Reflections on “The Mother of All Demos”

The prototypes Doug Engelbart initially published a programme of action which made a great influence on future interaction design in terms of GUI. From the video ”The Mother of All Demos”, it is great to see Engelbart shows instantly responsive and real-time editing features on the computing interfaces. He also makes use of the mouse which is a tool for indicating actions and movements. Doug Engelbart and Stanfords predicted in their demo a few things about interaction design, such as the computer mouse, categorization, and user feedback.

The function of the computer mouse indicates the actions of the users which indeed helps users to interact around the interface by moving, clicking, and pointing. Doug Engelbart presents his actions by moving the little mouse on the interface directly and clearly. The concept of the mouse profoundly influences nowadays practice of interaction design. Since people start to consider an interactive way between technological devices and users through the graphical objects on user interfaces. For example, when we are typing on a word document, there is a small vertical line tracking the position of the text so that the user’s change can be seen. Thus, the concept of the mouse does bring a positive effect on future interaction design.

From the video of “the Mother of All Demo”, Doug Engelbart categorizes the words so that he can better regulate and show the process to users. The function is prevailing and widely used in modern technology, and we call it hypertext. Engelbart displays the categorization by topic function like placing the words into groups based on their common criteria. I think this idea accelerates the practice of hypertext because it helps users clearly find their targets through the titles and subtitles. As such, the function of categorization truly improves the completeness of the user interface.

One thing I find interesting in the video is that Doug Engelbart cannot find the word “produce” on the list after he types it during the presentation. He is supposed to put the word ”produce” on the list, however, he types “produce” on the top of the list. In my view, the reason is that there is no notification or indication on the interface for the users to execute actions. Therefore, sometimes, it is confusing for users editing on interfaces. In other words, users need feedback so that they can better track their actions. Nevertheless, Engelbart’s presentation addresses the importance of the interaction between computing devices and humans, which leaves great impacts on future practice of interaction design.