Bruce Tognazzini

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (born 1945) is an American usability and human-computer interaction professional. He is a partner in the Nielsen Norman Group. He was an early employee of Apple Computer, staying with the company for fourteen years, then he was with Sun Microsystems for four years, then WebMD for another four years.

Tognazzini has written two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, published by Addison-Wesley, and he publishes the webzine Asktog, with the tagline "Interaction Design Solutions for the Real World".

Career Tog was an early employee of Apple Computer starting in 1978. In June 1978, Steve Jobs, having seen one of Tog's early programs, The Great American Probability Machine, had Jef Raskin hire him as Apple's first applications software engineer. He's listed on the back of his book Tog on Interface (Addison Wesley, 1991) as "Apple Employee #66" (the same employee number he held later at WebMD).

In his early days at Apple, simultaneous with his developing Apple's first human interface, for the Apple II computer, he published Super Hi-Res Chess, a novelty program for the Apple II that, despite its name, did not play chess or have any hi-res (high-resolution) graphics; instead, it seemed to crash to the Applesoft BASIC prompt with an error message, but was actually a parody of Apple's BASIC command line interface that seemingly took over control of one's computer, refusing to give it back until the magic word was discovered.

His work in user-interface testing and design, including publishing the first edition, in September, 1978, and seven subsequent editions of The Apple Human Interface Guidelines, played an important role in the direction of Apple's product line from the early days of Apple into the 1990s.

He and his partner, John David Eisenberg, wrote Apple Presents...Apple, the disk that taught new Apple II owners how to use the computer.

While at Sun Microsystems, Tog also filed for 58 US patents, with 57 issued in the areas of aviation safety, GPS, and human-computer interaction. Among them is US Patent 6278660, the time-zone-tracking wristwatch with built-in GPS and simple time-zone maps that sets itself using the GPS satellite's atomic clock and re-sets itself automatically whenever crossing into a new time zone.

In 2000, after his four-year stint at WebMD, Tog joined his colleagues as the third principal at the Nielsen Norman Group, along with Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman.