At Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Alan Kay changed computing from CLI's → GUI's 🤯

Alan Kay (1940-Present) was a UI innovator at Xerox PARC, and he was idolized by Steve Jobs

Notes

• Core design theory: Doing with Images makes Symbols
• Kay: "Let me argue that the actual dawn of user interface design first happened when computer designers finally noticed, not just that end users had functioning minds, but that a better understanding of how those minds worked would completely shift the paradigm of interaction."
• Modeless computing is very important to great user experience
  • Figured that users could "activate" a window by clicking on it, bringing it to the "top"
  • The active window constituted a mode, but you could move to other windows without any special termination - this is modeless
  • This guided the process of first selecting an object, and then deciding what you want to do with it. Object comes first; desire is second.
• Humans have romantic attachments with their tools (lumberjack's axes; hunters and their guns; painters with their paint brushes)
  • Lean into this. "The best way to predict the future is to invent it!"
• Seminal influences:
  • McLuhan's Understanding Media, 1964 (Link here)
    • In any communications medium, message receipt is really message recovery. Anyone who wishes to receive a message embedded in a medium must first have internalized the medium so it can be subtracted out to leave the message behind.
    • You have to become the medium if you use it.
    • The printing press was the dominant force that transformed the hermeneutic Middle Ages into our scientific society because of 2 reasons.
      1. Books were more available.
      2. Books changed the thought patterns of those who learned to read (BYO visualization)
    • The computer is a medium.
  • Jean Piaget → Jerome Bruner's Towards a Theory of Instruction, 1966 (link here)
    • Jean Piaget discovered that children go through several distinctive intellectual stages as they develop from birth to maturity. Learning should recognized and play into the brain development sequence.
    • Interface design must be intertwined with learning
      • Doing with Images makes Symbols.
      • Enactive mentality
        • "Doing" (e.g. with a mouse)
        • Description: Know where you are, manipulate
      • Iconic mentality
        • "with Images" (e.g. with icons; windows)
        • Description: Recognize, compare, configure, concrete
      • Symbolic mentality
        • "makes Symbols" (e.g. smalltalk)
        • Description: Tie together long chains of reasoning, abstract
  • Tim Gallwey, on the "inner game" (of tennis), 1974 (link here to most recent edition)
    • Positive benefits occur when interference is removed from irrelevant mentalities, and attention was facilitated on the environment

User Interface: A Personal View, Alan Kay (1989)

From Alan Kay:

"I think I would pick the intent of the GUI ... as the most misunderstood Parc inventions."

Basically, the idea was that a UI is not just about “control panels for nuclear reactors”, but is “an environment for learning what can be done and how to do it”. This means it has to not just be explorable, but also experimented with, and this means that you have to provide really good UNDO facilities. It also means that the UI needs to manifest “things to learn and how to learn them”.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c948449b-56f1-4169-8537-b817145500c8/Kay-UserInterfaceaPersonalView.pdf