If you look closely, you will see that most popular, modern interfaces use concepts and techniques put forth within the pages of Raskin's landmark book, including both Microsoft and Apple devices. He drops all three bombshells on the same page of his book, The Humane Interface, an interaction design book of near-biblical status. Lucky for me, the three laws I would go with have already been alluded to by the master himself, Jef Raskin, the brain behind the original Macintosh project. They must be basic and unalterable fundamentals upon which to build other interaction design principles. When designing to influence a user's experience, our three laws must be primarily concerned with how an interface behaves, and what effect it has on user behavior. Just as industrial and graphic designers focus on form, interaction designers hold behavior as the foremost element to consider. I got to wondering, what are our final failsafes? What would our three laws be as interaction designers?Ī user's perception of an interface is inextricably connected to its form, content, and behavior. These laws were permanently hard-coded into every robot as a final failsafe to prevent catastrophe and protect humanity. Not a purchase.Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote the "Three Laws of Robotics" into his Robot series of stories. Overall, probably worth a library checkout. So I skimmed through a lot of the second part of the book. And his detours into hard-core quantitative user interface testing were really dull to me. But it does get repetitive hearing him talk about the wonders of his own design. Maybe that's because I'm brainwashed by the current design of computers and have gotten used to them. I like a lot of the ideas he's trying to design to, but his actual design choices seem pretty awful to me. Then Raskin decides to evangelize for the operating system that he designed for the Canon Cat. Raskin has several good observations about our tendencies as users, and how interfaces can be designed to accommodate those tendencies. Cognetics is designing for the limitations and tendencies of the human mind. This first part of the book deals with cognetics, a term he coins in analogy to ergonomics, the study of arranging things to be most efficient and comfortable for the human body. His point is that we as humans will develop habits, and computers should adapt to those habits rather than the other way around. The first four chapters are interesting reflections on what it takes to make a good interface I especially like his discussion of how to design an interface such that it fades into being automatic (tips include reducing modal interfaces, because modes mean you have to think about what mode you're in before launching into your automatic keystroke sequence). So when a friend was giving his copy away, I grabbed it. I'd been meaning to pick up this book ever since I first read about it in the Good Experience newsletter. Jef Raskin was one of the primary designers of the Apple Macintosh, and has been respected in the human-computer interaction field ever since.
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