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Bringing Design to Software Ch. 2 - Liddle

hci.stanford.edu · 4,396 words · saved by 1 readers

David Liddle was interviewed by a group from the Association for Software Design, consisting of Barry Polley, Andrew Singer, Suzanne Stefanac, and Terry Winograd. Software design is the act of determining the user’s experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user’s whole experience.... The most important thing to design properly is the user's conceptual model. Everything else should be subordinated to making that model clear, obvious, and substantial. That is almost exactly the opposite of how most software is designed. In 1978, David Liddle was asked to head Xerox’s new System Development Division, to create products based on the research being done at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Over the next few years, Liddle and his group developed the Star system, which was the forerunner of today's graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such

§ § § Association for Software Design: You were instrumental in the design and development of the Xerox Star, one of the first systems to use a graphical user interface. What was the overall context in which the Star work got started? David E. Liddle: By the mid-seventies, developers were beginning to move away from the distributed model of computing, in which an employee sat at a terminal and shared processor time. IBM's entry-level division was promoting the idea of individual computers, almost like tiny mainframes, for small businesses. But connectivity was not part of that picture.…

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