Rating: 
Summary: Excellent, but doesn't give practical advice
Review: This is a great book! It goes into considerable depth about how people think and how the way we process information should affect computer interface design. The two key concepts are the singular nature of the human locus of attention, and the human ability (and compulsion) to habituate behavior. The author then details how he would design a whole new way of interacting with computers to take advantage of these two key concepts. I found the author's ideas intriguing and his point of view a direct, if somewhat idealistic, challenge to the current human/computer interface paradigm.What this book isn't, however, is a practical guide for how to improve your own design. This is a very theoretical text (although extremely easy to read), not a reference or a checklist. Be sure you are aware that the book is trying to give you a foundation and a point of view, not a tutorial. Once you recognize that, it is a tremendous read!
Rating:
Summary: A Triumph for Raskin
Review: Raskin elicits a further review of our understanding of all that we interact with. His incites are well documented and clearly explained. Unlike some authors, he goes into great technical detail which I applaud. He may have certain leanings to exclusive input types such as a keyboard, but this does not detract from his message. I enjoyed the text thoroughly and found the concepts challenge the roots of all design. Raskin should follow up on his challenge and give us more to consider in relationship to what the newest round of efforts has produced in the field of User Interaction.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought-provoking
Review: This isn't the best book it could have been, but it's well worth reading nonetheless. It would have been better had Raskin taken the time to present an in-depth explanation of the Canon Cat interface, rather than taking it for granted that everyone would know all about it. Those who have seen it know that the Cat interface verges on genius, but the rest will find themselves lost very quickly. Raskin talks about LEAPing (a Cat method of moving the cursor around and selecting text) a lot without ever explaining the concept in sufficient detail to get a sense of how it would feel to use it. Others have criticized the book for its scattershot approach in its second half, where each chapter is basically a separate idea Raskin has without much to tie them together. It's a fair criticism, but I enjoyed this part of the book anyway. A third issue is that Raskin focuses almost entirely on manipulating and organizing text. Some of his ideas (having e-mail automatically stream into your workspace in the middle of what you're working on) are just plain goofy and most of the rest simply aren't applicable to anything much more complicated than basic word processing, spreadsheet, and database tasks. Raskin never even hints at how a single interface might be designed that would allow text to be processed, numbers to be crunched, illustrations to be designed, and movies to be edited seamlessly and without modes, as was the Cat's goal. It's as if the desktop publishing and multimedia revolutions never happened in Raskin's world. The truth is that different tasks demand different ways of working. Raskin no doubt knows this but chose to basically ignore it in this book, perhaps because he's not sure what to do about it. Still a good read, though.
Rating:
Summary: A good look into the insights of interface design.
Review: 'The Humane Interface' was a very good book. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about the metrics used to quantify the efficiency of a given interface based on its information content. Important stuff. That portion of the book should be required reading for anyone designing an interface.
Rating: 
Summary: "Outside the box" isn't the same thing as "good"
Review: I found a lot to disagree with in this book. Mr. Raskin recommends that we dispense with GUI fluff that obscures more than it illuminates (not necessarily a bad idea) and replace it with a system in which your content IS the interface. While typing this review, for instance, I could type the word SAVE, select the word SAVE, and invoke a command to interpret the selected word as a command, thus saving the text to disk. Or type EMAIL (right here in the middle of this sentence!), select the command (and somehow also select the sentence), and tap a key to send the sentence off as an email. Or I can type an arithmetic expression into my text and evaluate it on the fly (which as we all know, most users need to do urgently and often). Truly out-there stuff, and I think that's admirable, but I also think it's wrong. Many of the book's proposed computing paradigms are based on the notion that most files are text files, when in reality, at least in today's systems, only a tiny percentage of files contain human-readable text. We've got applications, MP3s, video, pointers to content, content we've made ourselves, content from other sources. These data are different, and cannot all be tossed into a homogeneous soup and treated as text. Moreover, the book has some "bugs" which limit its own useability. Mr. Raskin makes dozens of references to a product he designed and extols, the Canon Cat, but never actually explains what it is. I know that it lets users manage files without having to name them (interesting) but I don't know what kind of files they're making, so I can't decide whether this is a good idea. The book does not offer even a single screentshot of this device. Same goes for Swyftware, another oft-cited product with which the author assumes we are familiar, when we are not (Google reports only 7 references on the Web). Instead of showing us pictures these paragons of design in action, the book devotes precious glossy color plates to a gallery of black & white icons, a Windows menu bar, a photo of a grey radio and other illustrations in which color is meaningless. In this book Mr. Raskin is really thinking, and he does back up his ideas with (talk of) empirical data. And as someone who has developed both hardware and software, he is not afraid to propose alternative input devices and new keys added to the keyboard. That's interesting stuff. But so many ideas just seem wrong. I don't think people want their computer to process keypresses while it is asleep. I don't think people are suffering for lack of a quicker way to enter a Carriage Return character into a search & replace dialog. And I don't think people want to have to learn a command-line interface and then type up their own menus (suffering through syntax errors in the process) to attain the convenience of a GUI. It's a novel book, but I won't recomment it on that basis alone.
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Summary: You should read this book...
Review: There are two categories of people who should read this book: 1) those who write programs and design user interfaces (which today includes everyone who builds a Web page, and 2) those who don't. For the first category of folks, the point is clear -- there are some well-researched principles to designing user interfaces, and you should know about them before you write code for human consumption. As a matter of fact, the references and bibliography alone are probably worth it for serious programmers. For those of us in the second category, the book is a glimpse into a world where computers serve useful functions in a simple way. Rather than the complicated, feature-bloated and overly cryptic machines we use today, computers are presented as being capable of adapting themselves to our work, fading into the subconscious, and allowing us to focus on the work itself. Everyone should come away with an almost obvious thought or two they've never realized, but upon reflection will say, "you know, that's right!" Nothing is taken for granted, and you will never view such standard user interface components as logins and passwords, file systems or text searches the same way. I'm afraid it will be years before hardware, software, operating systems and development tools catch up to some of these concepts, but there is nothing in it that couldn't technically be implemented today. Get this book, and pay attention to the footnotes! | OK |
Rating:
Summary: Great insight and guidance
Review: Raskin's book provides many great insights into human-computer interaction and interface design. Although the book wasn't written specifically for us, Web site designers can learn a lot from Raskin's principles by extrapolating his theories to Web applications. Raskin is at times extreme in his views, especially concepts such as the zooming interface paradigm, but it's that kind of thinking that can change the tradition of bad interface design today. Anyone who works with interactive systems should read this book. You might have to extend Raskin's theories to exactly what you do, but it's worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: forgettable and ineffective
Review: There are so many books like this one that have been written over the last three decades. And yet hard-to-use computer systems are still produced. I read this book. A few months later someone else told me that I should hand out a chapter to my students at MIT. I made a note to myself to check out this book, having completely forgotten that I'd read it. In fact, it was sitting on a shelf right behind my desk chair! One reason that this book won't have much impact is that it is not available on the Web. Thus university students worldwide will be unlikely to encounter it (professors only assign hardcopy books that can function as a textbook for an entire semester of a standard subject). So the next generation of engineers will be unaware of Raskin's restatement of user interface principles. A deeper reason why this book won't have much impact is that it usually requires a working system to get an idea across. For example, a lot of people learned about good UI by using the Apple Macintosh, not by reading the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (though that book was/is extremely lucid). Bottom line: a book on usability that, because it isn't on the Web and isn't organized as a full-term text, isn't usable by 99% of the people who'd be best able to use it.
Rating:
Summary: Everybody should read it
Review: I have been interested in interface design since I started programming. I always complained about bad interfaces and praised good and simple interfaces. Very strange among all the techies! I had read a lot of articles and all the GUI guides of MS and Apple. I had a lot of ideas about good design. But I never had the courage to read a full cientific book on the subject. THis was the book that explained everything to me. From the hows and whys of human interaction with machines, to metrics and all the way to crazy ideas. I think it is a fantastic book for beginners or experts. And, if you are a beginner, it will give enough background for you to start serious investigation on your own. It comes with a lot of Bibliographic references that will enable you to continue to study such a passionate subject.
Rating:
Summary: Practical and useful way
Review: This book has proved to be a practical and useful one for our business. We develop interactive Web sites. The book discussses easy-to-understand and implement principles that improve usability. For instance, the principle of "monotony." This does not mean what we generally take it to mean, but it is the idea that people can focus on one thing at time. We broke the tasks of determining a shipping address and billing address into two separate pages and people were much happier. The book also gives many metrics that can be used to quantatize the effort in using an interfaces. We have found these valuable in creating proposals.
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