online system to augment human intellect

•The demo in 1968 featured windows, email, hypertext, and videoconferencing

•But still very hard to use•When the funding dried up many researchers left for Xerox PARC

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XEROX PARC

XEROX PARC•Pioneered many innovations in the GUI•Alto, the first personal computer with a desktop metaphor

•Star, the first commercially available GUI, which was a failure since it cost $15,000

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APPLE MACINTOSH

APPLE MACINTOSH•Steve Jobs negotiated a visit to Xerox PARC in exchange for Apple stock options

•Apple team added innovations of their own like double-clicking, drag-n-drop, pulldown menus, trash can

•Macintosh was a success because it cost only $2500

•That’s Bill Gates in the blue shirt

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THE WORLD WIDE WEB

THE WORLD WIDE WEB•Most people don’t want to talk to a computer. They want to talk to each other.

•HTML made it easy to create documents with text/graphics

•URL made it easy for other people to find them

•By 1993, Lycos indexed 800,000 webpages

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TODAY•Today we have a vast array of devices•In just 65 years we’ve gone from •Having to force ourselves to communicate the way machines do

•To shaping tools so they fit into our lives•We’ve really come a long way!

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Karen McGrane karen@bondartscience.com 917-887-8149 @digitrix6

THANKS!

www.bondartscience.com info@bondartscience.com 212-226-6344 @bondartscience

THANKS•Thanks a lot, especially Brady, I appreciate the chance to speak

•I’m Karen McGrane, I’m on the internet•My company, Bond Art + Science, does interaction design

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