Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop
Talks by Don Hopkins and Donald Norman at IBM Almaden's "New Paradigms for Using Computers" workshop. Organized and introduced by Ted Selker. Talks and demonstrations by Don Hopkins and Don Norman. Norman: "And then when we saw SimCity, we saw how the pop-up menu that they were doing used pie menus, made it very easy to quickly select the various tools we needed to add to the streets and bulldoze out fires, and change the voting laws, etc. Somehow I thought this was a brilliant solution to the wrong problems. Yes it was much easier to now to plug in little segments of city or put wires in or bulldoze out the fires. But why were fires there in the first place? Along the way, we had a nuclear meltdown. He said "Oops! Nuclear meltdown!" and went merrily on his way." Hopkins: "Linear menus caused the meltdown. But the round menus put the fires out." Norman: "What caused the meltdown?" Hopkins: "It was the linear menus." Norman: "The linear menus?" Hopkins: "The traditional pull down menus caused the meltdown." Norman: "Don't you think a major cause of the meltdown was having a nuclear power plant in the middle of the city?" (laughter) Hopkins: "The good thing about the pie menus is that they make it really easy to build a city really fast without thinking about it." (laughter) Hopkins: "Don't laugh! I've been living in Northern Virginia!" Norman: "Ok. Isn't the whole point of SimCity how you think? The whole point of SimCity is that you learn the various complexities of controlling a city."
