Jef Raskin (1943 – 2005)
Expert in human-computer interaction who began the Macintosh project for Apple Computer.
MacUser: If you could change one thing, what would it be?
Jef Raskin: To not have people assume you can rank every-thing one dimensionally. Or have everybody realise that killing people is not a way to solve problems.
His role on the Macintosh was the initiator of the project, so it wouldn't be here if it weren't for him.
What I proposed was a computer that would be easy to use, mix text and graphics, and sell for about $1,000. Steve Jobs said that it was a crazy idea, that it would never sell, and we didn't want anything like it. He tried to shoot the project down.
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
It's absolutely ugly, but unfortunately quite true of the world today; the more money you make, the more people tend to listen to you. If you're not quoted in Fortune or Forbes or the Wall Street Journal, then nobody listens. If you say something that makes a lot of money, whether what you said is true or not, people listen.
Icons, windows, mice, big operating systems, huge programs, integrated packages.... I would like to remind the world that just because two things are on the same menu doesn't mean they taste good together.
If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monoty would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product.
A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.
MacUser: Which person do you most admire?
Jef Raskin: For what attribute? Once again you ask a question that linearises a complex matter. I can name many. Let's start with people named George: George Cantor for moving infinity out of philosophy into mathematics, George Washington for showing how a leader should relinquish power, and George Bernard Shaw for his humanity... Or we can do it by subject and admire Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for their pulling from nature comprehensible laws; or Euclid, Gauss and Gödel for their contributions to mathematics; or people who have influenced me very directly, in which case I'd mention my very admirable parents and the teacher who taught me to be intellectually independent, L R Genise; or how about Claude Shannon without whose work on information theory I would have been lost.
I am only a footnote, but proud of the footnote I have become. My subsequent work — on eliciting principles and developing the theory of interface design, so that many people will be able to do what I did — is probably also footnote-worthy. In looking back at this turn-of-the-century period, the rise of a worldwide network will be seen as the most significant part of the computer revolution.
A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.
We have a whole valley full of people talking UNIX versus MS-DOS. What do you need any of that for? Just throw it all out; get rid of all that nonsense. Maybe you need it for computer scientists, but for people who want to get something done, no. Do you need an operating system? No.
Making technology work simpler, he was at the heart of that from the first days at Apple. Jef Raskin is one of the most important people in personal computers, to this day.
Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.
When you have to choose among methods, your locus of attention is drawn from the task and temporarily becomes the decision itself.
Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.
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