Turning the art of interface design to engineering

Jef Raskin  User Interface and System Design Consultant Pacifica, California

To turn the art of interface design into an engineering discipline, we must understand both the human and the machine sides of the interface. Of these, the less understood is the human side. The well-developed science of ergonmics is of essential aid when dealing with the physical aspects of interface design, and a comparable rational science of cognetics is slowly developing on the cognitive side, which has often been treated as being beyond quantitative understanding.

Too often, user interface guidelines have been presented as heuristics, garnered from the experience and opinions of gurus. While much of value has come from this, a number of myths have developed, and many of the conventional rules and published guidelines turn out to be wrong. Working from empirical data, and by creating useful measures of interface performance, we can replace incorrect rules with new concepts derived from fundamental principles.

In doing so, we find that some of today’s most widespread interface paradigms, from computer GUIs to hand-held devices, and even toys, are wrong. The presentation will present an overview of current misdirections, some old and some new quantitative techniques, and a glimpse of directions to take that avoid the existing problems.

BIO

Jef Raskin (www.jefraskin.com) is a user interface and system design consultant based in Pacifica, California. He is the author of "The Humane Interface" (Addison-Wesley 2000), the inventor of the Apple Macintosh and the Canon Cat computers, and was the CEO of Information Appliance, Inc. His clients range from start-ups to multinationals and government agencies, including NASA, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, NCR, Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, McKesson, Intel, and AT&T. Raskin's publications number over 500 articles in some forty periodicals including Wired, Forbes ASAP, IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Computer, Nature, Quantum, newspapers, Innovations, and the Communications of the ACM. Raskin has taught computer science at the University of California, Stanford University, and elsewhere and was the conductor and music director of the San Francisco Chamber Opera Co.