It's easy to look at a finished product and think it was the result of careful, planned design and processes. But as anyone who's designed anything will tell you, reality is much more chaotic. We don't always think about where certain design elements and features of our software come from, but in the case of these four examples, “genius” arose by accident.
Customizable UI options
With our operating systems these days, we take it for granted that we can change the appearance of the interface. You can change window colors, the system font, the appearance of individual elements such as buttons, and much more. This varies from one OS to another, but the principle is the same. If the user wants to change the appearance and operation of things, let him do it. Even if it makes the UX “expert” cringe.
While I can't say with certainty that this particular incident was the beginning of user interface customization on modern computers or why your mom uses that terrible font on her phone, a certain development inspired by Steve Jobs may well have been the beginning.
As Andy Hertzfeld tells it Folklore articleand an early Apple employee named Chris Espinoza worked on the design of a calculator application for the Mac. But when he showed it to Steve Jobs, there was a long list of criticisms about how it looked.
Jobs was known to be picky, and in the end Espinoza made a stroke of genius by simply adding a bunch of sliders and settings that allowed his picky boss to sit down and just tinker with every aspect of the app's interface until he was happy. Thus, the idea (perhaps) accidentally arose to give the user the ability to decide what the user interface should be.
I'm in awe of the excellent (and legendary) Microsoft Intellimouse in the past, which is partly known introducing the scroll wheel instead of the middle mouse button. Something that has proven invaluable in the Internet age and for anyone who deals with documents and spreadsheets.
The thing is, if you believe one of the people who claims to have invented the scroll wheel, it was never intended to scroll. It should have been a zoom wheel instead, or so Oculus co-founder Jack McCauley says in an interview. IGN interview.
Whether McCauley is the sole or even primary originator of the wheel idea or not, I should point out that we do use the scroll wheel for zooming in many applications. So the idea of a Z axis controller is still valid for 3D apps and games, but it's a little funny to think that someone had such big ambitions for a new hardware feature and then software developers used it to avoid having to drag the scrollbar.
Undo becoming a permanent feature after a debug hack
We all take it for granted that we can avoid most mistakes by pressing Ctrl+Z. In fact, these days, when you have enough computer memory, you can often “undo” a few steps of what you've done in most applications.
Now the function, which is actually an “undo” function, has been invented several times independently, but it was originally a way to debug software. So you can go through the program line by line in reverse order until you figure out what went wrong. This was proposed in Marvin Zelkowitz's 1971 doctoral dissertation. Reversible design as a diagnostic tool.
Others expanded on the idea, but it was the programmers at Xerox PARC (where both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were “inspired” to create graphical interfaces) who gave us the Ctrl+Z shortcut and the “undo” nomenclature that we know, love, and often retain to this day.
Tabbed browsing evolves from a boring productivity feature
When I first started using the Internet in the late 90s, there was no such thing as tabbed browsing, and I have a hard time remembering how we survived without it. In fact, over a dial-up connection I could only load one web page at a time, so maybe that wasn't the case. What most of the problem. However, when I got my first tabbed browser, it completely changed the way I worked and used the Internet.
The fact is that applications such as word processors with tabbed interfaces existed back in 1982. I actually remember my dad using Borland Quattro Pro in the 80s and 90s with tabbed spreadsheets. The first browsers with this feature appeared in the mid-90s, but like most people, I only started using tabbed browsing in the early 2000s with Firefox. Somehow, it wasn't until 2007 that Internet Explorer started using tabbed browsing as an option. But then it was always slow to catch up.
The point is that although tabs were not designed for web browsers and were initially only added as an option in some browsers, actual browser users quickly switched to tabbed browsing instead of opening each website in a separate window. So while we now think of them as synonymous with web browsing, that's not what they're designed for.
I usually have 20-40 tabs open at once, spread across three windows and two monitors. I can only imagine how much less productive my work would be if I had to juggle and manage 40 separate windows!
