Tog on interface
by Bruce Tognazzini · first published 1992
71% recommend29% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Collected columns from an early Apple human interface evangelist, full of stories on why GUI elements work and the failed ideas behind them; valued for explaining reasoning, not just rules, to working UI designers.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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How has Bruce Tognazzini's stuff not been mentioned yet? Tog on Software and Tog on Interface are great. https://www.amazon.com/Tog-Software-Design-Bruce-Tognazzini/... https://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-Tognazzini/dp/020...
on “Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?” ↗Bruce Tognazzini covers the topic of information theory in user interfaces very well in "Tog on Interface" (which is an excellent book in general).
on “Know When to Stop Designing, Quantitatively” ↗One of my HCI favorite books is "TOG on Interface" by Bruce Tognazzini because it's filled with stories about why certain GUI elements work and the failures that were tried as they finally adopted working GUI concepts. TOG was instrumental in making…
on “Do It (2004)” ↗…sorts of information that has apparently been mostly lost. Two books I remember, perhaps not the best, but definitely with information that transcends specific technical details, are Bruce Tognazzini's Tog on Interface (or Tog on Software Design), and Charles Petzold's Programming Windows 95. The original "Inside Macintosh" series also comes to mind.
on “Why do we create modern Desktop GUI apps using HTML/CSS/JavaScript?” ↗…interfaces, it means that many functions will either be misused or undiscovered. This is the source of the plaint that only 10%-20% of a product's features are used. On user interface design, the classic is "Tog on Interface", Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini, 1992. That's from the Mac UI era. A more modern take is "The Gamer's Brain", by Celia Hodent, designer of Fortnite's UX. Software internal documentation seems to suffer today…
on “The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)” ↗You must be too young to remember because a lot of the early user interface design principles, based on actual research, were pioneered by Bruce Tognazzini and Jef Raskin at Apple. Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design were THE bibles back in the day and Apple's Human Interface Guidelines showed how a company could and should adopt consistent user experience across all of their products. It…
on “Apple introduces a universal design across platforms” ↗I adore Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini, who led the earliest editions of Apple's HIG. He explores ideas that have been lost to time, like tailoring an interface to a user's personality.
on “Palm OS User Interface Guidelines [pdf]” ↗The suggested link to the Star UI paper I gave seems to be correct. Highly recommended. The other is "Tog On Interface". He's the guy (or one of them) behind the original Mac UI and you can see how he built it up. You really need to have used the original mac to relate the book to it, but you can get by without (I recently…
on “The most in-demand skills for designers, by level” ↗Also worth reading is Tog on Interface by an early Apple employee who was Apple's Human Interface Evangelist in that period. One particularly interesting essay goes into the issues associated with the way that developers are used to dealing…
on “Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac” ↗…continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.) >Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is…
on “Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen” ↗…continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.) >Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is…
on “No more icons in every menu by default” ↗…web-ignorant but otherwise capable iPhone was theoretically predictable half a century ago […] when it finally happened, it was something of a surprise." That made me think of Bruce Tognazzini (TOG) in "TOG on Interface" (http://www.amazon.com/Tog-Interface-Bruce-Tognazzini/dp/0201.... From 1991, but seems unaware of the existence of the world-wide web): "I want the United States Library of Congress on my desktop. I…
on “Taleb: The future will not be cool” ↗>good mental models of "systems" An Apple interface evangelist wrote a book years ago (Tog on Interface). Not really specific to Apple and you can believe or not the Meyers-Briggs data he used to bolster his argument. But it's almost certainly directionally correct that the engineers developing the software…
on “‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’” ↗Super cool. It's also neat to have some vintage, non-programming books about Apple culture. Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzani is one example.
on “Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library (2017)” ↗…Jobs' passing. Not only that, there doesn't seem to be an "Apple Way" anymore. Come to think of it, the old Apple had figures like Bruce Tognazzini who wrote about "The Apple Way"; I have a copy of Tog on Interface that distills many of the UI/UX principles of the classic Mac. I can't think of any figures like Tog in the modern era. Gradually the Apple software ecosystem is losing its distinctiveness in a world…
on “What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?” ↗