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The Humane Interface
New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
by Jef Raskin. Reading, Mass.: ACM Press, 2000. 256 p. $24.95 (ISBN 0-201-- 37937-6)
Jef Raskin has the chops to write a book about humane interfaces. He's been in the business of interface design for a long time. Before Steve Jobs took over the project personally, Raskin was the project leader for the Macintosh; the jacket copy for The Humane Interface somewhat hyperbolically terms him "the creator of the Macintosh computer project." The truth is that Raskin is much better than the eventual interface design of the Macintosh suggests, as his subsequent work demonstrates.
The clearest explanation of the book's raison d'etre comes in its conclusion, where Raskin lays out what he hopes he's accomplished. Perhaps it would be a good idea for the reader to start with the conclusion, and discover that Raskin's goal is to explain how to make interfaces as simple as possible given the limitations and capabilities of human beings. Certainly a laudable goal, and one that he accomplishes principally by exploring "cognetics," the study of cognitive psychology as it can be applied to engineering.
It is in the exploration ot cognetics that it first becomes apparent through empirical methods why our computer interfaces are as bad as they are: they have little to do with human abilities and fail to take into account the blind spots of the human mind. The biggest blind spot is our inability to easily deal with modes, the differing behavior of an interface depending on the state of the system. Because we are not "wired" to roll with these changes of state, we frequently use keystrokes or other gestures (clicking, moving the mouse, etc.) in ways inappropriate to the current state of our application or operating system. But our mistakes are not reflections of our own disability. They are indicative of the failure of engineers and programmers to design humanely. We should not have to adapt to the peculiarities of the computer; rather, the computer should reflect the ways humans behave.
Digressing slightly, I once had a colleague who espoused the view that eventually personal computers tended to develop personalities, and when they did, when they began to exhibit idiosyncratic "behavior," it was at that point...