the inner workings of the system. And you also have to do a lot of testing.
You have to be good at testing. You have to know what questions to ask people
and what problems to present to them.
The following is not something from my personal experience—it’s a story
told to me by the Mac team—but they said that, when they first did the dialog
boxes for the Lisa, instead of saying “OK,” it said, “Do It.” They found that
people were reluctant to click on that, and they couldn’t figure out why. Then,
once they had a test subject there who just wouldn’t click on it, they said, “Why
didn’t you click on that little button there?” He said, “I’m not a dolt. Why would
I click on that?” People were reading it as “dolt,” not “do it,” because it was an
unusual combination of words. So they changed dialog boxes to say “OK.” That
little change greased the skids for people to click on dialog boxes.
It’s very small stuff like that, very often—that somebody sees something and
has the wrong impression. The only way to learn that is by doing a lot of testing.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons why the iPod was such a phenomenal success
where the MP3 players before were not. The iPod had the design sensibility of
an average person just trying to listen to music, whereas the previous MP3 players
were kind of technical exercises in understanding how music files are
stored, and perhaps required very delicate balancing of your fingers to hit the
buttons the right way, and so on.
Livingston: Were you inspired by the Apple II’s use of TV as a monitor?
Perlman: Well, Apple IIs did work on TV screens, and I was inspired by the
fact that it was a friendly-looking computer and that it had color. But it was not
an easy-to-use computer. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t join Apple earlier. I
didn’t see where that was going to go.
Steve Perlman 185
I was very impressed with the engineering. When I looked at the floppy disk
drive for the Apple II and I saw that it was a Shugart SA-400, but it was missing
most of the chips that every other computer had in it, and realized that Woz had
hacked the thing and was doing a lot of it with a combination of software and
hardware, I was deeply impressed with the engineering. But it was not something
that I could see an average person using. I could see, probably, more
likely someone using that than a CP/M machine. Remember, this is before even
the IBM PC.
But I was ready to leave the world of computers. I was working at Coleco in
1983. At the beginning of 1984, I was calling up Lucasfilm and other people in

Похожие записи:

• the inner workings