Of Mice and Multimedia

In the broad sense. The whole community that’s included from Doug Engelbart [inventor of the mouse] forward to computer science people and human computer interaction people and designers—they’re all part of this world of trying to design the technologies.

Making it intuitive and attractive at the same time. Why are so many people so bad at this? Is it very hard to do?

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that it’s very young. These things take a long time to evolve. I really agree with [venture capitalist] David Liddle and his three phases of the adoption of technology. He talks about the first stage being the enthusiasts [who adopt a new technology] and the next being the professionals and the next being the consumer. The early 35 mm cameras, which were used by the astronauts when they went up to space first, took almost a Ph.D. to operate. In the professional phase everything started to sort itself, so the way of adjusting the aperture and focus were roughly similar across the range of all makes. They weren’t easy to use, you had to be a professional and get a lot of expertise in order to understand how to be good. It’s only when they moved into the consumer phase that everything became automated, so you had automatic focus, automatic exposure, automatic wind so that almost anybody could take a pretty good photograph—you just point and shoot.

I was fascinated by the evolution of the mouse—how intuitive it is today and, of course, how much work went into that, how many prototypes and stages of evolution there were.

I think if you look at those early tests, there were huge varieties. The things that Doug Engelbart was testing in the beginning included something you’d wear on your head and something you operated with your knee, as well as various devices that were on the desk. In that sense the diversity, before they did the testing with people on prototypes, was as wide as anything could have been. Much to their surprise, it turned out that the mouse was the best performing device.

Do you see yourself as on a mission to get computer people to use better design?