Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Perlman 185
I wanted to work with televisions, audio systems. That’s what I’ve been interested
in, and it has driven all the things I’ve done.
When I joined Apple and interviewed with them, they weren’t even interested
in doing color, and we brought them over to doing color. We created the
whole color model as well as the rest of multimedia for the Mac—music and
sound and everything. We made the Macintosh from a little black and white
computer into a multimedia powerhouse. And it was driven really by what my
ultimate desire was: as a delivery vehicle for multimedia and a means by which
you can interact. Video games are one kind of interaction. That’s great, but
there is more than just that.
I think that, in the end, if you have enough people communicating with one
another, it’s going to be really hard to go and blow each other up. They may
send nasty messages on blogs, and they may argue and maybe somebody will
write something unpleasant in Wikipedia about you, but that’s a lot better than
blowing someone else up.
Livingston: Was it hard designing something for non-technical users?
Perlman: It’s extremely hard, because you have to design for someone who’s
not you. After a while, as you develop interfaces and have experience with
them, you begin to think with the intuition of a person who does not understand
the inner workings of the system. And you also have to do a lot of testing.
You have to be good at testing. You have to know what questions to ask people
and what problems to present to them.
The following is not something from my personal experience—it’s a story
told to me by the Mac team—but they said that, when they first did the dialog
boxes for the Lisa, instead of saying “OK,” it said, “Do It.” They found that
people were reluctant to click on that, and they couldn’t figure out why. Then,
once they had a test subject there who just wouldn’t click on it, they said, “Why
didn’t you click on that little button there?” He said, “I’m not a dolt. Why would
I click on that?” People were reading it as “dolt,” not “do it,” because it was an
unusual combination of words. So they changed dialog boxes to say “OK.” That
little change greased the skids for people to click on dialog boxes.
It’s very small stuff like that, very often—that somebody sees something and
has the wrong impression. The only way to learn that is by doing a lot of testing.
In fact, that’s one of the reasons why the iPod was such a phenomenal success
where the MP3 players before were not. The iPod had the design sensibility of
an average person just trying to listen to music, whereas the previous MP3 players
were kind of technical exercises in understanding how music files are
stored, and perhaps required very delicate balancing of your fingers to hit the
buttons the right way, and so on.
Livingston: Were you inspired by the Apple II’s use of TV as a monitor?
Perlman: Well, Apple IIs did work on TV screens, and I was inspired by the
fact that it was a friendly-looking computer and that it had color. But it was not
an easy-to-use computer. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t join Apple earlier. I
didn’t see where that was going to go.