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I was talking with my non-techie wife tonight. She was talking about how she was training staff to use some new software. The software made heavy use of wizards to accomplish tasks. Her question to me was "Why are wizards called 'wizards?' Are they made by some nerd with an interest in Dungeons & Dragons?"
I realized that, while the "nerd" and "Dungeons & Dragons" were true in my case, I didn't know the origin of of the term "wizard" as it relates to a part of an application that guides a user through some difficult process.
I'm curious to see what thoughts others here have on this great and weighty question.
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The word wizard comes from the Middle English word 'wys' meaning 'wise'. In this sense, it first appeared in English in the early 15th century. As a word used to describe a man with magical powers, wizard did not start to be used until around 1550.
In computing, wizards were originally expert computer users (people) who could install software or help you with your installation. Later, they were software assistants (programs) to help with initial tasks of setting something up.
In computing and Internet applications, the term wizard is sometimes used in reference to a human hacker or expert user. Wizards are often specialists. A person who is a wizard in a single field such as Unix programming may lack knowledge in other fields such as hardware engineering.
A wizard is a simplified, sequential control for guiding users through a complex task. Wizards guide users through a sequence of steps, offering more direction along the way than does traditional UI. A wizard control consists of a series of pages, each of which helps the user perform a step in the overall task.
My impression is that it's related to the meaning of wizard that's similar to "expert". A UI wizard is like a (very simple) expert system. The wizard/"expert" asks you a series of questions to figure out what you want, and then they use their "expertise" to generate a result.
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One of the original Wizard interfaces, was with Microsoft Publisher 2.0.
The wizard part came after the last dialog page, where it would 'magically' perform the actions required to achieve the task requested in the wizard, and actually show you how to do it. For example, running the Greeting Card Wizard, would show you how to set the aspect ratio, paper size, etc.
I guess user interface testing showed that not enough people were following the wizard tutorial, and just skipped through it to get the desired result, because this functionality was dropped in later versions of Publisher.
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Because they magically guide the user through the process to achieve the users goal.
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