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Jef Raskin Talks Skins
gwernol writes "Jef Raskin, one of the original Mac design team and a distinguished figure in the world of user interface design has given an interesting
interview over on OS Opinion. He talks about the tradeoff between interface consistency and customizability, and particularly the impact of skinnable applications on usability. Interesting reading, including some harsh words for "guru UI designers" like Steve Jobs..."
Problem statement: If everyone uses a different skin, then you're lost if you use someone else's computer.
Obvious solution: Select your favorite skin on the other computer, do your work, restore to the original skin before you leave. This could be as quick as typing a number in a box "My favorite skin is #372 optionflags 17".
What the article says: Obvious solution not mentioned. It is assumed that you HAVE to deal with someone else's skin choice. Your subconscious chokes. Bad bad bad. UI expert conclusion: no more skins.
*sheesh*
The man seems rather arrogant to me, insisting that customization will reduce productivity and therefore is a Bad Thing(TM). With this kind of logic we should insist on only right-hand mouse settings since 90% of the people who use the computer are right-handed and would be less productive if they had to change the settings when they sat down at some left-handers computer.
Fact is, people generally customize their computers to make things easier on themselves, and to make the machines more pleasant to work with. Nothing wrong with that. Most machines are used by a single person anyway, and if that person moves on then the next will customize it according to his or her preferences. I can't see how the Ultimate UI will radically improve performance; this 'Ultimate UI' would probably just end up annoying a whole lot of folks who don't like what the 'specialists' think is the key to greater productivity.
Now, if the man was serious about improving productivity in the work place he'd abandon this topic altogether and lobby to ban web browsers from company computers. I'd bet my last dollar that web browsers are the source of more wasted time at work than all UI 'issues' put together.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Steve jobs did NOT invent the macintosh. he was the team leader after a while, and made it into his baby, but it was not his idea, or creation. in fact, jeff raskin deserves more credit for the wizardry of the mac ui than just about anyone else. i may not agree with everything he said about apple and/or jobs, but strictly from his experience, he has a right to voice his opinion, and the smart people will at least take what he says into consideration even if they dont directly follow the 'law of raskin'
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
They say that Jobs, disappointed with the progress on his pet Lisa project, commandeered the Macintosh team and "rode" it to victory. I've read the good, bad, and ugly biographies of Steve Jobs, and it seems to me that Raskin had a few good ideas in his "Macintosh Bible" that would have been pulled down by all his bad ideas if Jobs hadn't gotten involved and imposed his own brand of anal-retentive design fascism.
IIRC, Raskin wanted a pitiful 256x256 resolution, Jobs insisted on higher (512x384), which was one of the features which made the Mac Classic unique. He wanted white on black, Jobs wanted the paper look (black on white). Again, part of the original Mac's charm.
It seems like they both started out somewhat geeky, anal-retentive, and anti-social; however, Jobs has mellowed somewhat since he got booted from Apple for being so mercuric. Raskin still seems to be growing up.
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
Not only is there not one grand perfect interface for the desktop but different apps will need vastly different interfaces.
Going along with the car analogy there is a great difference in the interfaces of a car and a backhoe, and yet they are both more similar than they are to a 747.
The needs, thought and work patterns of a graphic artist are different than those of novelist, whose needs are a bit different than a short essay writer.
The one grand UI is a chimera, and I hope it stays that way.
KFG
well, yes. i respect mr raskin a lot too, and owe a lot of my happy computing experiences to him. that's why this article is troubling me. i pretty much disagree with most of what he said as well... I think skinning is a good thing, as long as it is based off a workable standard. take for instance kaleidoscope for os9. You could completely changed the way your windows looked, and the colors of everything you wanted, but it still stuck to the functional standards. menus and buttons were all in the same place, although they might look funky. and the best part of kaleidoscope skins is the fact that they are system wide, and work on any properly programmed app. This is an example of a skinning application that did it right.
raskin's attitude in this article does worry me tho. he is a very smart man, but i dont like the 'my way or the highway' attitude he is taking. i think freedom to customize can greatly enhance the computing experience when it is based off of what he would call a functional 'scientific' gui model. I have been reading stuff raskin said for many years about GUIs, and i have agreed with him for the most part. but i can only listen for so long before i have to say 'Put up or shut up.' Mr Raskin, please show us this gui you have in mind for all of us. Please stop talking about it endlessly and just do it. You can rag on Steve Jobs all you want... but to quote Steve, 'Real artists ship.'
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Yes. But there is a big difference: Your girlfriend did not move the position of any of the controls (i.e. she didn't exchange the pedals or something). She just made the car fit her in a physical way. Also note that in a car, it's quite easy to adjust things, while on computers you often have to dig deeply into obscure menu structures. Raskin's "red on red" is a good example of what's wrong with the kind of UI customization that is offered by current systems.
I used to think that too. Try a better monitor, and do not set it to maximum contrast. (I'm serious about this. Black on white is much more readable.)
This is a good example, but this doesn't mean customization as offered by current systems is done well. I would (like, probably, you) not want to read code on someone's computer if he's set up high contrast comments, slightly lower contrast code. Still, that person shouldn't be forced to read code the way I like it. But that's not the problem -- the problem is that you can't change the setting with a simple mouse click, like you can arrange the seat in your car with something as simple as pulling a lever and then simply moving the seat to where you'd like it to be.
But I think there is also a lot of truth in what Raskin says. Most of the skinning and customization options available on current system just increase the coolness factor, not the usability. You can't tell me that a semi-transparent menu is more usable than a non-transparent one. Regarding your example of source code, you cannot customize the way code looks when reading a book. Still, you probably do read example code in books, don't you? And you probably don't have too much difficulty doing so.
But while "no customization" does solve the problem of "bad customization", this doesn't automatically mean that "good customization" is impossible and shouldn't be available in a good GUI.
I've read Raskin's book, and this interview is really way below the quality of the book. Raskin ought to apply the scientific methods he talks about to the reasoning in his interviews, just like he applied them to the reasoning in his book.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The car analogy actualy presents us with an answer.
Power seats that remember driver position. These come in some of the higher end cars now.
Why not do this for preferences?? It is rather trivial to do with the MAC. I would like to speak of it in other terms....
Using a keychain microdrive (USB?) with about 16-32 MB of storage, you could not only provide a secure login method, but also store preference data. Any application that was "(Insert Marketing Term) aware" would store it's preferences in a registry type repository, and would be synched with the microdrive.
Moving to a new computer would be a matter of plugging in your "key", which would read your user data, log you in and apply your preferences to the "registry". A 32MB Mircodrive should have no trouble storing your Photoshop Prefs, Background images, Winamp skins, etc... Power users will want larger Microdrives.
As time evolves, The Gimp will learn to read Photoshop Prefs, etc..., But at the very least, like applications will work in like ways on different machines.
Even in standardized interfaces, there will still be "preference related items" like bookmarks, recently used files, etc. I personally would just like to have my bookmarks and preferences stored and merged between home and work. Standardized interfaces are difficult to achieve even in the corporate environment where a given OS may only have 10-20 different uses.
Raskin is full of empty criticism. For all of his chirping, he has not created this perfect interface. Perhaps it's too hard for him to get in the industry?? He has no buisness commenting on Eazel when he has nothing better to show.
Finally, he made a crack about the default "Aqua" colored background, whether the Redmond or Cupertino version is unclear. If he is talkling about that horrible off-blue that was the default for Win95, that was chosen for another reason.
Blue waves travel slower, and hence a monitor displying a blue field will have less noticable scan lines from refresh than a red field would.
Complex problems require overlooking simple solutions.
~Steve Jobs
Jason
When the Mac came out in 1984-ish, a big part of the computer industry (including the press) talked about ideal user interfaces. That was the whole point of the GUI pioneered by PARC.
A lot of the interfaces done up until that time were unique; 1-2-3 had a unique interface, Wordperfect had a unique interface.
What apple did that was revolutionary wasn't the GUI, it was they defined an environment for all programs to use which enforced a common user interface. The net result was groudbreaking because a lot of the basics were the same in each application. Remember, WYSIWYG was the hot buzz word (words?) back then, so the entire frame of reference was different.
So, the evolution so far was:
No interface -> Application Specific Interface -> Common User Interface
What's wrong with this picture? Well back in the day when the CUI was the hot ticket, the idea of desktop "metaphors" was in vogue. The trash can was there because you understood that deleting a document was like throwing away a piece of paper on your desk. So in fact, the interface of the Mac was supposed to be a metaphor for a user's desktop (in fact, its still called a desktop).
But a desktop isn't a good metaphor for recording music, or taking pictures, or doing an unlimited number of tasks.
Why shouldn't the garden hose have the same interface as the typewriter? Because each interface exploits the unique features and attributes of that type of device.
So in 2001, computers are several orders of magnitude more powerful than 1984 and we really have the ability to create much closer metaphors.
In fact, you could say this argues against a common user interface. It says the interface should be the best to do the job at that time.
I fall somewhere in the middle. There is clearly a value of having the idea of a desktop metaphor. There is value in having experience framework for doing computer related tasks. But ideally there is a balance between consistency and the best interface for the task at hand.
So I find Jef's interview interesting, but I think he's still stuck in a 1988 period of UI design. No offense to him, he's a smart guy and I don't discount what he says, but based on the comment's he's made, I think the computer world has passed him by.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you