Bringing Design to Software Ch. 2 - Liddle
David Liddle was interviewed by a group from the Association for Software Design, consisting of Barry Polley, Andrew Singer, Suzanne Stefanac, and Terry Winograd. Software design is the act of determining the user’s experience with a piece of software. It has nothing to do with how the code works inside, or how big or small the code is. The designer's task is to specify completely and unambiguously the user’s whole experience.... The most important thing to design properly is the user's conceptual model. Everything else should be subordinated to making that model clear, obvious, and substantial. That is almost exactly the opposite of how most software is designed. In 1978, David Liddle was asked to head Xerox’s new System Development Division, to create products based on the research being done at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Over the next few years, Liddle and his group developed the Star system, which was the forerunner of today's graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such