What does ‘for the rest of us’ mean?
I got one of the first Macs in New Zealand. While I was using an IBM mainframe to crunch statistics from my research, I was able to desktop publish my master’s thesis on my Mac. The contrast between the experience on the IBM mainframe and the Mac had quite an impact on me. At the time Apple talked about the Mac being the computer ‘for the rest of us’ – it was easy-to-use and you didn’t have to be an engineer to do powerful things with it.
When I later went to work at Apple I found the ‘for the rest of us’ mantra was part of the Apple core values. One of my managers, who at one time had been the evangelist for Apple’s ground breaking LaserWriter printer, explained the mantra of the LaserWriter team had been to ‘build the laser printer for the rest of us’. Later I got to design the user experience for a ‘projector for the rest of us’ which Apple was developing – this was challenging when most people’s biggest fear was to give a presentation let alone try to make a projector work at the same time! In the QuickTime VR team we said we were developing ‘virtual reality for the rest of us’ – our goal was to give people a VR experience with ‘a one button mouse, no goggles, and a regular computer’. At Apple, we assumed our job was to make technology work for the rest of us. I think that if you look at Apple’s products today, you can see they still hold true to this ideal. So who is ‘the rest of us’?
The ‘rest of us’ means ‘all of us’ – folks who may not understand the technology behind a product, but want to use the product to get something done.
Frequently ground breaking products make use of new technologies, but the ability to make products functional and usable is a key factor in making new products a success for customers. In this blog, my goal is to make people more aware of how we can design products to be used by non-technical people – ‘the rest of us’. But more than that I’ve come to be aware in recent years that with a small amount of effort we can be much more inclusive when we design products. So, when we say ‘the rest of us’, I include in that people who need products to be accessible.
