Douglas Engelbart once said, “If ease of use was the only valid criterion, people would stick to tricycles and never try bicycles.” Just making things as easy to use as possible is not the whole story. If you are interested in usability, you will enjoy this article; it demonstrates a new perspective for analyzing interfaces.

Human-computer interface (HCI) experts often say that the aim of design is usability. But there is more. In this article, the author introduces the term “slanty design,” which originally comes from the design of sloping desks in libraries, so that people cannot put their coffee cups next to the books (this makes them less usable from a user-centric point of view, but much more appropriate for their overall purpose). Thus, a slanty design has some built-in lack of usability or functionality to prevent irresponsible use. In other words, slanty design reduces functionality, and makes it simple to do simple things, but makes it difficult to do unwanted things. The author demonstrates this approach by presenting the slanty design in the Apple’s iPod shuffle, where people can experience music in a random way, and in Google’s Gmail, where it becomes very difficult to delete emails.

This paper gives readers a very good understanding of the importance of slanty design. It should be read by both designers and programmers.