> Has Woz ever demonstrated any expertise in design or UX?
Yes. He's the reason the Apple II had support for the Dvorak keyboard layout, hidden as it may have been. That's a big UX thing for me. Huge, in fact. His design skills in terms of putting motherboards together are beyond mere mortals.
May I pose a counter-question, which is if you're bitter that Woz has dissed your cult?
"That's a big UX thing for me" yes, for you and other 10 users of Dvorak keyboard
"His ->ELECTRONIC<- design skills in terms of putting motherboards together are beyond mere mortals."
Woz is a nerd. There's nothing wrong with it, and he is certainly very good at certain things, like creating minimal circuits that do several things at once.
But to say he understands UX is not really true. Having run a music festival and having taught kids makes him certainly (a little bit) more qualified for it, still.
You see, the problem with people who are very good with technology is that they will overcome any usability problems to use said tech. To be good at UX you need to put yourself in the shoes of your grandma and see things as she sees it, which is the opposite of the 'tech' way of thinking.
> To be good at UX you need to put yourself in the shoes of your grandma and see things as she sees it, which is the opposite of the 'tech' way of thinking.
No, you don't. UX can mean 'ls' just as much as it can Metro just as much as it can MATLAB.
> like creating minimal circuits that do several things at once.
There's a presumption here that this has limited impact on the design of the overall product. It doesn't.
"UX can mean 'ls' just as much as it can Metro just as much as it can MATLAB."
True, having Dvorak is a nice feature, but it's not the whole thing. You can certainly have a UX expert pouring over Matlab commands, then you would be considering several aspects, and would get a friendly command line interface, but not only one aspect as in that case.
"There's a presumption here that this has limited impact on the design of the overall product. It doesn't"
For the Apple I, it was certainly essential, since every part saved could save something like $10, $20 or even more (in 1980 dollars). Nowadays, not so much. Today you can fit the whole Apple I inside a FPGA (around $10) with room to spare.
It's popular with guys that like the exclusivity of using it and enjoy the placebo effect, but has never been conclusively shown easier or faster to type. Not to mention that for programmers its case is made even worst, because something designed for regular typing is not at all necessary to also be good for programming languages, where the common characters change, and even include ones like {} and such.
It's the ideal keyboard layout for the guys that make optimizations without profiling.
One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense...
You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization
>One man's premature optimisation is another man's common sense...
I doubt common sense comes into play into such complex matters as determining keyboard layout performance. Without testing between different options, using control groups and working on some specific domain (e.g performance for programming vs prose writing), common sense is useless.
(Not to mention that even in programming common sense can be both right and irrelevant --e.g. common sense might correctly assume that some function can be optimized to perform 3x faster, but fails to that it takes only 0.2% of the total running time in the first place so the win would be negligible).
>You can see some automatically-optimised keyboard layouts here, and decide whether they look different enough from Dvorak for it (or the site itself) to qualify as a scam: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?full_optimization*
I never argued against alternative keyboard layouts, or that qwerty is the best. Just that Dvorak is not worth it (and mostly, badly tested placebo solution). I've read the mwbrooks article in the past, the points he makes are not really worth it -- mostly a hack job.
In any case, if we need a future keyboard layout standard, it would have to take into account use cases (e.g programming vs journalism, etc), modern typography and extended glyphs, and of course since this is 2012, international language switching (I, and billions of other people, alternate between english and my language layout).
Yes. He's the reason the Apple II had support for the Dvorak keyboard layout, hidden as it may have been. That's a big UX thing for me. Huge, in fact. His design skills in terms of putting motherboards together are beyond mere mortals.
May I pose a counter-question, which is if you're bitter that Woz has dissed your cult?