Palm Pilot's Graffiti input system likely made users more willing to put up with lower quality.
- Palm Pilot's Graffiti input system likely made users more willing to put up with lower quality.
- Back in the day, Graffiti was a special input system that required you to trace specific shapes with your stylus to input specific letters.
- Many shapes were the same as the letters they encoded.
- But some were wildly different.
- Instead of saying, "just write like normal and we'll figure it out"--an impossibly high bar to hit even now, let alone in the 90's–they said "learn this new way to input that is inspired by handwriting"[ss]
- If the system didn't understand your input, it wasn't just "the system is dumb," it also had a "oh I didn't make the shape properly."
- The outcome felt co-created by the user and the system, which made users more willing to put up with failures and not give up in frustration.
- There was something the user could do to meet the system where it was and get higher quality output.