Former Microsoft exec explain how a behavioral psychologist utilized Fitts’s law to place the Windows 95 Start button in the bottom-left.
Former Microsoft exec explain how a behavioral psychologist utilized Fitts’s law to place the Windows 95 Start button in the bottom-left.
This smells apocryphal to me. Very apocryphal.
Like you don’t need a behavioral psychologist to explain why people are going to prefer putting menunthingies out of the way.
Even back before a mouse, graphical applications (like q-basic) would place their menuthingies at the top, in a header. They had already established a pattern we still largely follow today- the most general menu category goes to the right, the most specific to the left.-
File is stuff relating to the document- opening, closing, savoring; document wide settings, etc, where help is… uh… extremely specific and almost never used.
So you already have this pattern in UC design; applications are already following it because it makes sense. So now, your devs need to place another menu bar somewhere, and they place it at the bottom, so it’d out of the way of everything else, and they follow the pattern.
oh. and NeXTSTEP’s came out in '88…
I wouldn’t be so sure. Fitts’s law is well-known and could easily have been in the right state for this story to be true at the time. I remember learning specifically about how it applies to the corners of ths screen in a Human-Computer Interaction class once.
Fitt’s law being true or well known, and explaining why it works doesn’t mean they hired a behavioral psychologist.
This is like saying an architect hired physicist to explain why arches work; when everyone already knows that they work.
With the other UIs, like Mac’s next step and dock; they saw the same basic concept and had the ability to see real world feedback from that, no behavioral psychologist needed.
Hmm, true