Granting three wishes through performance-centered design
Gloria J. Gery · Communications of the ACM · 1997
The article focuses on new design possibilities that visual and task focused systems offer. In the 1970s when the infrastructure, methodologies, specifications, architecture and goals for large scale corporate systems were set, the focus of applications software was data processing. The hardware was, of course primitive by today's standards. But hardware aside, the first 10 to 15 years of application development were focused on structuring environments to capture, transform, and report on data-largely transaction data. The first systems author remember were insurance, banking people used to keypunch from when batch systems were the rage. Of course, since the paper forms couldn't be represented well and since display screen real estate was such a priority, these "data entry"screens contained huge numbers of fields with minimalist cryptic labels. Since people weren't doing anything but entering data that existed on source paper forms, the focus was on rapid data entry. And since data transmission was costly, the goal was to have as much on a display as possible before pressing transmit or enter