Everyone can see what a horse is (but not how it was designed)
I recently read Pick, Click, Flick!: The Story of Interaction Techniques, the 800-page tome on computer interaction techniques by Professor Brad A. Myers of Carnegie Mellon University. When I was a student at CMU, I took Professor Myers’ course on interaction techniques and even contributed some content that made it to the book; so I didn’t exactly go in blind.
Reading the book made me think of an entirely different text: an 18th-century Polish encyclopedia. Nowe Ateny starts its entry for “horse” with the following statement:
Horse: Everyone can see what a horse is.
Why write a book on computer interaction techniques? People use computers every day. “Everyone” "knows" what a dropdown-select-with-text-entry-and-autocomplete looks like. But luckily, Pick, Click, Flick! does not imitate the Polish encyclopedia of yore.
Professor Myers spells it out for us:
Combo Box: a combo box (also called a drop-down list or sometimes an option menu) is a widget that always displays the current value, and when the user clicks on the widget, a popup menu shows the list of options (Figure 7.2(b)-(d)). (The original Macintosh calls this kind of widget a “PopUp Menu” [Apple Computer 1992, p. 82], but this name is too ambiguous.)
When a new option is selected, the menu disappears, and the widget displays the new value. Sometimes the original widget is a text entry field, so users can either type the new value or select it from the submenu. Thus, this widget is a combination (hence “combo”) of a button or a text field and a menu. Sometimes, the submenu “drops down” from the widget but other times the submenu is centered on the widget, so “drop-down” may be somewhat misleading. However, some systems...
[followed by several screenshots of different combo-boxes, from the Xerox Star (1981) to Microsoft Word for Mac (2019)]
Brad A. Myers: Pick, Click, Flick! The Story of Interaction Techniques
Now I really know we’re talking about the same thing! That level of detail enables readers to discuss design tradeoffs with precision, and learn from the successes and failures of the past.
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It would be a great reference text on its own, but it gets better.
Here's one key difference between interaction techniques and horses; computer interaction techniques were invented rather recently, and you can go talk to their creators.
Every time you interact with your computer or phone - from copy-paste to pull-to-refresh and the swiping keyboard - that interaction was designed. It didn't appear wholesale or by accident. A real person invented it! And we are unbelievably lucky to be near the beginning of modern computing history, where documentation is abundant and many of those inventors are still telling their stories.
Larry Tesler (copy-paste) passed away in 2020, just a few years ago. Loren Brichter (pull-to-refresh) and Shumin Zhai (the swiping keyboard) are living today - maybe you expected that since the modern smartphone is so recent, but how about Dan Bricklin, creator of the spreadsheet? He’s still around too, and I saw him guest-lecture in the flesh. All of them made it to the book plus more - a total of 16 interviews with key creators, plus anecdotes from Myers' own career in human-computer interaction.
I’m not usually one to write reviews (and to be clear, I’m not being paid in any way to write this), but in a single line: this book inspired me, through the details, history, and opportunity ahead.
We live in an era where it is possible to create computer systems that do just about anything. Each decade brings new form factors and challenges, and we will certainly live to see new “horses” being designed. Isn’t that amazing?