Jef Raskin Quotations

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.

Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.

A well-designed and humane interface does not need to be split into beginner and expert subsystems.

What users want is convenience and results.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

The system should treat all user input as sacred.

Once the product's task is known, design the interface first; then implement to the interface design.

Users do not care about what is inside the box, as long as the box does what they need done.

An unlimited-length file name is a file. The content of a file is its own best name.

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.

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.

If our field is "to advance", we must - without displacing creativity and aesthetics - make sure our terminology is clear.

If I had not studied music, there would be no Macintosh computers today.

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.

When you have to choose among methods, your locus of attention is drawn from the task and temporarily becomes the decision itself.

I hate mice. The mouse involves you in arm motions that slow you down. I didn't want it on the Macintosh, but Jobs insisted. In those days, what he said went, good idea or not.

I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency?

As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.