The mice and the 8 - week 9

Today I’m going to write about how ergonomics has affected the success or failure of IT products, I’m going to do it by two examples, a story of a well-designed product that revolutionized the IT industry forever and a poorly designed one that resulted in a disaster, a commercial disaster at least.

The Mouse

Very few things contributed to the commercial success of PCs and their operative systems as mice, both in business and domestic environment. Being a ''technical miracle'', the mouse allowed the user to move pointers on the desktop simply moving the device whit one hand, resulting in perfect coordination between the brain and the PC output on the monitor, something unseen before.   

After the first prototypes and milestones of mice development by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 (the “Wheels Mouse”) and Bill English in 1972 (the “Ball Mouse”), in 1973, PARC invented the very first desk-computer Alto and the potential for mice to be used in a commercial way. 

Since the 80’ mice imposed themselves on every computer and played a crucial role in making them ergonomic also for the common users who is usually reluctant at learning how to perform operations using command-line only OSs. 

Windows 8

An example of poor usability is Windows 8, it was a disaster, hopefully, no one died, but we can’t be sure about that. The problem wasn't that Microsoft's designers couldn't design a good operating system interface, it's that they designed two of them!

The designers of Windows 8 were probably thinking of doing a great thing engineering an OS with two separate environments/interfaces, one for keyboard/mouse and a second overlaid interface for touch screens. Windows 8 was meant to be a great tool to approach the coming (expected to come) transition to tablets so each of the two environments/interfaces had a separate Web browser, Control Panel, e-mail program and type of programs. It wasn’t possible to ignore either of the two, resulting in twice the learning, twice the confusion and halving the customer satisfaction.

Microsoft corrected the wrong approach with Windows 10 where the transition between traditional and touch environment is much better managed and ergonomic to use.

Sources:

Sutori: HISTORY OF COMPUTER MOUSE

https://www.sutori.com/story/history-of-computer-mouse--2yUFPn6vNQBstaaz2x4FTdsy

ZDNet: ​Saying goodbye to Windows 8: Where did it all go wrong?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/saying-goodbye-windows-8-where-did-it-all-go-wrong/