The Humane Interface
I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface AM. You’ve got to love a book on interface design so fundamental and visionary that it dares to ponder such deep digressions as, say,
There is but one “I” in each us. But to say that there is one personhood per human being begs the question. That is, why are there not multiple personhoods per mind-body ensemble?
or take,
Studies of the brain performed with such techniques as magnetic-resonance imaging ((MRI) WP and positron-emission tomography ((PET) WP are helping researchers to elucidate the physical correlates of various mental activities. These technologies are mentioned because they may, at a future time, be directly helpful in the design — and, especially, in the testing — of interfaces. For example, there is an inverse correlation between a person’s localized glucose uptake — an indicator of how much energy the brain is using in a particular physical structure — and the ease with which that person uses a tested interface feature. Interface testing in the future may well make increasing use of direct measures of brain activity, but a further exploration of these methods lies outside the scope of this book.
1 Comment
What Jef didn’t say in THI is that the zooming interface he designed for the hospital information system illustrated there was so simple to use that computer experts became comfortable and competent with less than two minutes of training. On the other hand, utter novices accomplished that in less than one minute.
With an entire computing system built like that, adding perhaps pie menus, I would expect to be able to teach three year old kids to use it right away. And 93 year olds. And even college professors.
Is anybody ready to construct such a ZUI so these claims can be tested?