History of User Input

The why of modern-day conventions

Commonality?

The Humble Form

"Every meaningful interaction
that happens on the web is achieved
by a form of some sort."

                      Adam Silver
                      Form Design Patterns (2018)

Paper-land Origin

"A form is a document with spaces (also named fields or placeholders) in which to write or select, for a series of documents with similar contents. [...] Forms have existed for a significant amount of time, with historians of law having discovered preprinted legal forms from the early 19th century that greatly simplified the task of drafting complaints and various other legal pleadings."

Wikipedia

Form (Document)

The Role of Typewriters

"Most forms ask questions. But to save words and therefore save space, the questions usually aren't written out. Instead of asking. "What is your age?" is is better simply to say "Age". [...] The visibility of captions in the upper corner of boxes permits the typist to read them without rolling the typewriter platen up and down as is required when the captions are below the line."

National Archives and Records Service

Record Management Handbook (1960)

The Birth of Computers

"At the end of the 1800s Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine, developing punched card data processing technology for the 1890 U.S. census. His tabulating machines read and summarized data stored on punched cards and they began use for government and commercial data processing."

Wikipedia

Punched Card

Input/Output

"In computing, input/output or I/O (or, informally, io or IO) is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system and outputs are the signals or data sent from it. The term can also be used as part of an action; to "perform I/O" is to perform an input or output operation."

Wikipedia

Input/Output

The Future Of Yesterday

"The Web has become an almost iconic cultural reference - ubiquitous and familiar. Even your grand-mother can recognize a Web page by its typical brochure-like displays of Times or Arial text, eye-grabbing graphics, and highlighted hyper-links. What we need to remember, though, is that the Web, as we know it now, is a fleeting thing. [...] The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens."

                      Darcy DiNucci

                      Print Magazine (1999)

Web 1.0

"Web 1.0 is a retronym referring to the first stage of the World Wide Web's evolution, from roughly 1991 to 2004. According to Cormode and Krishnamurthy, "content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content." Personal web pages were common, consisting mainly of static pages hosted on ISP-run web servers, or on free web hosting services such as Tripod and defunct GeoCities."

Wikipedia

Web 2.0

Web 2.0

"With Web 2.0, it became common for average web users to have social-networking profiles (on sites such as Myspace and Facebook) and personal blogs (sites like Blogger, Tumblr and LiveJournal) through either a low-cost web hosting service or through a dedicated host. In general, content was generated dynamically, allowing readers to comment directly on pages in a way that was not common previously."

Wikipedia

Web 2.0

Breaking Changes

"The minor version is incremented for releases which add new, but backward-compatible, API features, and the major version is incremented for API changes which are not backward-compatible. For example, software which relies on version 2.1.5 of an API is compatible with version 2.2.3, but not necessarily with 3.2.4."

Wikipedia

Software versioning

Luke Wroblewski

Luke Wroblewski
Web Form Design (2008)

• Product Director at Google
• Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!
• Coined "Mobile First" approach
• Co-founder of Interaction Design Association (IxDA)

Adam Silver

• Interaction Designer for Government of the United Kingdom
• Interaction Designer for BCC
• Interaction Designer for Financial Times