
History on Why we have OK buttons in GUIs (web site slow, see article in comments) - vlad
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?&story=Do_It.txt
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vlad
_Do It_

Author: Andy Hertzfeld, June 1982

Many of the academic types who were involved in creating the earliest
implementations of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC and various
universities sort of sneered at the first generation of personal computers
when they appeared in the mid-seventies, since the early personal computers
were much less powerful than the machines that they were used to programming.
There wasn't that much you could do with only four kilobytes of memory and no
disk drive.

But Larry Tesler, who was a key member of the Smalltalk team in the Learning
Research Group at Xerox PARC, felt differently. He was really excited by the
potential of personal computers, buying a Commodore PET as soon as one became
available in 1977. He was one of the demonstrators at Apple's famous Xerox
PARC visit in December 1979, and he was so impressed by the Apple visitors
that he quit PARC and started working at Apple on July 17, 1980, as the
manager of the Lisa Applications team.

Larry championed consistency between applications, and made many contributions
to what eventually became the Macintosh User Interface. He was also the
leading advocate and implementor at Apple of user testing: actually trying out
our software out on real users and seeing what happened. Starting in the
summer of 1981, Larry organized a series of user tests of the nascent Lisa
software, recruiting friends and family to try out the software for the first
time, while being observed by the Apple designers who recorded their
reactions.

The user tests were conducted in a specially constructed room featuring a one-
way mirror, so observers could watch the tests without being intrusive. The
tests were conducted by a moderator who made sure the user felt comfortable
and showed her the basics of using a mouse. Then, with no further instruction,
users were asked to perform specific tasks, without help from the moderator,
like editing some text and saving it. The moderator encouraged each user to
mumble under her breath while doing the tasks, revealing her current thinking
as much as possible. Each session was audio or videotaped for later analysis.

When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small
window called a "dialog box", that contained a question, and presented two
buttons, for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled "Do
It" and "Cancel". The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at
the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking "Cancel" when they should
have clicked "Do It", but it wasn't clear what they were having trouble with.

Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the
dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator
interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, "I'm not
a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?"

It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the 'o' and the 'I' in 'Do
It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital 'I' looked very
much like a lower case 'l', so he was reading 'Do It' as 'Dolt' and was
therefore kind of offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button
label to 'OK' (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too
colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.

~~~
tomcat111
A great lesson...the obvious, no matter how obvious, may in fact be the best
choice.

~~~
vlad
You know, when I first started using Windows 95, it felt weird to see the word
OK on every single dialog or confirmation screen.

