Raskin humane interface pdf

See Graphical input devices Handheld personal data managers, xi Global Village, Handwriting tablet, Goals, objects, methods, and selection rules. See also Input devices, computer, See Intensive care unit and universal psychological facts, 4! See and absorption, See also Humane dialog box with different, interfaces; Human-machine Lazar, David, 11 interfaces; Interface design LEAP, , , , , , Interface timings, and cursor position, Interference, 21 document selection with, Internet, xix, 12, 99, See also Locus of attention MRI.

See Positron-emission tomography Noun-verb design of commands, Photo-processing programs, PLlI, Positional cues, Oberon, Positron-emission tomography, 15 Objects Pound, Ezra, 66 actions applied to, 59 Power connectors, display states of, Preemption dilemma solution, highlighting of, Preferences, 47 and locus df attention, Pressure-sensitive graphic tablets, sameness for, Product OCR programs.

See Optical character interface as, 5 recognition programs Productivity Old selection, designing for, 5 OLE software Microsoft , Programmers, One-button mouse, 34 and documentation, history and future, Programming One-on-one interaction with human user considerate, See also tIumane ease and pleasantness of, xix prograrnining language environments OpenDoc Apple , Progress bar, 76 Operating system, xviii Psi effect, elimination of, Psychology of Computer Programming Wein- Optical character recognition programs, berg , The rest of the book leaves one with mixed feelings.

This unique guide to interactive system design reflects the experience and vision of Jef Raskin, the creator of the Apple Macintosh. Techniques and Help Facilities in Humane Interfaces. Clear and fun read on how to create better interfaces than those we are currently unfortunately habituated to some fun screenshots https:.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience. Thanks to the groups at Addison Wesley Longman, whether editors, designers, in PR, marketing, or whatever, all of whom seem to have been chosen not only for their competence, but also for their friendliness and forbearance.

On the other hand, the anonymous reviewers they chose were merciless, for which I am also grateful. Only a few are experts in human-computer interface design, but all have read my manuscript and made essential contributions to the book or have contributed over the years to its concepts: David Alzofon who also drew Quasimodo , Bill Atkinson, Thomas Atwood, Paul Baker, Jerry Barenholtz, John Bumgarner, David Caulkins, William Buxton, Ph.

Miller, David Moshal, M. I am lucky to have a literate as well as a loving wife, Linda Blum, R. Her attention to the ideas, direction, and details of this book have improved many a page. I can take no credit in choosing my parents, but they deserve much credit for teaching me to value people over things and to relish the arts as well as the sciences, choices that lead directly to this work.

My son Aza contributed far beyond what you'd expect from someone of his youth, including ideas, editing, and hard work on the illustrations. He and his sisters were amazingly patient with me as I wrote. Especially important in my life is L. Roland Genise, my best teacher, who, during high school, gave me the twin gifts of intellectual self-confidence and a love of mathematics.

Among those who have shared warm friendship, philosophy, and music, and who have been devastating editors of my earlier works, I am lucky to be able to name Brian Howard and Douglas Wyatt.

I have disagreed with a few details of the writings of Dr. Donald Norman in this book, but these are minor points as I regard his work as essential reading in the field; without his critiques and teachings this book would not have come about.

I am grateful to Bill Verplank, a quiet and agreeable sort whose comments are delivered so gently that you don't realize the rug's been pulled out until you hit the floor. His was one of the voices that convinced me to completely change the tone and orientation of the book, for the better. Many concepts, a few of which are cited in the text, came from or were polished during discussions and work done with my friend James Winter, M. The delightfully acerbic computer scientist Dick Karpinski, who styles himself aptly as the world's largest leprechaun, has been helpful in manifold ways, whether expounding on a technical point, introducing me to a key person or book, or dropping by with dim sum.

And, whom I've saved for last, there's Peter Gordon, a man of wisdom, persistence, and especially patience, who was my advocate at Addison-Wesley. Our correspondence must never be made public as it would reveal a penchant for extended word play and awful puns that would forever besmirch both our names, but which lightened the burden of endless details that must be attended to in putting together even so slim a book as this.

Thanks to Agfa Corporation for supplying the digital camera used in creating some of the illustrations. Gustavson, Peter Johns, G. The author is also grateful to Rich Morin for supporting the www. You take your seat and look out the freshly cleaned large window.

With a sigh of anticipation for a particularly pleasant flight, you reach into a small compartment in front of you to see what is there. A not-too-small bottle of your favorite beverage comes to hand first, followed by a little booklet about this remarkable airliner.

As the flight attendants swing the doors shut and you settle in, you read the booklet. You learn that the aircraft is the work of some of the finest interior designers from all over the world, that chefs from fivestar restaurants have created the menu and personally prepared the dishes, and that because the internationally acclaimed artists who designed the exterior made the craft look so much faster than any other airliner, there had been no need to include professional aeronautical engineers in the aircraft's development team.

In the small print used for legalese, the booklet warns that the ride tends to be bumpy, even in the absence of turbulence, and that the plane crashes regularly. However, the booklet promises, until any of those events occur, you will be comfortable and well entertained. Suddenly, the latching of the doors seems menacing instead of promising. Your equanimity is gone; you are trapped.

This flight, the only one to your destination, is doomed, and you are on it. At this point, you'd rather be sitting on a hard seat, no drink in your hand and no window by your side but in an aircraft blessed by great engineering. This absurd situation closely parallels the nature of most human-machine interfaces today. Our computers and cellular telephones have the latest chips and electronics; today's operating systems are a feast for the eyes, with glorious colorful backgrounds and threedimensional tromp l'oeil effects.

You click on a button, and lo! But when you start to use the system, it begins to poke you with uncomfortable corners of unexpected behavior. You cannot find the command you want among the thousands that the system provides. Simple, routine tasks take forever to do. The program you bought last year does not run under the improved operating system, so you have to buy an upgrade.

And, of course, the system crashes regularly. Some engineering fundamentals that are not widely known underlie good interfaces. And why should those fundamentals be studied? But consider what these interfaces fail to do for us. When you want to set down an idea, you should be able to go to your computer or information appliance and just start typing: no booting, no opening the word processor, no file names, no operating system. My definition of an operating system: What you have to hassle with before you get to hassle with the application.

You should not have to learn an entire new application to perform what you know to be only a few simple tasks that you'd like to add to the repertory of your system.

Regrettably, the design of interfaces has taken a wrong turn, leading to a level of difficulty unjustified by technological or logical necessity. Millions of us have a love-hate relationship with information technology: We can't live without it, but at the same time, we find it difficult to live with.

The problem of making technology comfortable does have solutions, but we can't buy them now; they will be available to us only if we drop a lot of the baggage of the past.

The customary, desktop-based, applicationsoriented interfaces turn out to be part of the problem. This book offers some alternatives. After all, computer problems are not like the weather: We can do something about them.

Given the prevalence of the Internet and the obvious importance of products that facilitate group interaction, it may seem odd that The Humane Interface concentrates on single-user interface design. One reason is that the design of single-user interfaces is not a solved problem. If a system's one-on-one interaction with its human user is not pleasant and facile, the resulting deficiency will poison the performance of the entire system, however fine that system might be in its other aspects.

Background Nothing is more impossible than to write a book that wins every reader's approval. There is more to interfaces than windows, icons, pull-down menus, and mice. The need to take interface design into account early in the design cycle is sometimes overlooked.

Another factor often overlooked is the commonality in the cognitive equipment handed out to all of us. We must take into account common factors before we can deal with the differences among individual humans. Unfortunately, the tools widely available for interface construction are inadequate to this task. I reject the idea that computers are difficult to use because what we do with them has become irretrievably complicated.

No matter how complex the task a product is trying to accomplish, the simple parts of the task should remain simple. This chapter ends with a definition of a humane interface. Background Interface Definition Call our USA number above and test your stamina against the incredible frustration provided by our voice mail system.

Many people assume that the term user interface refers specifically to today's graphical user interfaces GUIs , complete with windows and mouse-driven menus.

For example, an article in Mobile Office magazine said, "Before too long, you may not have to worry about an interface at all: You may find yourself simply speaking to your computer.

See also Raskin Background Keep the Simple Simple Technology is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. Snow quoted in Jarman Despite a burgeoning population of interface designers, few consumers claim that new products, such as an electric, four-button wristwatch, are easier to use than they were a few decades ago.

If you point out to me that watches, like computers, now have much greater functionality true and that, in consequence, the interfaces have had to become more complex debatable , I respond by pointing out that even the simple tasks that I used to do easily have become mired in complexity. Complex tasks may require complex interfaces, but that is no excuse for complicating simple tasks.

Compare the difficulty of setting the time on your electronic, four-button wristwatch to that of completing the same task on a mechanical model. No matter how complex the overall system, there is no excuse for not keeping simple tasks simple. Of the many absurdities foisted on us by inept interface design, perhaps it is the complication of what should be simple that gives comic strips and comedians the most opportunities.

In the movie City Slickers, three chums are driving a herd of cattle. When the friends finally explode in exasperation at the lengthy explanation, Crystal's character cheerfully agrees to drop the subject and offers instead an explanation of how to set the clock on the VCR. This offer enrages his cronies and cracks up the audience. The humor arises from the dissonance between the simplicity of the task and the difficulty of the interface: If the vertical front of a VCR had labeled buttons situated above and below the digits of a clock as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. An easy-to-set digital clock on a VCR. An even better design would be a clock that set itself based on broadcast time signals. The first step in meeting this need is to get to know your users, but in commercial practice, getting to know the users usually consists of listening to task domain experts.

Domain experts often know the parameters and details of the problem to be solved, but their formal expertise does not usually extend to questions of human psychology. Although users' task-related needs differ, your user population shares many common mental attributes. Before exploring the application or even working to accommodate differences among individuals, interface designers can minimize their work by exploiting what is common to all humans with regard to interface-design requirements.

After that is accomplished, the interface designers can accommodate the differences across individuals and groups, and, finally, they can satisfy the varying requirements of their tasks. For the most part, interface designers have abdicated that responsibility to "industry standards. For example, files with file names are a nearly universal feature in computer systems, yet we all have trouble remembering what file name we used to store a document six months ago.

A solution to this problem will be discussed in Section We want comprehensible software that demonstrates, by its impeccable behavior, that its designers were focused more on usability than on glitz. In spite of their utility, these tools will not be mentioned often in this book; they enshrine current paradigms and thus unduly limit the scope of what you can do.

Where real improvement can be achieved by making major changes, the interface designer must balance the legitimate use of familiar paradigms, which ease the learning process, against the enhanced usability that can be attained by abandoning them.

In a situation of rapid turnover of personnel or the customer base, familiarity might be the better design choice. Background Interface Design in the Design Cycle Project methodologies often fail to take full advantage of what is known about interface design.

This omission can be the result of bringing in interface designers long after much of the opportunity for improving the quality of interaction between user and product has been lost. Designs are most flexible at their inception. The budget and most of the schedule have already been expended, and the option of throwing away much or all of the design and the completed code makes the project managers look bad.

Even so, as recent a book on project management as the UML Toolkit Eriksson and Magnus fails to recognize that the interface has to be part of the requirements analysis, which is Eriksson and Magnus's first phase of project development.

Contrary to their suggestion, interface design cannot be postponed until the technical design phase their third phase. Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design. This is an iterative process: The task definition will change as the interface is designed, and the implementation will be influenced by the task definition and the interative interface design as well.

Flexibility on all fronts is needed. The place to start the implementation is to list exactly what the user will do to achieve his or her goals and how the system will respond to each user action.

Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done. What processor was used, whether the programming language was object oriented or multithreaded, or whether it was the proud possessor of some other popular buzzword does not count. What users want is convenience and results. But all that they see is the interface. As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.

I use a keyboard-operated save command every time I complete a paragraph or even a few sentences. This command places a copy of my work on the disk, where it is relatively safe from damage in a crash.

Every hour or so, I further back up my work to a nonvolatile memory card that I physically remove from the computer so that the backup is isolated from the computer and is safe, no matter how the computer runs amok; every week, I back up the whole system on an external disk drive. I am not paranoid, just realistic. Yet these elaborate procedures should be unnecessary. The first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

While working on this book, and at the suggestion of my editors, I began to use a facility that allows me to accept or to reject suggested changes. After every few decisions, I used the save command. When the system crashed, I was not worried, because of my continual saves. But when I went to find my most recent changes, they were gone, and I had to redo my work. By trying a few experiments, I finally figured out that when the accept-reject feature is in use, the keyboard save command does not operate.

No warning is given. I lost more than three hours in work and in experimenting to figure out what had happened, in the hope of preventing a recurrence.

Aside from the sheer complexity of today's computer systems, it is vexing details such as this one that prove the need for better interface design. For a second interface law, you could do worse than to insist on this one: A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

Section introduces a measure of how much work is necessary to complete a task. Background Definition of a Humane Interface You can have any combination of features the Air Ministry desires, so long as you do not also require that the resulting airplane fly.

If you want to create a humane interface, you must have an understanding of the relevant information on how both humans and machines operate. In addition, you must cultivate in yourself a sensitivity to the difficulties that people experience. That is not necessarily a simple undertaking.

We become accustomed to the ways that products work to the extent that we come to accept their methods as a given, even when their interfaces are unnecessarily complex, confusing, wasteful, and provocative of human error. Many of us become annoyed, for example, at the amount of time that it takes a computer to start up, or to boot.

An advertisement for a computer-based car radio in assures us that "unlike a home computer, there are no long boot-up times to worry about. I am sure that each of these authors would wholeheartedly agree that reducing or eliminating this delay would improve usability; I have never met a user to whom the delay is not an annoyance. Yet the boot delay is so much a familiar and accepted part of using a computer that it is seldom questioned in the interface-design literature.

There has never been any technical necessity for a computer to take more than a few seconds to begin operation when it is turned on. We have slowbooting computers only because many designers and implementers did not assign a high priority to making the interface humane in this regard. In addition, some people believe that the sale of millions of slow-booting computers "proves" that the way these machines now work is just fine.

The annoyance of having to wait for a machine to start up has not been ignored in other product areas. Engineering has successfully tackled some more difficult problems. In early television sets, for example, the wait due to the time it took to heat the cathode of the picture tube was nearly a minute. In certain television sets, engineers added a circuit to keep the cathode warm, reducing the wait to reach operating temperature.

Keeping the cathode fully heated would have been wasteful of electricity and would have shortened the life of the tube. Other engineers designed picture tubes that had cathodes that heated in a few seconds.

Either way, the user's needs were satisfied. In the early twentieth century, the failure of the Stanley Steamer, a steam-powered automobile that apparently was a superior vehicle in other aspects, may have been a result of the minute delay between firing it up and its having sufficient boiler pressure to drive. That a user should not be kept waiting unnecessarily is an obvious and humane design principle.

It is also humane not to hurry a user; the more general principle is: Users should set the pace of an interaction. It does not take much technical knowledge to see, for example, that higher-bandwidth communication channels can hasten downloading of web pages. Other relationships are not so evident. Cognetics and the Locus of Attention He wept and was nothing content, but it booted not.

Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium As complicated as computers and other products of our technology may be, it is easier to understand the machine side of the human-machine interface than to come to grips with the far more complex and variable human side. These properties of human learning and performance are directly applicable to the foundations of any interface design. In particular, that we have one locus of attention affects many aspects of the design of human-machine interfaces.

Design a human-machine interface in accord with the abilities and foibles of humankind, and you will help the user to not only get the job done but also be a happier, more productive person. Design guidelines for products that interact with us physically are reasonably straightforward.

The sizes and capabilities of the human frame and senses have been well cataloged; these studies form the science of ergonomics.

Chairs, tables, keyboards, and displays can be designed with a high degree of likelihood that they will work reasonably well for their human users, although thorough testing can never be neglected.

You would not design a machine that required one person to simultaneously operate two switches 3 meters apart: We all know that humans are not that large. Mayhew , Chapter 12 discusses computer-relevant ergonomics, a topic outside the scope of this book, in her overview of interface design.

Ergonomics takes into account the statistical nature of human variability. You might design a car seat to accommodate only 95 percent of the population, even though you know that 5 percent of the potential car purchasers will find the seat uncomfortable. It might be too expensive or mechanically impossible to give the seat the range of adjustment needed to work with the rare 1-meter midget or the rarer still 2.

For the most part, the machines that our civilizations have built have been mechanical and have interacted principally with our physical selves. Consequently, our physical limitations are relatively well understood. Increasingly, inventions have come to the aid of intellectual rather than physical pursuits.

We must master an ergonomics of the mind if we want to design interfaces that are likely to work well. As surprising as it may seem, we are often blind to our own mental limits; we must rely on careful experiment and observation to discover the edges of our own mind's abilities.

The study of the applicable, engineering scope of our mental abilities is cognitive engineering, or cognetics. Certain cognetic limitations are obvious: You do not expect a typical user to be able to mentally multiply a pair of digit numbers in 5 seconds, and you would not design an interface that requires such an ability. But we are often not aware of other mental limitations that adversely affect our performance when we use human-machine interfaces, although these limitations are inherent in every human.

Much of the difficulty that we have with computers and related devices is due to poor interface design rather than to any complexity inherent to the task or to any lack of effort or intelligence on the part of users. Just as ergonomics takes into account the statistical nature of human variability, so too should cognetics. However, because there has been so little practical use of what is known of the limits of human cognition that are common to all of us, it seems wise to look first at those limits.

We can design successful interfaces based on a pragmatic and empiric view of what the human mind can and cannot do, of how long the mind and body take to do particular tasks, and of the circumstances that increase the likelihood that we will make mistakes. In an engineering context, it is useful to work with the more limited concepts of the cognitive conscious and the cognitive unconscious.

More accurate would be the terms empirical conscious and empirical unconscious, but Kihlstrom's more euphonic coinage has priority Cohen and Schooler , p. Understanding that we possess these two distinct sets of limited mental abilities and understanding how they work in relationship to human-machine interfaces is as essential to designing interfaces as is knowing the size and the strength of the human hand when we are designing a keyboard.

Here is a first-cut definition: Unconscious mental processes are those of which you are not aware at the time they occur. The cognitive unconscious is not the seething, mythic creature of Freudian psychology but rather a phenomenon that you can demonstrate with a straightforward experiment, which you will be asked to try shortly.

Although a growing mountain of books discusses the questions and paradoxes of consciousness, following the approach taken in Bernard J. As Baars says in his preface, "one time-honored strategy in science is to sidestep philosophical issues for a time by focusing on empirically decidable ones.

Although theoretical studies can be illuminating and eventually may lead to firm and practical results, we avoid them until they do. Analogously, although a study of human bone growth can inform ergonomics, such a study would fall within the purview of physiology rather than of ergonomics itself.

Consciousness and Models of the Mind In following Baars's useful treatment of the cognitive properties of consciousness, it is not necessary also to subscribe to his theory of mind, which uses contemporary digital computer structures as models. I am leery of that approach, especially because throughout the ages, thinkers have borrowed the latest technology as models for understanding humans only to abandon or to limit the models when technology advanced.

Don Norman, a cognitive psychologist who is especially conversant with computers, spoke of the mind in terms of computational units Norman Although the analogies are usually enlightening, some scholars tend to overapply the metaphor of the moment. We must monitor this tendency carefully lest we reify the analogies without neurophysiological support. In the seventeenth century, the universe and its denizens were often spoken of in terms of clockwork Dijksterhuis , p.

In the nineteenth century, the metaphor of the steam engine permeated many philosophical musings on human function; now we know that the analogy's value is limited primarily to explaining metabolism, insofar as the metabolic system is a heat engine. These treatments, however fascinating to read, unfortunately turn out to be of no use in the design of human-machine interfaces.

Without direct evidence of functional parallelism in hand, it is wise to avoid taking computer-brain metaphors too literally. Because concerns about what is conscious and unconscious usually seem remote from our workaday world, let us tangibly demonstrate their reality in your life by means of a question: What is the final character in your first name? Until you read the previous sentence, you were probably not thinking about this alphabetic character and its relationship to your name.

You were not thinking of it; you were not considering it. Or, to use our preferred terminology, you were not conscious of it. Deep thinking is rare in this field where most companies are glad to copy designs that were great back in the s. Definitely recommended for anyone designing user interfaces.

Although some of the specific interface ideas described in this book are already dated, the premise — that the human should be the central consideration of interface design — is quite sensible. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website.

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