Trinity Personal Computers Case Study

Place any one of the original “Trinity” personal computers; PET, Apple II or TRS-80 in front of a non-tech savvy person and the look you will receive is one of absolute bafflement. For one, though they were made in the 70s, that was over 40 years ago and personal computing has gone through many interface changes since then. While the Trinity may resemble what we 21st century computer users are used to, they don’t exactly fit the profile for a personal computer any businessman/women would currently desire to have. While back in 1977 these computers functioned fine enough for them, they wouldn’t appeal to someone now. Why, because they Trinity many computers before that and after would not fit into the current culture aesthetically. The guidelines
When the cellphone was first introduced to society in 1983, it did initially focus on functionality. The first initial cell phone was commonly known as the “bag phone” it had one function, make phone calls. Beginning in 2000 when the “first” touchscreen phones were introduced is when the real challenge began. Designers were challenged with taking aspects of the desktop and condensing them to fit the compact screens of mobile devices. With the introduction of mobile devices, the guidelines went from a uniform set of rules to it varying between the major operating systems; iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. The cause of these contrasting guidelines comes from the different target groups. Where Android focuses on applications developers and providing highly customizable interfaces, Apple targets interaction and appeasing user experience with a very straightforward interface. (Groß) Essentially with Apple what you see is what you get, unless you jailbreak your IOS device, where with Android devices the user can personally customize their device without the addition of ‘jail breaking’
Take the HP Sprout for example, this device is an all-in-one desktop pc with 4 cameras. Gone is the physical keyboard and mouse, what you get in exchange is 20-pt touch mat that does more than a mouse and keyboard ever could. Consumers are in the midst of a paradigm shift as a result of this device, traditional desktop pc users are soon going to be faced with a world of no keyboards or mice. Some recently occurring trends are; content chunking, browser integration, and color affordances. Developers are now breaking up information and chunking it so users can quickly locate their desired topic. Apple has been using chunking for a while now but more websites are adopting this form of organizing information for users. Apple has established full integration between all of their devices for years now, but browser integration is seemingly on the rise. (Vukovic) The forerunner, Google Chrome, users can now sign into Google Chrome using their Google account on their computer and mobile devices and retrieve activity from either browser wherever they are. The integration on Google Chrome allows users to exchange bookmarks, history and settings. As kids we were always taught that red means; stop, bad, no, etc. and green means; go, good, yes, etc., well colors are being added into devices as a means of affordances. If the anti-virus protector is yellow or red one would automatically assume something bad happened and