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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..."
Jef Raskin is making one VERY big assumption.
He assumes that 'experts' can come up with one 'grand-unified-ui' which works the best for everyone, ignoring the fact that peoples minds interpret things in many different ways.
He should try working with mentally disabled children for a while, it is a BIG eye-opener as to how different people minds can be in their interpretation and reaction to a given stimulus, and is a little undersood area.
These 'UI' experts who apparently know us well enough to design the 'one true' interface are chasing an impossible dream, IMHO. You only need to look at how many people love/hate XPs default look, or apples aqua, for examples. I personally cannot develop efficiently without multiple desktops to support my many open windows, yet I know other excellent developers who will NOT run more than one app at a time and run it fullscreen.
This is the equivalent of trying to design the perfectly efficient kitchen, it will never happen.
I suspect a lot of the problem is that the 'common' desktop ui's out there don't really skin very well, the underlying system is too limited. X windows is the exception to this, as it only exists as seperable layers, allowing a much fnier control of it's functionality (via KDE and Gnome, for example)
The most consistent UI I've ever used was under OS/2, and IBM did a LOT of development on that, I wish windows would catch up, but it was far from perfect for me, and I bet the majority.
Customisation is required for ANYTHING we interact with in a major and complex way, computers are probably the biggest example of this yet, thankfully their customisability is growing.
please ignore this second posting, between slashdot droping out and explorers (yick) broken re-posting, it was inevitable but unfortunate.
Stop the bickering and read the fucking article. Then stop and think about what he is saying. Then go read the original editorial. Then stop and think about what he is saying. Goodnight now.