I just promised myself that I would stop clogging up thislist with my
thoughts, but i can't resist this one:
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Adam Parker
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Don,
>
> Do you feel that the Alto was effective for users ab initio, or did PARC
> require ongoing user testing and refinement in their first few years of use
> to develop their effectiveness?
>
> Cheers
> Adam
>
Good question. The Alto was developed by the same people who used it.
AS a result, it was constantly being tuned to make it effective.
Moreover, at PARC, the secretarial staff (administrative assistants,
AAs, they were called) all were given Altos and their feedback was
respected and listened to. There was no formal usability testing --
that field didn't exist yet -- but what was done was superior -- they
people who built it had to make it work both for themselves and for
their AAs. (Stu Card, Tom Moran, Allen Newell and I once did some
tests of the text editor, but not to make it better -- to improve our
analytical analyses of text editing.)
HISTORY and CONTEXT:
For those of you who don't know, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or
Xerox PARC (today, just PARC) developed the Alto for themselves. It
was the machine on which PARC developed the very first graphical user
interface. Its text editor was called Bravo. The Alto was a research
machine and was commercialized as the Xerox Star. That flopped (very
expensive, limited software, and neither salespeople nor customers
knew what to do with it.).
A bunch of folks from Apple visited, led by Jef Raskin, with the young
Steve Jobs tagging along. They realized this was the future, and with
Xerox's permission (and a healthy payment of Apple stock), decided to
make their own version. The first Apple version was the Lisa, which
flopped. The second was the Macintosh. The rest is history. The person
who developed Bravo, Charles Simonyi, left Xerox and went to work for
Microsoft, He became a billionaire (multiple billions) and Bravo
became Microsoft Word. (I was a consultant to PARC and an early user
of the Alto and Bravo. But i was consulting on natural language
Understanding and AI, not on design. This was years before i
discovered design and usability. The field of Human-Computer
Interaction did not yet exist.)
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