The best interface is no interface | Cooper Journal
Interesting article. Likely to be controversial, and some of his examples may be a bit exaggerated as to the number of steps, but overall, worth reading for computer people (both hardware and software), IMO.
Seen via a retweet of a tweet by @timoreilly.
The author works at cooper.com, a design firm in SF.
Founded by Alan Cooper, the "father of Visual Basic". I had read the first edition of his book, About Face, long ago. It was an interesting book about UI design and what was wrong with it, even back then.
I need to improve the UI of my own software products, even the command-line ones, and even the APIs of the libraries I've released.
One thing I still remember from the book was the concept of affordances (Google it), and an example he gave of a better scroll bar with both of the arrows at one end of the bar, rather than at opposite ends, the benefit being that you don't have to move the mouse to the other end to change scrolling direction. Neat.
If interested in these ideas, also see my post about muji :-)
http://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/05/muji-simplicity-is-deceptively-complex.html
- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
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