About User Interfaces

Last week I did some research for a tiny project I'm doing at the University of Amsterdam.

This project is about the development of User Interfaces through the years. For example, back in olden days your monitor was... well... just a speaker! Imagine a processor running ticking at 8 kHz, and the checksum of the "input bits" being redirected to a speaker. It turns out you get a strange kind of melody. If you were to see a stream of dots passing by at this speed, you wouldn't recognize an unevenness in the pattern. But when one bit is missing, the pitch changes dramatically - so the monitoring proceeded by ear. dr. Gerard Alberts has posted some videos of these early computers but I can't find them right now (so I'll post 'em later).

Anyhow, while looking for history on User Interfaces I stumbled across the book "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. Ordered it at the university library, and read it last week. It's a really good read, and triggered me by thinking about how User Interfaces are supposed to work. Raskin explores User Interfaces from the viewpoint of humans and human shortcomings (very interesting!). Some human shortcomings (such as the time we need to switch from one task to another) can be exploited by UI's. Read the wiki page, and if you're not convinced, read the book :-). Some of the points Raskin states are (points are from Wikipedia, explanation is mine):

• Modelessness. Computers shouldn't be in different "modes" where they react different - for example: using ctrl-c for copying text in one context and ctrl-c for terminating a program in another are different modes where the same action triggers different behavior.
• Monotony of design. System / UI designers should figure out the best way to do something, and only implement that one - it confuses users when dozens of options are offered to do one task.
• Every action must be undoable. Programmers have known this for long and name it version control ;-). The effect is, however, that save-buttons should be obsolete. A computer should never discard your work. This also diminshes the need for dialog boxes
• Elimination of warning screens. People tend to automate tasks, almost making it a reflex to click away a dialog box.
• Universal use of text. Icons are okay, but should be accompanied by text so it's obvious what they do
• When you stop using your computer, you shouldn't have to wait for booting, but continue with the task where you left off

Especially the undoable functionality struck me. Of course, there will be operations where it's (because of law restrictions) needed to explicitly save things. But still, a computer should simply never, never discard my work! When the lights go off and I turn my computer back on, my work should be still there.

This was 2000. Eleven years ago - nearly two computer-lifespans (you remember, in 2000 you still played around with Win ME, when you were on Microsoft. The first stable Microsoft-consumer-OS - Windows XP - wasn't even completed at that moment!).

What you should know, however, is that Jef Rasking designed the original Macintosh interface. Not all of his ideas were implemented, though. Today the new specifications of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) were made public. And imagine what? Three in a row:

• Auto Save - "Say good-bye to manual saving. Auto Save in Mac OS X Lion automatically saves your work - while you work - so you don’t have to."
• Versions - Versions records the evolution of a document as you create it. Mac OS X Lion automatically creates a version of the document each time you open it and every hour while you’re working on it. If you need to revert to an older version or retrieve part of a document, Versions shows you the current document next to a cascade of previous versions (...) so you can see how your work looked at any given time. 
• Resume - If you’ve ever restarted your Mac, you know what’s involved. First you save your work, then close all your apps, then spend valuable time setting everything up again. With Resume, that time-consuming process is a thing of the past. Resume lets you restart your Mac — after a software update, for example — and return to what you were doing. With all your apps back in the exact places you left them. In fact, whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it. So you never have to start from scratch again.

Amazing - ideas from eleven years ago (technically already no problem for over a decade) still inspiring today's computer makers. Of course, Apple will claim this as their invention. We know it isn't, but still they're the first to include the features in consumer-grade OS - makes it (for me at least) worth considerable when buying my next computer..

Next time I'll digg in some more UI-stuff with Fitts's Law (even older than Raskin)