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Summary: extraordinary
Review: This book offer you the intellectual framwork to think outside the box. It really challenges you to think about interface from a cognitive point of view.
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Summary: How to tell a true friend from the others.
Review: This wonderful, readable book explains what the problem with computers today is, in considerable detail. The author includes the science to back up the conclusions. Then Raskin explains how it could be much much better. To see today's problem clearly, let me make a little analogy to ordinary life. A friend comes to your house and offers new capabilities. If she's a true friend, she does not cut the phone cord and the TV cable on the way in and then block the doors and windows from the inside. Instead, she leaves all your existing capabilities in place and offers some new facility, perhaps a radio or a cell phone. However, we can now see clearly how terrible some scoundrels are. You invite them into your home because they promise to make many wonderful things easy, but they don't seem to care about messing with the rest of your life. Whether it turns out to be easy or hard to deal with the new guest on her terms, she just naturally freezes all your appliances and cuts all communication with the rest of the world. Nothing at all seems to work aside from what she brought with her. That's how computer applications behave. Once you load one, it takes over your whole computer. None of the commands that worked before is available now. The new application has hidden them and may or may not supply adequate substitutes. That is why we must eliminate separate applications. That's why we need an immediate revolution in software design, implementation, packaging, marketing, installation, training, and use. Read this book and start getting ready for the revolution. And help it along every chance you get. The world will be the better for it.
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Summary: Fresh insights - continually surprising
Review: I haven't read this book, but just wanted to add in my two cents. From start to finish the author covers the subject with rare insight. The breadth of his thinking is startling and the way he pulls together ideas from different disciplines continually surprises. I'd recommend this book to anyone. In fact, I intend to read it myself.
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Summary: excellent introduction to usability engineering
Review: Somewhat less pompously written than Jakob Nielsen's stuff, *The Humane Interface* is a great introduction to formal human-computer interaction and design theory. It incorporates cognitive psychology and a bit of visual design & explains how each affects system usability; additionally, it gives a very thorough overview of heretofore very academic usability inspection techniques like GOMS.
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Summary: The Visionaries new Vision
Review: Chock' full of fantastic ideas and keenly knit arguments, this book has a property almost unique in the HCI realm: The ablility to be once-read in a single sitting! How many times have you caught your locus of attention involuntarily shifting (after using it to peer at it's previous state) in the process of reading and rereading the same guru's well manicured sentence? Could it be due to the poor depth to breadth ratio inherent in the elocution of the natural history of the subject; condensing ideas vapidly towards their obvious conclusion without much attempt at scientific or philosophic duction, and then skipping on to the next one? (yawn!) Not this book. Once opened, it is difficult to close! Deductive, descriptive, and imaginatively proscriptive, it spans both verticality and horizontality; depth and bredth, not only citing but insighting. True, he does define "invisible" as "not visible", but how less reasonable is this than defining "connected" as "not disconnected" as is done in topology? Please note that in both cases the words have techical meanings whose understanding is quite independent of a sense of humor. That is the beauty of Dr Raskins work. Please read and take note of his ZIP world, an important idea whose execution is hopefully as immanent as the object of his 67' thesis on the usable, object-oriented, platform-independent graphical interface? Read this book. This man has vision. He describes the way HCI ought to be and would a' been in a "revisionists" history ( i.e. "second vision" (see 67' thesis)and also if Apple had ruled w/Raskin as it's HCI guy)).
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Summary: Every computer programmer should read this book!
Review: I can not over-emphasize how absolutely important it is for everyone involved in the design or programming of computer software--no matter how big or how small--to read this book. Even designers of non-computer interfaces, like for steroes or vcrs, would benefit from reading it. The book doesn't just explain the dos and don'ts of interface design--it also clearly explains the WHYS, by going into the psychology of the human mind and explaining interface design from that standpoint. It is true that the book goes outside the realm of currently-used computer systems, and introduces ideas that can't immediately be put to good use. But that is necessary to get a complete picture of the concepts. (Not to mention the help that it might give to someone who decides to go about designing an all-new computer or operating system of his or her own. This is a hint for all you inventors out there.) And it isn't just the individual ideas themselves. After finishing the book, I began to have an all-new way of thinking about programming; a whole new attitude which is helping me with some of the projects I'm currently working on. A creative mind can think of many new ideas based on the general concepts presented here, other than the specific things that Raskin mentions. The book is, for the most part, very pleasant to read (a page-turner!) and focused on the concepts. Very professionally done.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good
Review: Consistent emphasis on some important central concepts: locus of attention (what the user is looking at at any given moment); Fitt's law (smaller targets take longer to hit with the mouse); rate of information transfer in interface design. Positives: concentrates on enduring principles, not as picayune as the "Miss Manners" books on interface design. Greater intellectual scope and synthesis. Negatives: somewhat pedantic and idiosyncratic. A few pet concepts, such as LEAP, are overbearingly ubiquitous. Worst example: "If a feature is not visible, we say that it is INVISIBLE." (Page 63).
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Summary: Mixed Feelings
Review: As a previous reviewer stated, this book definitely warrants five stars for the metrics alone (these have been incredibly useful for me). The rest of the book leaves one with mixed feelings. While the ideas are interesting (we'll see how they work with the Eazel project), they aren't typically applicable to the systems most of us work with (Windows, X-Windows), leaving the reader somewhat depressed more than anything else. This book is a definite read; if for no other reason than to inspire thought as to the validity of any work you may currently be doing!
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Summary: Computer Geeks: Please Read This Book!
Review: This is a valuable book for two reasons. First, it explains how human cognitive abilities and limitations determine which UI designs will be easy vs. difficult for people to learn and use. It can therefore help to educate those software designers who lack training in cognitive psychology. Second, it challenges longstanding GUI design assumptions, pointing out many ways in which conventional GUIs are actually bad for users. It can therefore point the way for evolution of current-day GUIs into something better. What this book is NOT is a design-guide for creating GUIs that are Windows (or Mac, Motif, or Web) compliant. If that's what you want, you should look elsewhere. My one criticism is that, in my opinion, the book loses steam in its later chapters, becoming a collection (the author calls it a "potpourri") of Raskin's pet peeves about computers, along with his remedies. For the second edition, these chapters could be tightened up or cut. Nonetheless, the Human Interface should be required reading for every software designer and UI researcher.
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Summary: This book will change your life
Review: The chapter on GOMS and metrics is worth the price of admission. This distillation is very valuable. It's a simple fact that to measure and observe something is to improve it. To be able to measure at least some aspects of a particular user interface design against another and against an absolute best case is a powerful tool. While I am somewhat embarrassed to not have heard of these techniques before, I can tell from most user interfaces on the market that I am in good company.
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