Richard Kenyon's story
about Edward Tufte puts me in mind of a Tufte story.
A long, long time ago, my friend Eric Bergman and I were
working on the UI for Sun AnswerBook,
which was a CD-based predecessor to docs.sun.com.
Sun had invited Edward Tufte in to teach a
session in our Boston office about the Grand Vistas of Information
Architecture or something. After the class, we lured him into our
usability lab to look at the user interface for Answerbook, of which
were were very proud.
(The was waaay before the web or HTML or PDF, and AnswerBook was cool
stuff: It consisted of a hierarchical topic chooser and query engine...
that served as a remote control to a PostScript-based browser... that
displayed whatever section of whatever document you chose in the
chooser ... all of which documents were written in troff or Frame or
Interleaf and then published into PostScript via ditroff or fmbatch...
and we hacked the PostScript and inserted metadata and link comments...
and there was an object link resolver underneath that mapped object IDs
to the appropriate PostScript pages and sections. And of course we had
NeWS so Postscipt rendering just happened for free. (Legend has it that
some of AnswerBook served as an early inspiration for parts of Adobe
Acrobat, which also sports a page-based model and links embedded in the
display file, and a hierarchical view of the content, and whose
original Windows architect worked on... Answerbook. Of course, truth be
told, our AnswerBook project lead had worked on the legendary Symbolics
Document Examiner so... lots of inspiration to go around.))
Anyway... we were very proud of our user interface and the fact that we
had a way to browse 16,000(!!) pages of documentation on a
CD-ROM. But browsing the hierarchy felt a little complicated to
us. So we asked Tufte to come in and have a look, and were hoping
perhaps for a pat on the head or some free advice.
He played with our AnswerBook for about 90 seconds, turned around, and
pronounced his review:
"Dr Spock's Baby Care is a best-selling owner's manual for the most
complicated 'product' imaginable -- and it only has two levels of
headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven't
even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it's complicated."
Oh.
