Comment by drivers99
1 day ago
I'm curious if the manual was made available to you. The reason I ask is that in the linked article he said the manual was part of the user interface. Also, from what I recall, his opinion on intuitive was that it was more important that it worked well after learning how to use it, vs somehow knowing it without being taught. (I'll double check my copy of The Humane Interface when I get back to it.)
edit: back, here's a quote:
> [...] I asked people unfamiliar with the mouse to use a Macintosh. My protocol was to run a [game that only used clicking, with the keyboard removed]. I would point to the mouse and say, "This is the mouse that you use to operate the game. Go ahead, give it a try." If asked any questions, I'd say something nonspecific, such as "Try it." The reaction of an intelligent Finnish educator who had never seen a Macintosh but was otherwise computer literate was typical: she picked up the mouse.
> Nowadays, the might seem absurd, but [mentions the scene in Star Trek where Scotty does the same thing]. In the case of my Finnish subject, her next move was to turn the mouse over and to try rolling the ball. Nothing happened. She shook the mouse, and then she held the mouse in one hand and clicked the button with the other. No effect. Eventually, she succeeded in operating the game by holding the mouse in her right hand, rolling the ball on the bottom with her fingers, and clicking the button with her left hand.
> These experiments make the point that an interface's ease of use and speed of learning are not connected with the imagined properties of intuitiveness and naturalness. The mouse is very easy to learn: All I had to do, with any of the test subjects, was to put the mouse on the desk, move it, and click on something. In five to ten seconds, they learned how to use the mouse. That's fast and easy, but it is neither intuitive nor natural. No artifact is.
> The belief that interfaces can be intuitive and natural is often detrimental to improved interface design. As a consultant, I am frequently asked to design a "better" interface to a product. Usually, an interface can be designed such that, in terms of learning time, eventual speed of operation (productivity), decreased error rates, and easy of implementation, it is superior to both the client's existing products and completing products. Nonetheless, even when my proposals are seen as significant improvements, they are often rejected on the grounds that they are not intuitive. [He goes on to talk about how if it going to be significantly better than it will end up being different than what people currently know, but the clients still want it to be similar to Windows...]
The Humane Interface section 6-1
Having refreshed myself on what he said, and re-reading what you wrote, I don't think he would say that you should be able to walk up to his computer without having someone show you how to use it, or looking at a manual. And as you said: "Then someone demonstrated a Macintosh to me" just like when he said he'd show people how to use the mouse.
Yes, the Canon Cat had a built-in manual, and I checked the manual quite thoroughly. I learned to use the Cat after a fashion, but even when I understood the Cat a little bit, it still didn't make any sense to me. It especially didn't make sense that there were no separate files and no clear cut way to save your work. By design, the Cat had a single, infinite scrolling text workspace. Documents were separated by a special return code. The user never needed to save a file, because all actions were automatically saved. I now know that the Raskin's theory was that users shouldn't be bothered with thinking about saving or file structure, but at the time it was hugely confusing to me. Most of what the Cat did was invisible to the user. Raskin thought that saved users mental overhead, but all it did was give the user no feedback on what the computer was doing.
The Macintosh, by contrast, was quite transparent to the naive user. It was very easy to understand that if you saved a file, the file was represented by a little picture that you could move to a folder icon or a disk icon. No naive user of the 1980s had any experience with an infinitely long scroll, but the desktop metaphor of file and folder icons was easily understood.
The no-separate-document interface of the Cat was, I think, a huge mistake. That might have been the way Raskin thought people should use computers, but it was a greater conceptual leap than users could easily understand. Non-computer people who were used to typewriters were used to working on separate documents; they thought in terms of writing letters, memos, reports, and manuscripts, and they expected all these documents to stay separate objects.
In the section of The Humane Interface you quote, I think Raskin exaggerates the non-intuitiveness of the mouse. People in the 1980s were familiar with the concept of a pointing device through playing Pong and Centipede. Even before I'd seen a Macintosh in real life, I'd seen the Mac ads and knew what the mouse was supposed to do. As Raskin says, no one needs more than 10 seconds to understand a mouse. It takes a lot more than 10 seconds to understand the Canon Cat.