Why are wizard dialogs called "wizards"?

Question

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.

Answer 1

I guess because user interfaces that configured things that were previously done manually must have seemed like magic to users. It's a pretty good analogy if you think about it - this little config app is doing many many things with a single "wave of the wand" as it were.

Answer 2

I believe Microsoft invented and introduced the term, no doubt for marketing related reasons.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Because they magically guide the user through the process to achieve the users goal.

Answer 5

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.