ryan.freebern.org

I’m a big fan of Jef Raskin, the thinker behind the concept of the Humane Interface, which basically encourages a lot of the same stuff that I brought up in my Reimagining series: the computer should take human fallibility and imprecision into account at all times, and allow humans to do what humans do best while the computer handles the stuff that humans struggle with. His son Aza has followed in his footsteps, starting the company Humanized, and building the Enso software that attempts to incorporate many of Jef’s ideas, albeit in a sort of minimal way.

(Three of Humanized’s four principals were just hired by Mozilla, which probably means Humanized will shut down, but Mozilla’s interface will probably improve. Congratulations to everyone involved!)

To generate interest and press, Humanized recently developed and released Songza, a simple website that lets you search for music and play it in the browser. It makes use of several Humane principles: transparent zero-interaction “monolog” boxes, pie menus, and text labels instead of icons (mostly). This is great! It’s a simple and useful demonstration of how a Humane interface can be quickly and easily understood by people even when they’re not used to it, and it shows how nicely it works. In this sense, it’s a success.

I consider myself a “power user” of the web. When I find a website that performs some function I enjoy, I try to incorporate it into my life as seamlessly as possible. One thing I use often, for instance, is Firefox’s Smart Keywords feature, which lets me specify a keyword that I can use to quickly send a search to a specific website. I’ve set up dozens and dozens of these, so that finding the information I want is just a few keystrokes away: I can type “google jef raskin” to do a Google search, or “wp jef raskin” to look him up on Wikipedia, or “amazon jef raskin” to find his book on Amazon, or “dict humane” to find a definition, or “wu chicago, il” to find the weather at the Humanized offices. Once I’ve set these up and used them a few times, they become habit, and I barely have to think; looking up the information I want from a site I trust is utterly simple, and the computer has “learned” how to use its smarts to help me achieve my goals more quickly. This is the essence of a Humane interface: turning the user’s interaction with the interface into a benign habit that requires no thought.

To set up Smart Keywords, Firefox has created a simple process: you right-click on a form field, then select “Add a Keyword for this Search…” and then specify the keyword you want to use. It works on any standard web form, and Firefox figures out all the nitpicky details for you. Handy, no? Well, when I tried this with Songza, something went wrong: Firefox didn’t offer me the option of adding a keyword for the Songza search form. Viewing the source showed me the problem: the Songza search form, contrary to standard web design practices, doesn’t specify an action. The whole interface is handled by javascript and Flash: when you push the search button or press enter, the text you’ve entered isn’t sent to the server via HTTP, it’s grabbed by javascript and sent to the server using AJAX in the background. Hence, Firefox has no idea what’s going on, and can’t automate it for me, thereby denying me the expected simplicity of turning Songza into one of my habits.

To further aggravate things, there’s no reason why the site should be designed this way. It would be dead simple, from a programmer’s perspective, to make the form send a GET request back to the main page, and make the main page automatically handle it. Then, voilá, the form works as a standard web form, Smart Keywords work, and people can even link directly to search results. Add an auto-play option, and when I want to hear a song, all I have to do is type “songza perpetuum mobile” and, seconds later, it’ll be playing for me. (“Perpetuum Mobile” as performed by the Penguin Café Orchestra is a beautiful song. If I could provide a link here for you to listen to it directly on Songza, something like http://songza.com/perpetuum%20mobile, I would.)

It frustrates me that Humanized is trying so hard to effect a sea-change in how people interact with computers, but they (at least with Songza) aren’t trying to play nice with standard functionality at the same time. I understand that a paradigm shift often requires cracking a few eggs, so I don’t expect everything to go smoothly as they try to show how the Humane Interface is better than the current accepted computer UI, but I don’t think it’s wrong of me to say that their attempts should try to work with the current system as much as possible. People are going to be more impressed, and more enthusiastic, if your groundbreaking interface also does all the handy little “power user” things they expect, and provides as many avenues to habituation as possible.

Edit: You know what? I feel so strongly that this would improve Songza that, if any of the Humanized guys happen to read this post and want to take me up on it (and give me access to their code, of course), I’ll gladly do all the work necessary to add the above functionality to the site. How about it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, Jan 16, 2008 at 9:00 am and is tagged technology, usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.