Did the Father of the Mac predict Miro?
How Jef Raskin imagined a zooming interface ten years before Miro
At least once a day I get frustrated trying to find the bits information I need to do my job. Each folder I open may or may not lead to the thing I’m looking for. But before I even start my search, I need to guess where to start: File Explorer, Sharepoint, Teams, Slack, BIM 360, Google Drive, and on and on . . .
Things have been better, though, since Covid lockdown when I discovered an information management system that uses my intuitive sense of “space”. Miro has become an essential part of my worklife. When I get a new project, I go there first to note my initial ideas so that I can evolve them with collaborators. I keep my scope at the top of a project board — and then develop concepts and research over time. The work generally expands down and to the right. I keep notes, run interviews and develop workshops all on the same board. Frequently I even do presentations in Miro because I hate the linear constraints of PowerPoint. If the audience is interested in a topic I haven’t included in my deck, I just navigate to that area of my board which I can almost always find immediately.
The most important feature of Miro, though, is how it enables a more democratic way of working. A typical meeting with a white board or a workshop with sticky notes are usually driven by the most outgoing and talkative people in the room. The person holding the pen welds more “power” than anyone else. In a time of hybrid meetings, we are all looking for ways to make our gatherings more equitable. I’ve found that Miro can help counteract this inequity by giving everyone the same interactive presence on the board. The immediacy and visibility of ideas being built through collaboration is unmatched even in a live meeting, and it can lead to amazing outcomes. The “shape” of this interaction give us extra insight. And no one is at the front of the room hogging the white board.
After using Miro for a few weeks, I realized that the interaction was familiar. In his book The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin, “Father of the Apple Macintosh”, (who was unfairly portrayed in the Jobs movie, BTW) proposed a new form of operating system with “Better Navigation” he called ZoomWorld. Although he wasn’t the inventor of the idea, the details of his or a Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) are familiar. ZoomWorld is . . .
“…based on the idea that you have access to an infinite plane of information having infinite resolution . . . everything you can access is displayed somewhere in ZoomWorld. “
Instead of the “maze” that would “put you in a little room with a number of doors leading this way and that” (i.e., folder systems), ZoomWorld leverages our ability to remember spatial arrangements. Much like the memory palace trick that can be used to improve recollection, ZoomWorld leverages your sense of location allowing you to fly above all of your data to see the larger map giving you a “physical” sense of where information is located. ZoomWorld allows media at an infinite number of scales and sizes — so that the organizing landmarks can be large, while the details can be compact and concentrated in relevant clusters not too different from Google Maps.
The reason I’m writing about this here is to give Raskin the credit he deserves and to be grateful that he put these ideas out into the world. I don’t know if there is a direct path from ZoomWorld to the eventual creation of Miro, but as Steven Johnson has written about, good ideas come from conversations and combining adjacent ideas (e.g., sticky note workshops and ZoomWorld). They rarely come from a singular genius. Even Raskin built on previous ideas of a zooming interface.
The other reason I wanted to write about this is to put his book out there again and recommend it as a relevant read for any interaction and interface designer. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from the book:
“One of the most laudatory terms used to describe an interface is to say that it is ‘intuitive.’ When examined closely, this concept turns out to vanish like a pea in a shell game and be replaced with the more ordinary but more accurate term ‘familiar.’”
And what is more familiar than how we navigate through our physical environment?
