This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.
Intuitivity bridges gaps
I think intuitive design makes the Mac a communicator that saves a lot of time and trouble. I have used and taught the use of practically every personal computer platform in the past decades, and the Mac is not only my choice for myself, as a long-term, reasonably educated user, but for my children and students.
Can intuitive design really bridge big gaps? Yes, it can.
When I got my first Mac, a LCIII running System 7, I unpacked it with my curious two-year-old toddler, my younger daughter. She had never seen a computer before, and was naturally interested, if not something of a pest while unpacking. I had an urgent physical need involving a small room elsewhere in the house, so after unpacking the Mac and plugging it in, I said to my pesky toddler, "Look, I have to go for a minute, but when I get back, I'll turn it on and get you into something fun."
When I came back a few minutes later, there she was, drawing in ClarisWorks.
She had not only worked out how to turn the computer on, but also how to use a mouse, how to manage the environment, how to open a program and how to use some tools. She's a reasonably bright kid, but nothing that unusual. She could not have done this on the Windows of the period, which didn't even have a GUI.
The Mac simply made sense to her. It's designed to make sense, to remove as many as possible of the inconveniences and confusions which can separate machine and human. I have never used a platform which required less explanation, less motivation for students, and certainly less technical support. It just works.
I've had many more examples of its ease of use while working with both school-age and adult students of all kinds of backgrounds. To me, as a keen computer-user, the Mac pretty much brings it all together, and is the most effective platform. Since I've been very ill/disabled, I've felt so even more strongly, since its accessibility features (again, built-in) work so well. The only thing I missed was really talking to the system, so I used to run MkLinux on another partition. Now we have Mac OSX, with its BSD base, I'm even happier with my Mac.
Why do we love it? In my case, because it's good engineering. :)
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