Media: Jef Raskin on the future of user interfaces

In one of his long term projects, a book entitled 'The Mac and Me', Jef Raskin discusses how he learned to put human needs ahead of technical concerns. The book is "about the things that gave a strong humanitarian and altruistic direction to my life and a lack of interest in making money for its own sake". Raskin acknowledges that the Macintosh was, from the beginning, anidealistic project but he knew has to be a commercial success. Raskin had argued that MacOS interface should be licensed but Steve Jobs, then running Apple, didn't. "After I left and before the product was released, the interface got somewhat more difficult to use because some of the people who were designing it afterwards had less of an understanding of human factors." He believes there was an over-reliance on the mouse and icons. "An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. Whatever language you know, you have to learn the meaning of an icon anew." ("Ever notice that those little tips come up to explain icons are words?" he adds.) Discussing 'The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction' (Card, Moran, and Newell. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983) he notes that using their and my methods, you can predict a lot about the performance of an interface and its human users without having to build and test it, though he adds that testing is still required to make sure that an interface works well. He discusses his THE project, which presents and alternative model for human-computer interaction to the current GUI, which was meant to make conventional computer structures more accessible and asks the "human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well". His celebrated book ,'The Humane Interface', came out of his realisation that "a lot of interface approaches we took were simply wrong, including some things that I had designed", and he compares his approach to that of David Gelernter. "the GUI starts from a model of how the machine works, THE starts from a model of how we work."

Reflecting on his UI consulting work he comments that "when I get to a company I discover that the real problems are structural with respect to the company, and I end up having to work on that a lot". "People don't understand, for the most part, the idea of competing with yourself. If you can do something better, put it out alongside what you presently have and let natural selection take care of it."

Read an excerpt from 'The Humane Interface', also in Ubiquity:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/book/j_raskin_1.html

Read more about THE from a previous story in Usability News:
http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article894.asp

THE resources:
http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/

[Use picture at http://www.usabilitynews.com/pics/jef_raskin.jpg ]

Associated Link: Ubiquity: A Conversation with Jef Raskin

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