Description
Press On provides many ways of thinking clearly about the design of interactive devices and provides many ways of thinking about interaction programming. It covers the computer science fundamentals of the design of interactive devices, which are typically complex things with buttons, like mobile phones and photocopiers, but they range from the very simple—like torches and guns—to the very complex like word processors and the web browsers.
This book takes the view that we can build far better interactive devices than we do and that much of the initiative for better design can come from clear engineering creativity, knowledge, and perspectives based on sound computer science principles. Some things are possible or not possible, and competent computer scientists can work it out. Programmers can come up with solutions that would have escaped users or designers with limited technical knowledge; programmers can be more creative and more central in all areas of interaction design than anyone suspected.
Contents:
0.1 What is interaction programming? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1 The Code of Hammurabi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.2 Cargo cult computers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3 An obituary for a fax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.4 Energy consumption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1 Eliza meets Parry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.2 Personas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.3 Ralph Nader . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1 Turning the Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.2 Design blindness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.1 Weapon salve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.1 Small screen interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
5.2 The QWERTY effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
5.3 Information theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.4 Video plus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
5.5 Permissiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
5.6 Card sorting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
5.7 The principle of least effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
5.8 Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
6.1 Syringe pumps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
6.2 Timeouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
6.3 Mealy and Moore machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
6.4 Bad user interfaces earn money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
7.1 Computer demonstrations at exhibitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
8.1 Chinese postman tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
8.2 Trees versus DAGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
8.3 Computers in 21 days . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
8.4 Small world friendship graphs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
8.5 Erdös numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
8.6 LATEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268
9.1 Facilities layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
9.2 Button usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
10.1 Why personal video recorders? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
10.2 What “always” and “never” should mean . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
10.3 Handling infinity properly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342
11.1 Matrices and Markov models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382
11.2 Ways to avoid human error . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 389
11.3 Generating manuals automatically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
12.1 Problem solving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
12.2 Design guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
12.3 Defending finite state machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430
12.4 Reductionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
13.1 The ISO 9241 standard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 449
13.2 Paper prototyping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455
13.3 Design as literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
13.4 Hippocrates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
13.5 The road to wisdom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
13.6 Computers were invented too soon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
13.7 Scenarios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480