The OK Corral: A Brief History Of The “OK” Button

You click it everyday. It's in your computer and even your phone and PDA. The “OK” button is nearly ubiquitous, but where did it come from? According to the UI design blog, History of the Button, the “OK” button made its debut in Apple's Lisa software.

The interface designers were apparently testing some interaction dialogues in Lisa and noticed that the dialogue box with “Cancel” and “Do It” caused problems for many users. According the folklore.org one user in particular was frustrated by the “Do It” button:

It turns out he wasn't noticing the space between the ‘o' and the ‘I' in ‘Do It'; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital ‘I' looked very much like a lower case ‘l', so he was reading ‘Do It' as ‘Dolt' and was therefore kind of offended.

The designers decided to switch to “OK” instead.

The interesting thing about that switch is that it has implication well beyond just readability in san serif fonts. As Bill DeRouchey writes on History of the Button, “OK” represents a complete change in semantic approach to machines.

Interesting. “Do it!” is the same as previous versions of Enter or Execute. It's commanding the machine to do something. OK is acquiescing to the machine, forming a partnership. In the end, the simple OK button may have contributed to the success of the Macintosh. It changed the relationship between person and computer, away from the master and slave mentality toward a friendlier world where the computer is a partner.

[via neatorama]