Summary
A review of The Humane Interface, by Jef Raskin.

I've just finished Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. Jef's greatest claim to fame is the invention of the original Machintosh (although I'm not sure exactly what role he played, given that the Macintosh was surely created by a team). I found the book a quick read, interesting and thought-provoking, although a bit uneven.

This book wants to be on the same shelf as Donald Norman's classic, The Psychology of Everyday things. Like Normal, Raskin revels in pointing out examples of bad interface design right under our noses, for example the placement of Windows menus, which he claims are hard to aim for because they're not at the edge of the screen like Mac menus. I once attended an entertaining talk Jef gave criticizing the "iDrive" interface in the BMW 745i, which makes every rookie mistake in interface design imaginable: from having too many levels of submenus to requiring the driver's attention when his eyes should be on the road, and, of course, the mother of all bad interface design, modes.

Remember the editor wars, pitting vi and Emacs enthusiasts against each other? One argument often heard against vi is that it has modes: sometimes, typing an 'x' inserts the letter 'x' into the text, and other times, it acts as a command (erasing a character, as it happens). While vi's successor, vim, does a much better job of showing in which mode you are, Jef's point is that the mode indicator is not at the user's locus of attention: that is the insert point in the text, while the mode indicator (at least when using the terminal version) is at the bottom of the screen. If you are distracted for a few seconds and then go back to your editing, you may not notice the mode indicator in the corner of your peripheral vision, and you will start typing assuming the wrong mode. Sure enough, that has happened to me many times. (Emacs has modes too though! For example, I often find myself inexplicably in a modal dialog, or accidentally typing into a "dired" window.)

In his book, Jef argues that all modes are evil, whether we are talking modal dialog boxes, different selection modes in graphical editors, or even having different applications that behave differently. Since humans are creatures of habit, we have a hard time remembering which mode the computer is, because we want to focus on the task at hand; modes divert our attention to keeping track of the mode, and hence slow us down.

Jef's alternative is a clever idea that he calls a quasimode, which is a mode that only lasts as long as the user keeps a key or button depressed. His key example is LEAP: an incremental search that is triggered by depressing a key placed below the space bar with your thumb. The LEAP mode ends as soon as the key is released. It is impossible to forget that you're holding the LEAP key down (this has something to do with the part of our nervous system that keeps track of which muscles are used), so you can't forget the mode you're in. I've seen Jef give a demo of this using a laptop's mouse buttons as LEAP keys, and the idea seems to work well -- if you have a keyboard with keys that can be used for this purpose.

But for most of us, LEAP and some of Jef's other clever ideas are part of a utopian dream which we cannot obtain. Some other ideas discussed in the book are more down-to-earth. For example, I found his explanation of the GOMS analysis of how long it takes to perform a particular task very useful: some of the biggest slowdowns are switching between mouse and keyboard, aiming the mouse at a tiny target, and thinking about what to do next. Jef's analysis of the amount of information conveyed by a user gesture is also interesting: for example, clicking in a modal dialog box with only an OK button conveys no information, and such informational messages are better presented in a way that doesn't require explicit acknowledgement. Jef's suggestion, to make the message transparent, is clever and I would like to try this out -- but, heeding one of his other points (also made in another favorite book of mine, Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think), it needs more user testing.

Jef makes a point against interface customization which I have long observed: customizations act as long-living modes, and can cause great pain and confusion when you find yourself using a familiar application on someone else's computer, or even on your own computer when you have changed a preference that has a farther-reaching effect than expected. (An extreme example: four out of five PythonLabs developers use XEmacs on Red Hat Linux, and yet none of us dares drive anyone else's keyboard, because our personalizations are all totally different. When doing pair programming, this can be a serious slow-down!)

Jef also argues convincingly against differentiating between beginner and expert modes, and against "learning" interfaces that change the contents of the menus based on its observation of your behavior. He is not against menus (menu selection is after all the first quasi-mode), and seems to argue for fewer menus containing more items: while it's easier to find something in a short list than in a long list, if you have hundreds of items, having a small number of long lists makes a rarely-used item easier to find than hiding it in one of many dozens of short lists (especially submenus). He also sensibly points out that in menus there's no particular gain in brevity, and that text can convey more information quicker than icons do: never underestimate our brain's text processing ability!

One point that Jef makes seems untenable to me: he wants the distinction between all applications to disappear. I agree with some of his observations, e.g. that it's confusing to have a text editor containing a simple graphics editor sitting next to a graphics editor containing a dumbed-down text editor. (I've often deplored the differences in behavior between Word and Excel, which sometimes seem to be from different planets, despite being sold together as a package deal!) But while we can hope that key productivity applications will eventually merge (and not in the way of the dreaded OpenOffice), I expect that there will always be a lively trade in applications that cater to special areas, be they games, instant messaging, or video editing. And, despite bearing a 2000 copyright, the book has remarkably little to say about web browsers and the interfaces we build using them. I'm looking forward to Jef's Humane Browser!

(The next book I'm reading is Bob Martin's Agile Programming book. I'm looking forward to reviewing that, too!)

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About the Blogger

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).