Doug Englebart and his team developed an interactive operating system of computers and made a demonstration of the system in 1968. During the demonstration, Englebart showed audiences the early prototype of graphical user interfaces (GUI) which is composed of mouse, keyboard, and a screen (monitor). The things that Englebart and his team could do with their system was not that diverse; they could input and delete texts with the keyboard, move the mouse around, select, drag, and duplicate things, search for keywords, use links to find files and so on. But there is no doubt that Englebart and his team made an enormous contribution to the development of GUI in the future. Doug was one of the very few people who came up with the idea to create an interactive interface on computers which mainly serves the users. In recent decades, computers have evolved to be more and more interactive, and all of them are highly influenced by Englebart’s operating system.
Doug Englebart’s idea also brought some apocalypse to the interaction designers. The point of creating products that assist and try to do all the work for users instead of creating products that requires users to try very hard to work with. Designing and producing products that allow users to easily control and interact with free will has become the goal for all the interaction designers.
“Designing and producing products that allow users to easily control and interact with free will has become the goal for all the interaction designers.” Thank you for your sharing! That’s what we need to do!
Agree. It is true that we aim to create objects that help users better achieve their goals as easy as possible.