![]() Maybe you think this is only an engineer's concern. The only thing worse than having to redo work you have already done is losing data that you cannot reproduce exactly, like creative work.Īpplications should maintain the integrity of your data as you entered it and do as much as possible to prevent users from losing work. Thus we can all agree that the single most aggravating experience you can have with a computer is losing work. Playing off of Asimov's 3 laws himself, Raskin says that "he first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm." Let us all remember that a computer is a tool you use to accomplish something simply using a piece of software is rarely, if ever, the end goal in and of itself. If you look closely, you will see that most popular, modern interfaces use concepts and techniques put forth within the pages of Raskin's landmark book, including both Microsoft and Apple devices. He drops all three bombshells on the same page of his book, The Humane Interface, an interaction design book of near-biblical status. Lucky for me, the three laws I would go with have already been alluded to by the master himself, Jef Raskin, the brain behind the original Macintosh project. They must be basic and unalterable fundamentals upon which to build other interaction design principles. When designing to influence a user's experience, our three laws must be primarily concerned with how an interface behaves, and what effect it has on user behavior. Just as industrial and graphic designers focus on form, interaction designers hold behavior as the foremost element to consider. I got to wondering, what are our final failsafes? What would our three laws be as interaction designers?Ī user's perception of an interface is inextricably connected to its form, content, and behavior. These laws were permanently hard-coded into every robot as a final failsafe to prevent catastrophe and protect humanity. Archy uses simple commands for common operations in word processing and e-mail, but "doesn't work like anything else on this or nearby planets," meaning users would have to learn it from scratch, he wrote on his Web site.Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote the "Three Laws of Robotics" into his Robot series of stories. ![]() Raskin was working on a project called Archy, where he hoped to put many of the ideas expressed in his book into software. In 2000, Raskin published a book, The Humane Interface (Addison-Wesley Professional), which is widely assigned at universities. His consulting clients have included Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and many other big names in computing. Inc., although the product wasn't a commercial success. Soon after leaving the company, Raskin founded Information Appliance Inc., where he designed the Canon Cat computer for Canon U.S.A. Raskin left Apple in 1982, two years before the Macintosh went on sale, but he continued to influence the design of computers through his writing, lectures and consulting work. "Up to that time, at Apple and most other manufacturers, the concept was to provide the latest and most powerful hardware, and let the users and third-party software vendors figure out how to make it usable," he wrote later on his Web site.
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