Book review

Jef Raskin is a user interface consultant and was a designer of the Apple Macintosh and Canon Cat computers. His recent book, The Humane Interface is of broad importance for the discipline of humancomputer interaction (HCI). It is important for designers because it is one of the few books that oVers an approach based on whatever science there is in HCI and, therefore, should oVer user interface techniques that really work. It is important for researchers because it helps us think beyond current interface styles, and makes us realize that a lot of what we take for granted with interfaces is at best unnecessary and at worst an impediment to our productivity. It was a bit di cult at the outset to see the general picture Raskin would paint. While reading the ®rst few chapters, I found myself thinking I was getting an ersatz `Design of Everyday Things’ (Norman 1988). However, as I proceeded through the book, the various ideas were brought together into an overarching theme that, once understood, was profound. This book is much meatier than Norman’s, and I believe it forms an important new paradigm for interface design. Let us discuss some examples. One of Raskin’s ideas is that we use the same core set of elementary operations for many purposes (one might say across applications). Such operations include selection, indication, activation, moving and copying. If we use the same small set of operations across applications, we can learn a keyboard shortcut or have special purpose keys for each, rather than look them up via menu selection using a pointing device. Why do we have all these special-purpose menu items peppering the top of our displays? Raskin argues that they are unnecessary. In a mistaken attempt to provide us with lots of functionality (feature bloat), designers have cobbled together the elementary operations as menu items. But if the elementary operations are well learned, then a rapid series of command keystrokes will be faster than the menu look up and selection. Perhaps we do not need applications at all. This revolutionary idea is explored at length in the book. In Raskin’s world, instead of buying software applications, we buy application-independen t command sets that plug into our general user interface. The command sets would work with transformers that change content from one data type to another (allowing you to check spelling in a graphic using optical character recognition, for example). Commands and transformers can be purchased as needed, perhaps even on an individual basis. The result is that we use a small set of elementary keystrokes or special keys for everything we do on the computerÐword processing, e-mail, tables and graphs, computation, drawing pictures, writing code, etc. Because commands are consistently mapped to speci®c actions or gestures, software will be easy to learn and there will be no negative transfer from one situation to the next. Raskin emphasizes the importance of automaticity in interface design. If the same set of actions is repeated over time, it becomes automatized. He notes that there is a need for software that encourages habit formation. Such software would assign one control to one function mapping. With special purpose keys, there is no problem in learning the association of a speci®c keystroke with a speci®c operation. In contrast, too many options puts the user’s locus of attention to the selection of a command rather than the command itself. User says: `I think I’ll bold this word here. Should I bold this text from the 5Format, Font4menu sequence, or by pressing the bold icon button? Or should I right click and choose font on that dialog box? HeyÐthat dialog box is diVerent from the one I get with the menus! ’ The selection of the particular command sequence has become the locus of attention and distracts from the command action. The ̄ipside of this notion is that when we do develop automaticity we had better ensure that the sequence that is being developed is e cient. Once the sequence is automatized it becomes hard to interrupt the sequence without attending to it. Hence, if a designer prompts the BEHAVIOUR & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY, 2002, VOL. 21, NO. 3, 231±233