It was easy for me to see this because up until this time, the old handwriting recognition software I had created always worked best with my handwriting, because I was the guy who created it. One of the industry analysts quipped, “If you write like Jeff, it works all the time!” I tried to generalize and said, “What if we just told people to write a particular way?” What if we said, “Write your e this way and your f this way and your g this way!” It would reduce the problem significantly. That was the genesis of Graffiti. We just came up with a simplified system that was fast and reliable, based on the way I write an upper case character set; then we tweaked it from there. I don’t think I would have come up with this idea if I didn’t understand some of the stuff about brains already. I knew that brains want a consistent model, and they want to be able to predict what’s going to happen. The problem with traditional handwriting recognition was, when you wrote something and it didn’t work, you had no way of knowing why. You wanted a system where you could say, “All right. If it fails, I know why; it was my mistake, I’ll fix it. I can change my behavior.” That gives you a predictable relationship between behavior of the machine and your own behavior.
When Jeff finally did read the PARC paper, he was impressed by the research, but he realized that the goal of the authors was to create fast text entry, whereas his goal was to create reliable text entry that would be easy to learn. He focused on trying to make the pen strokes as much like regular handwriting as possible, keeping the characters very close to standard letterforms. The PARC approach was designed to maximize speed, so they chose the simplest strokes for the most frequently used characters.The e was a dot, because that was the most common letter, and the s and the t were single strokes, with more complex strokes reserved for the least common characters. The combination of Graffiti and Jeff ’s four design criteria for the PalmPilot were the keys to a good product, but the dramatic success that they enjoyed was also due to the unique interaction design. For this, Jeff relied on Rob Haitani, who had worked with him from the very first days of Palm Computing.
From the Desk to the Palm |
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