Lone Gunman

In designing any application, creating efficient and easy user flows is crucial to user engagement. Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Product Planner provides user flows from successful web applications to help others learn from them.

Something I’ve never thought of reading before: the history of the QWERTY keyboard:

With the assistance of […] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, [Christopher Sholes] built an early writing machine for which a patent application was filed in October 1867. However, Sholes’ “Type Writer” had many defects, [including] the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession.

Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine’s alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard.

As Donald Norman says in The Psychology/Design of Everyday Things, “We are commited to it, even though it was designed to satisfy constraints that no longer apply, was based on a style of typing no longer used, and is difficult to learn.”

It made me think: what other ‘everyday things’ are committed to past constraints, and in my work do I design to any?