Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini (Read via Physical Book)

This book is an extended publication of the early mac developer mailing lists around the mac os 5-6 timeframe. It is just great to read all of the testing and discovering what worked and what didn’t with the creation of the modern user interface.

A few pages just opened my eyes to the way people think. They wanted to ask a user if the screen they were looking at was a color display. You think that would be a straight forward question but it wasn’t. They actually had to go through 5 different iterations of that question to get it right. Just wording a sentence makes all the difference. 

Overall what made this book over the top for me was the point of view TOG takes for designing interfaces. Even though this book is 15 years old, most all of the same design principals procedures, to rephrase, how you work to end up with a what we call a intuitive/simple design still matters. 

What a fascinating gem, especially so early on in the development of computers. I just love when you just read the excitement and drive these people had over these little periods of time where tons of innovation happened.

9/10