No more icons in every menu by default

you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"

these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...

At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:

Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!

Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:

Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that, because it was a kind of odd thing at the time...

[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]

Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?

[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]

Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.

And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.

It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.

But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.

The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.

Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.

My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.

Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.

How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.

It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.

But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?

Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.

i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.

This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.

Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.

It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.

Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.

HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.

[Class laughs]

So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.

----

That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Don-Hopk...

At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:

PIXIE SIMELEC (1972) on PDP-7 and 340 Display emulator:

https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/

Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI

PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c

As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class:

Don> One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ...[dramatic pregnant pause]... HyperCard?

Then I told my own story of how in 1987 HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.

More on the "Mile High Menu Bar":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125835

Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.

Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!

https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/

Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...

>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)

>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.

>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.

>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.

>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.

Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672

[...]

Windows 8 Metro, on the other hand, was almost universally hated and with very good reason. And Apple has been doing the same exact mistake for awhile, slowly porting designs meant for a phone (and far worse designs than Metro at that, iOS 7 was terrible as was everything since) to laptops/desktops.

However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.