{"id":247,"date":"2009-02-10T15:34:05","date_gmt":"2009-02-10T20:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/10\/good-engineering-is-necessary-but-good-design-has-a-more-direct-impact-on-helping-people-do-amazing-things-with-computers\/"},"modified":"2009-02-10T15:34:08","modified_gmt":"2009-02-10T20:34:08","slug":"good-engineering-is-necessary-but-good-design-has-a-more-direct-impact-on-helping-people-do-amazing-things-with-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/10\/good-engineering-is-necessary-but-good-design-has-a-more-direct-impact-on-helping-people-do-amazing-things-with-computers\/","title":{"rendered":"Good engineering is necessary, but good design has a more direct impact on helping people do amazing things with computers"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8230;the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart\u2019s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn\u2019t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system\u2019s powerful, language-size command structure? It\u2019s an interesting argument when you think about it that way, but it ultimately doomed his design to obscurity, while his proteges who left for Xerox PARC and designed a system people could learn to use in a hour went on to change the world. Frictionless user experience is paramount, engineering concerns are secondary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8212;<a href=\"http:\/\/log.scifihifi.com\/post\/76989703\/everything-buckets\">Buzz Andersen, summarizing  John Markoff\u2019s <em>What the Dormouse Said<\/em>, a history of the early personal computer industry<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The title this post is something I&#8217;ve been saying as part of my personal statement on <a href=\"http:\/\/hirevincent.com\">hirevincent.com<\/a> for years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;the thinking that ultimately sunk Douglas Engelbart\u2019s visionary but incredibly complicated OLS (online system): Engelbart didn\u2019t consider it all that necessary to develop an easy-to-use interface because, he felt, people invested years in learning human languages, so why not invest 6 months in learning his system\u2019s powerful, language-size command structure? It\u2019s an interesting argument when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,24,8],"tags":[49,64,169],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-programming","category-quotes","category-usability","tag-bad-design","tag-failure","tag-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgable.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}