Breakfast with Larry Tesler

Who is Larry Tesler?

Have you ever copied and pasted something? Scrolled through anything on your computer? Written a Word document? Shopped at Amazon? Used a Mac?

Then knowingly or not, you are familiar with Larry Tesler’s impact on interaction design and software development. The Silicon Valley veteran’s CV reads like a history of the user interface, with stints during the most formative years of tech giants like Xerox, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo.

He pioneered the practice of user testing and is responsible for coining such terms as “browser” and “friendly user interface”, and the lesser-known “modeless text editing”, which sounds a bit abstract, but ultimately laid the foundation for how we edit text in word-processing programs like Word and Pages.

Larry is now a consultant to technology and design companies of all sizes, specialising in the way users experience technology products.

Breakfast with Larry

Over breakfast and coffee late last week, Larry shared with us his thoughts about relevance in information services. As the web becomes increasingly crowded with with information, products, services, and apps; the concept of relevance is more and more important. Whether we’re searching for people, places, news, products or information, relevance is what matters. How should we, as designers and developers, adapt?

Striving for relevance

The agile process
We’ve long been proponents of the agile process for web and software development. The search for relevance is in many ways one of the defining characteristics of the agile methodology – the whole process is centred around the idea that the goals and ideas you think are important at the start of a project aren’t necessarily the ones you finish with. Once the software is in the hands of real people, your ideas about what is important are often challenged by how the users of your website or application actually behave.

Creating a new piece of software always starts with a leap into the unknown, and priorities can (and generally do) shift as the process rolls out. Our aim with working in the agile process is to always figure out what’s important now, not what was important before.

A user’s perspective
At Edenspiekermann, we often talk about the fact that we work for our client’s customers. What a business wants to put into the world doesn’t necessarily match up with what their customers are looking for. We always want to look at a business from the customer’s viewpoint and think long and hard about what offers them the most relevance.

Whether it’s connecting to a person’s Soundcloud account to show them music they might like, or allowing someone to choose the kind of photos and stories they receive in a feed, or creating systems for people to pay for things using their mobile phones; we’re always trying to think of how to give customers the stories, products, information and experiences that provide the most meaning and relevance.

Thanks, Larry, for the insights and the anecdotes about life and work in Silicon Valley!