Bruce Tognazzini

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Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (* 1945 ) is an American usability consultant and designer. He currently works in partnership with Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen in the Nielsen Norman Group, which specializes in human-computer interaction . He worked for Apple Computer for fourteen years , then for four years at Sun Microsystems and then another four years at WebMD.

He has written two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design , which at Addison-Wesley published, and he is the editor of webzine s Asktog with the slogan "Interaction Design Solutions for the real world".

Professional career

Tog (as he is widely known in the computer community) built his first electromechanical computer in 1957. In 1959 he received an order for the world's first check-reading computer, the ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) from NCR, at Bank of America in San Francisco.

Tog was an influential contributor to Apple Computer from 1978 to 1992. In June 1978 , after seeing one of his early programs, The Great American Probability Machine , Steve Jobs hired him to be Apple's first application software engineer by Jef Raskin . He is listed on the back of his book Tog on Interface (Addison-Wesley, 1991) as "Apple Employee # 66" (the same employee number he later had at WebMD).

In his early days at Apple, coinciding with the development of Apple's first human interface for the Apple II computer, he released Super Hi-Res Chess, a novel program for the Apple II that, despite its name, neither played chess nor a high resolution (Hi -Res) graphic had; instead, it appeared to crash at the Applesoft BASIC command prompt with an error message, but was in reality a parody of Apple's BASIC command line interface, which apparently took control of the computer and refused to return it until the magic word was discovered.

His extensive work in user interface testing and design, including the publication of the first edition in September 1978 and seven subsequent editions of The Apple Human Interface Guidelines , played an important role in directing the Apple product line from the inception of Apple through to the 1990s. (Steve Smith and Chris Espinosa also played a key role in bringing the initial material on the Lisa and Macintosh computers into the fourth and fifth editions in the early 1980s).

He and his partner, John David Eisenberg, wrote Apple Presents ... Apple , the floppy disk that taught new Apple II owners how to use computers. That disk became a self-fulfilling prophecy: at the time of its creation, there was no standard Apple II interface. As the new owners were taught the interface by Tog and David, the developers soon began writing, supported by Tog's Apple Human Interface Guidelines and reinforced by AppleWorks , a range of productivity applications for the Apple II, into which Tog also did the same Interface.

It was only after Steve Job left Apple early in 1985 that Tog took over the management of the interface for both machines. During this time Tog was responsible for the design of the hierarchical menus of the Macintosh and invented time-out dialog boxes which, after a visible countdown, perform standard activity without the user explicitly clicking. He also invented the "package" illusion, later used by Apple for Macintosh applications, with all of its supporting files residing in a "package" which in turn appears to be the program itself and as an application icon rather than a folder appears. This illusion makes it easy to install and delete Mac programs using drag and drop.

While at Sun Microsystems in 1992 and 1993, he produced the Starfire video prototype to give an idea of ​​a usability-focused vision of the office of the future. The video predicted the rise of a new technology that would become known as the World Wide Web. Popular Science Magazine reported in March 2009 that Microsoft was just producing a new video showing life in 2019: "The Microsoft 2019 details in this video are almost identical to those in this 2004 video produced by Sun Microsystems in 1992 were predicted.

While at Sun Microsystems, Tog also filed for 58 US patents, 57 of which were granted in the areas of aviation safety, GPS, and human-computer interaction. Among them is US patent 6,278,660, the wristwatch for time zone tracking with built-in GPS and simple time zone maps, which is set with the help of the atomic clock of the GPS satellite and is automatically reset when a new time zone is entered.

After four years at WebMD, Tog joined his colleagues in 2000 as the third director of the Nielsen Norman Group alongside Jakob Nielsen and Donald Norman.

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience: Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, Principal at Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved June 15, 2020 .
  2. Bloomberg - Are you a robot? Retrieved June 15, 2020 .
  3. RF Wachter, GP Briggs, CE Pedersen: Precipitation of phase I antigen of Coxiella burnetii by sodium sulfite . In: Acta Virologica . tape 19 , no. 6 , November 1975, ISSN  0001-723X , pp. 500 , PMID 2000 .
  4. a b Annex V. The lawyers admitted to the Reichsgericht from October 1, 1904 to June 1, 1929 . In: Fifty Years of the Reich Court on October 1, 1929 . De Gruyter, Berlin, Boston 1929, ISBN 978-3-11-164835-4 , doi : 10.1515 / 9783111648354-014 .
  5. a b About Tog. In: askTog. November 17, 2012, Retrieved June 15, 2020 (American English).