I really appreciate Elise Blanchard following up and publishing a timeline combining all the information she gathered!

Regardless of whether it was parallel evolution, or people just copying things they’d seen somewhere without remembering where it was, the fact is that Ben Shneiderman arrived at the color blue by user testing and scientifically measuring comprehension and recollection, and widely published papers and software to the other academics and researchers who were bothering to pay attention at the time, like Tim Berners-Lee, who he discussed it with.

While Marc Andreesen is apparently implying that Netscape just got lucky by choosing the only color that wasn’t yet used.

Personally I prefer user interfaces whose designs are conscientiously based on peer reviewed published scientific research and sound scientific theories like Fitt's Law (which inspired pie menus), rather than blind luck and cargo-cult cloning of shallow surface features, and I hope that more commercial companies look to, credit, and support academic research and history for inspiration of their designs, instead of just hoping to get lucky.

We certainly appreciate and acknowledge all the generous support that companies like Apple, Sun, NCR, Elographics, Microtouch, and other institutions like Smithsonian Museums and the Library of Congress gave us at HCIL.

I wish more companies, investors, and government organizations strategically supported the academic research and open source software development they so wisely and successfully exploit.

https://hcil.umd.edu/getting-value/

>There are many ways for companies, institutions, and non-profits to engage with HCI at UMD and many reasons for doing so, including sharing real-world challenges and perspectives with our talented students and getting fresh perspectives on your design challenges. Below is an overview of opportunities for your consideration. [...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

>Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. This scientific law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu#Comparison_with_other...

>Comparison with other interaction techniques: Pie menus are faster and more reliable to select from than linear menus, because selection depends on direction instead of distance. The circular menu slices are large in size and near the pointer for fast interaction (see Fitts's law). Experienced users use muscle memory without looking at the menu while selecting from it. Nested pie menus can efficiently offer many options, and some pie menus can pop up linear menus, and combine linear and radial items in the same menu. Pie menus just like any popup menu are shown only when requested, resulting in less visual distraction and cognitive load than toolbars and menu bars that are always shown.

https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Apri...

>My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.

>His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a significant user interface improvement over early systems such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/touchscreens/

>Between 1988 and 1993 Apple was a sponsor of the HCIL lab, Steve Jobs visited in person in 1988, and Ben Shneiderman was a consultant for Apple at several occasions. Demos were also shown to our lab’s visitors, and videos shown during invited lectures at conferences or during industry visits (see Ben Shneiderman’s resume for a partial list)
[...]

>During 1989–1991, we worked on a home automation system and explored several direct manipulation designs (e.g. clocks and calendars to schedule devices to go on and off, ON-OFF switches with buttons or sliders) . A playful fingerpainting exploration tool and toy called Playpen was developed. Finally we worked with National Cash Register (NCR) to explore how touchscreens might be used to replace keyboards when store cashiers needed to enter a little bit of data about shopppers (such as phone numbers or addresses). We stopped doing research on touchscreens as successful applications found their ways in museums or cash registers. Pen interfaces, made popular by the Palm Pilots, continued the work as they afforded a similar sense of “real” direct manipulation. Eventually touchcreens came back as the input device of choice of mobile devices, especially after the launch of the iPhone is 2007. [...]

>High-Precision touchscreen: the next step was to try to stabilize the touchscreen so that the cursor would stay put when the finger didn’t move. This was accomplished with a clever time-dependant averaging of the positions returned by the device. Now, individual pixels could be selected (in the 480x350 high resolution screen of the time). An experiment showed that there was significant difference in selection times and error rates between mouse and touchscreen for targets down to about 1mm2, when using a lift-off strategy with a stabilized touchcreen. Companies such as Elographics and Microtouch, with whom we had good relations, integrated stabilization techniques into the drivers of their touchscreens. From then on, high-precision was possible, and designers could do everything with the touchscreen that they could do with the mouse. [...]