Raskin provides an eye-opening approach to interface systems design and the issues faced by designers. It is eye-opening because it goes beyond the standard advice provided in traditional interface design books and provides a new and innovative approach to interface design issues. Raskin examines some of the flaws found in today’s interfaces and provides solutions to overcome these problems.

The book is organized as a series of eight chapters, with two small appendices. A reference list provides many of the classic works as well as references to Raskin’s other writings. The book also includes a detailed index. Each chapter is split into multiple parts and starts with an interesting quote related to the chapter topic. To keep to the spirit of the book and understand the examples, it is best read cover to cover.

According to the preface, the book’s audience can include Web designers and managers, product designers and product managers, corporate managers, programmers, information technology managers, consumers, computer science and cognitive psychology students, and any other human-machine interface researcher. This book will touch them all in different ways. The book does not take a cookbook approach; rather, it serves as a complement to other interface design books. Raskin “reexamines the cognitive foundations of human-machine interaction to elucidate a crucial aspect of why interface designs succeed or fail” (p. xi). This book does not survey the field, but it does cite the classic sources.

Chapter 1, “Background,” explains the nature of interfaces, keeping things simple, human-centered design, interface building tools, and where interface design fits into the design cycle. This chapter is brief but sets the stage for Raskin’s approach to a humane interface. It concludes with Raskin’s definition of a humane interface: “An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties” (p. 6). Obviously, very few standard interfaces meet his definition.

In chapter 2, “Cognetics and the Locus of Attention,” the author briefly discusses the ergonomic issues of design, but then moves on to the cognitive issues. There is an interesting discussion of the cognitive conscious and the cognitive unconscious, and how they relate to interface design. The chapter ends by considering locus of attention and  habituation. 

Chapter 3 discusses “Meanings, Modes, Monotony, and Myths.” Every interface book written talks about how users hate modes, yet we continue designing modal interfaces. Raskin takes the discussion one step further by defining a metric that measures how modal a particular interface is. This chapter provides some guidelines for the design of buttons, keystroke combinations, user preference settings and customizing facilities, and affordances. Raskin also discusses the controversy of noun-verb versus verb-noun construction. Plenty of good and bad design examples are interspersed throughout this chapter, including an interesting discussion of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) ticket dispensing machine.

One of the criticisms of human computer interface design is the need to quantify designs and make it more of a science and less of an art. Chapter 4, “Quantification,” covers a number of methods of analyzing interface designs. Detailed examples and explanations are provided for using the classic GOMS keystroke model created by Card, Moran, and Newell; Raskin’s measures of interface efficiency; and Hick’s and Fitts’s laws. Appropriate references are provided for additional details.

Chapter 5 presents some “Unification” principles and ideas. Whereas the previous chapters presented more of the nuts and bolts, the remaining chapters begin putting the pieces together. This chapter examines the “commonality of physical actions across almost all applications” (p. 99). Elements such as highlighting, selecting, and commands are discussed, along with filenames and structures. This chapter provides many approaches to looking at interfaces from a fresh perspective.

Chapter 6, “Navigation and Other Aspects of Humane Interfaces,” presents an interesting metaphor using a “Zoom World” interface. This chapter also discusses icons and what makes an interface intuitive. Horton’s icon design guidelines are, appropriately, mentioned. The chapter ends with an interesting note from a user that illustrates some of the points being made.

Chapter 7, “Interface Issues Outside the User Interface,” presents a brief survey of other technology related areas and some innovative approaches. It begins with a discussion of programming environments and how cumbersome and difficult some of the simplest operations have become. The example given is to write a Visual Basic program that adds two numbers (3 and 4) and prints the results. Considering how much faster our computers have become, it is amazing that the task itself takes much longer today. The discussion moves into the hardware area and talks about the difficult cable connections that must be made. Raskin presents a solid argument for hermaphroditic connectors. The chapter ends with a discussion of the ethics and management of interface design and presents some radical ideas for product/interface certification.

Chapter 8 is a brief summarizing conclusion. The book provides a very interesting journey and attempts to open readers’ eyes to many issues. We seem to keep replicating the same bad designs. We need to think outside of the box, once in a while. The best conclusion one can draw from the book lies in a statement that Raskin makes early on: “If a system’s one-on-one interaction with its human users is not pleasant and facile, the resulting deficiency will poison the performance of the entire system, however fine that system might be in its other aspects” (p. xix).

Enjoy the journey.