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..."

Comments

An incorrect assumption?

[thesupraman]

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.

Re:An incorrect assumption?

[ccoakley]

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.

I agree. Something to think about: A car is the most time critical interface that most people deal with. Take your eyes off the road for 8 seconds to change the radio station while a child crosses the street. And yet, most people manage NOT to kill someone with their car. These are the same people that bitch and moan about computers being hard to use. Anyway, everyone has a certain ammount of customization to their car. They use their favorite radio station. They adjust the seat. They roll down the windows. They adjust the mirrors. Should these things be standardized? Absolutely not. Sure, I found it a pain to have to adjust the seat after my girlfriend drove me home, but it was definitely better than her driving without reaching the pedals.

Computer interfaces are analogous; "I like it" IS a good reason to change your interface. Comfort with a tool improves productivity.

Besides, it would be difficult to have anyone find a comprehensive set of widgets without overwhelming even the best user. There is a big difference between multi-line and single line text boxes (press the enter key when there is a default button on the screen). Or tri-state vs. binary check boxes. Or the hundreds of ways a calendar could be used. If the functionality of something is different, should the look be different? What about the grids in Access vs. the grids in excel?

I agree that skins that move the window resizing controls around might have a learning curve for a guest at a machine. But is it bad? A slight loss of productivity for a guest for a comfort increase for the main user is probably worth the tradeoff. I know that I like changing my window background to 20% grey. It provides enough contrast without blasting my eyes with bright white light. Just because a text box functionally mimics paper and ink doesn't mean that it needs the same colors. And think about editors with syntax highlighting. I may browse code looking mostly at braces. I damn well want my braces to stand out. You might browse code by comments, whereas I find them distracting, so you choose a high contrast comment color and I choose a low contrast color. Because we are different, we have difficulties at each other's machines, but it's a lot better than each of us being less productive most of the time.

Of course, I may just be full of dung.

Re:An incorrect assumption?

[HamNRye]

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

Jef Raskin: the Interface Nazi?

[steveha]

"No customizations for you!"

In this interview, Jef Raskin comes off as rather arrogant. He seems absolutely convinced that there is an objective, scientific, Best Way for everything about interfaces.

I'm not convinced. One person might actually work better with white text on a deep blue background, or whatever. I can think of other examples.

With Mr. Raskin it is all-or-nothing: if you work for him, you don't get to customize anything, unless you convince him that you really have a better idea (in which case he switches too, and everyone else who works for him has to switch too.

His supporting arguments didn't impress me much either. A "Preferences" dialog makes an app consume more resources? Not enough to matter, I'd say. That's like saying that putting foam cushions on a car seat makes the car heavier.

The absolute gem of a quote, though, was this one:

Of course, there are no really well-designed interfaces out there good enough to prove the point that you don't need preferences. Any programmers who want to help build one with me, drop me an e-mail.

Maybe he can actually create an interface so amazing, so perfect, so right that no one would ever be able to improve upon it. I won't hold my breath, though.

steveha

Re:Efficiency, Boredom, and Schemas

[wadetemp]

For me, I would prefer to stretch my "subconscious" processing of alternative, skinned UIs so that I can respond to a greater number of computing/information presentation. I may not be able to autonomically process a given interface as quickly as somebody who is familiar with the standardized UI, but I will be able to adapt to other UIs.

I would say that's a resonable opinion for someone who wants to get a diverse computer use experience, but then again most computer users (of which slashdoters are a small small minority) just want to get in, get things done, and get out.

Have you ever used the trial version of WinZip? The trial dialog that pops up before you can use the product swaps the OK and Cancel buttons intentionally every time it starts up. Even if you use WinZip 10 times a day every day your concious mind comes into play every time you use this application. What's the task at hand? Accepting a dialog. Why should you have to think about this?

The same mental lag happens for novice users working between UIs (or skins)... bringing the concious mind into the picture is not helpful to people who need/want thier entire concious mind available for the task at hand, not accepting a dialog. :)

Hmm...

[Waffle Iron]

In our group's machines, I strongly encourage everybody to leave all the settings at the default, or if somebody makes a strong case (strong does not mean "I like it") for a particular change, we all make it. That way we can move from machine to machine without going berserk or even feeling a little ill at ease.

In our group, I strongly encourage everyone to keep their fscking mitts off of my machine. That way nobody gets hurt.

Question for Jef

[IvyMike]

Hey, Jef: I use Solaris (and even SunOS 4(!) for some of the legacy systems) at work. I also use Windows NT at work. I have Windows 98 at home for games. I have a Linux box at home for networking. I have an iBook on which I run MacOSX and Yellow Dog Linux.

So, Mr Jef "Allowing users to customize their desktops creates a hodgepodge of interfaces" Raskin, I have a question: Have you considered that my life is already a hodgepodge of crazy and different intefaces, and that skins and themes actually let me make it MORE regular?

(Yeah, I know he's not really reading this. But I needed to vent somehow. If Sun, Apple, MS, and Red Hat will suddenly all agree on a common UI, I'll drop my need for customization.)

Re:I was quite impressed...

[TotallyUseless]

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.'

User Interface Consistency

[guttentag]

Isn't it interesting that Jef preaches against the evils of inconsistency, yet he spells his first name in a manner that is inconsistent with the common spelling?

Jakob Nielsen would say the spelling hurts the usability of Jef's name because it goes against our conditioning. Everywhere he goes, he must bear the burden of correcting people who misspell his name.

I'd say Jef is either quite angry with his parents' creative streak or there's something inconsistent about his behavior.