Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
January/February 2004

Book Review: The Humane Interface

by Richard Mateosian
Senior Member, Berkeley Chapter

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
by Jef Raskin (Addison-Wesley, Reading MA, 2000, ISBN 0-201-37937-6, $24.95)

Jef Raskin’s best-known work is the Macintosh. That product brought about a revolution in computer interface design, but yesterday’s revolutionary idea has become today’s entrenched paradigm. Raskin has moved on. In this book, he shows the flaws of the desktop-and-application approach and explains how it can evolve into something much easier for humans to use.

Raskin centers his ideal system on your content—not named files in a hierarchy of directories, but just content. You can have files and directories, but only if you decide to mark their boundaries in an otherwise undifferentiated sea of content. Rather than applications to process your content, Raskin gives you individual commands. Thus, rather than buying Photoshop and Word, you buy individual (or perhaps groups of) image processing commands from Adobe and text manipulation commands from Microsoft. You can use the text commands to add text to images, and you can use the image processing commands to manipulate the images in your printed documents.

This sounds like component software or Unix filters. It’s not a radically new idea, but Raskin arrives at it from a different direction.

He begins by asking how he can make interfaces that humans can learn easily and use efficiently. To answer that question, he looks at the equipment on both sides of that interface: the computer and the human.

Many people have studied human cognition, but few have applied what we know about the capabilities and limitations of humans to the problems of interface design. To do this, Raskin applies techniques and observations that the cognitive psychologist Bernard J. Baars discusses in his book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge, 1988).

Raskin takes a fundamental principle from Baars’ work: Humans can accomplish many tasks in parallel, but can pay attention only to one at a time. We all know this, but many people design interfaces as if it weren’t true. Raskin’s examples of this error are taken from widely used software products.

The fact that we have at most one locus of attention, whereas most tasks we perform with computers require us to accomplish a variety of subtasks in parallel, leads to the principle of automaticity: The more we can do without thinking, the more efficient we are. Anything that makes us think about what we already know how to do slows us down. This principle leads to the following conclusions:

• Interfaces should be modeless—the way to accomplish a task should be the same under all circumstances.
• Interfaces that change in an attempt to adapt to your actions can actually slow you down.

Raskin elaborates on these points with many examples. Some of the examples are surprising. They show the inefficiency of widely practiced interface design techniques.

Raskin turns a lot of attention to the problems of navigation. He likens current navigation methods in applications, operating systems, and the Web to trying to find your way around a maze with only the ground-level view of where you are and where you’ve been. He proposes a two-pronged approach to improving this situation: a zooming video camera metaphor for finding your way around a pictorial representation of your content, and a text-search facility that differs sharply from the most commonly used search facilities.

Raskin also applies quantitative methods to interface design. He uses the goals, objects, methods, and selection rules (GOMS) technique developed by Stuart Card, Thomas Moran, and Allen Newell to measure the relative efficiencies of alternative interfaces.

I haven’t come near to covering all the topics Raskin addresses in this marvelous book—icons, programming environments, documentation, the number of buttons on a mouse, and even cables and connectors. If you have anything to do with designing any aspect of computer systems for use by humans, you should read this book. People will be talking about it for a long time.

This review originally appeared in slightly different form in the May/June 2000 issue of IEEE Micro.
© Copyright 2000 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. All rights reserved.

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