The computer desktop metaphor is ubiquitous, but how much work do we get done there? None! … all Time is entirely wasted navigating or shuffling content to the application in which we can finally work. What lessons can we learn from designing interfaces without the desktop and without applications? Is it even possible? And how does this apply to the Web? Currently, Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well.

Aza Raskin gives this excellent talk which is really about human computer interaction and usability. For those who don’t know Aza is the son of Jeff Raskin the guy who started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Aza’s offers some very useful views on User interface design, he touches on GOMS Models, Cognetics, Habituation in a wonderfully easy to follow manner. In this talk he outlines how we can get rid of the application centric model which comes from the desktop design paradigm in order to free functionality that can be made accessible using a ZUI along with a universal method for accessing functionality.

Applications are like walled cities that hoard their functionality, but we need to give that functionality away so others can use it wherever they are. But to facilitate this Aza argues that we need a universal access interface. Web services give you a separation between the UI and the Data but up until now services are really available to developers, they’re not really intended for end users but can we expose them through CLI’s?. He proposes a synthesis between GUI’s and CLI’s and from what he says they’re having a great success some of the examples he shows are compelling. I for one can see the value of this. In fact we’ve already put it into practise about six months ago.

You see this was something Rob and I thought about when we developed Project Cenote, one of the features of the user interface is that the browser’s URL line is an interface in its own right. For example if you type this into the url line:

http://cenote.talis.com/author/gemmell

And the application will perform a search for all items that were authored by “gemmell”. So if your like me and you just want to get to the content your interested in you can use this as opposed to navigating around the site and entering search terms into a search box. It is basically a Command Line Interface, and I think this is a wonderful way of giving end users access to content without necessarily forcing them to always use a GUI.

I was amused when one Aza paraphrased Asimov’s Three laws of Robotics into Raskins Rules of Interfaces:
1. An interface shall not harm your content or, through inaction, allow your content to come to harm.
2. An interface shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
3. An interface shall not allow itself to get into a state where it cannot manipulate content.

This is a great talk to listen to and full of some very useful tips.