I'd like to second Jim's recommendation of Jef Raskin's book "The
Humane Interface".
-K
Jim Blandy <jimb@savonarola.red-bean.com> writes:
> With the possible exception of my own posts, I think the discussion
> about interfaces on this list has been very civil and constructive,
> which is great. I've noticed that user interface discussions
> elsewhere get acrimonious pretty fast, which is a shame.
>
> At least with code, if we've agreed on the behavior we want, there's a
> consensus that "correct", "understandable", and "fast enough" are the
> values. We don't care so much how we get there, which gives us a lot
> of freedom in working together. But there really isn't any consensus
> on what makes a good user interface. One man's meat is apparently
> another man's poison.
>
> But I don't think that's really true. I think we grant too much
> authority to personal taste, because we're in a primitive phase of
> understanding user interfaces:
>
> - We're each reasoning from our own experiences, so when clashes
> arise, we have no customary practice for resolving them. Your
> experiences are simply different from mine, full stop.
>
> - We're unable to distinguish the effects of our own habituation from
> the independent qualities of the interface.
>
> Emacs: "I don't mind remembering that M-~ clears the buffer-modified flag."
>
> vi: "Sure, ~ just operates on one character, instead of being
> followed by a motion command, like everything else. It's okay."
>
> make: "Sure, the build process hides your warnings amongst thirty
> pages of `all is well'. But it's okay, I've got an Emacs mode to go
> find them for me. Sure, if a file gets only warnings, it doesn't
> need recompilation, so you'll never see the warning again. Just do
> `make clean' every once in a while to stir them up again."
>
> And these limitations make it hard for groups to make choices. The
> available methods of persuasion are weak, so you're effectively
> beholden to the intuition of the folks making the decisions. And
> since that intuition isn't shaped by any coherent theory, it's certain
> to be wrong, often.
>
> I recently read Jef Raskin's book, _The Humane Interface_, and I
> really enjoyed it. Rather than recommending specific implementation
> techniques, it provides principles and metrics for assessing
> interfaces. So it's not biased towards GUI's --- it's completely
> clear how command-line, non-mousey interfaces can be vastly superior
> to GUI's. (Finally, a UI person who doesn't tell us we're stupid!)
> You can read it and say, "Wow, *that's* what I like about Emacs." You
> can understand why the Bryce raytracer was able to completely ditch
> the Macintosh look-and-feel and get a vastly superior interface. You
> can understand why even using Motif well doesn't guarantee a decent
> result.
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:13 2006