3/6/2023 0 Comments Jef raskin![]() Developers must make sure their software has safeguards and redundancy to prevent data loss (and has as few bugs as possible), right? In fact, data protection and effort preservation is also an interface design task, as a designer must anticipate - and/or find through user research - how a user is likely to lose work or have to duplicate her efforts. Maybe you think this is only an engineer’s concern. The only thing worse than having to redo work you have already done is losing data that you cannot reproduce exactly, like creative work.Īpplications should maintain the integrity of your data as you entered it and do as much as possible to prevent users from losing work. Thus we can all agree that the single most aggravating experience you can have with a computer is losing work. Playing off of Asimov’s 3 laws himself, Raskin says that “he first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.” Let us all remember that a computer is a tool you use to accomplish something simply using a piece of software is rarely, if ever, the end goal in and of itself. 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. Farewell.Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote the “Three Laws of Robotics” into his Robot series of stories. We miss him, both as an innovative lateral thinker and as a friend. His inquisitive mind led him to question everything, which made him some enemies, but in the end we are all richer for his forays into engineering and design.Ĭredits: most of this comes from Hubby, who flew and built model airplanes with Jef. In keeping with his ease-of-use mantra, a layman can calculate, plan and build this airfoil without additional aeronautical knowledge. He described a very effective airfoil that is easy to build. Jef also put some effort into understanding airflow at the very low Reynolds numbers that apply to small light model airplanes. He designed the Anabat, a foam-core aircraft with tape stress-skinned wings - this was the first use of adhesive tape as a structural part of a model airplane. A lesser passion was for his favorite hobby of radio controlled model airplanes. Posted by kindall at 2:02 PM on February 27, 2005Īlthough history will remember Jef mostly as the father of the Mac, it should be pointed out that his greatest passion (after his family) was mathematics. We need more people who think outside the box just for the fun of seeing where it leads. his ideas were always thought-provoking and his passing is a loss to everyone who likes to think. ![]() In other words, it was a fairly effective metaphor for working with text, and not so much for anything else. He also never did explain how his leaping UI would be useful for working with graphics, or music, or video, or the Web for that matter. Despite his claims that this actually works better than it sounds, there are only about 10,000,000 reasons nobody would ever want e-mail to work like that. Then you can simply select it and move it wherever you want it (you'd set up a part of the document - in his paradigm there was only ever one document - which had the text "e-mail goes here" so you could easily search for it, searching being the only way to navigate in his system). In his book, The Humane Interface, he actually suggests that incoming e-mail simply be inserted in the middle of whatever you're working on, just before the insertion point. Those were brilliant, frankly, but his ideas have always been a bit too weird for the mainstream. You can tell what kind of UI he preferred by looking at the Canon Cat or the SwyftCard for the Apple II. His vision was entirely different from what came to pass. Jef resisted adding a mouse to the Macintosh. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |