A /. post links to the essay by Jef Raskin (he who more or less wrote the Mac human interface, among other things) in ACM Queue, "Comments Are More Important Than Code" after the poster attempts to figure out spaghetti code he wrote three years ago. As Raskin says,
But the fundamental reason code cannot ever be self-documenting and automatic documentation generators can’t create what is needed is that they can’t explain why the program is being written, and the rationale for choosing this or that method. They cannot discuss the reasons certain alternative approaches were taken.
Which is what interfaces are really all about, in the real world: interfaces are rhetorical, and if the coders (or someone one design team) doesn't deeply understand why interface decisions need to address logical decisions from the user's standpoint, they're only geek puzzles. And those are fine in some domains--like when the users are geeks (and I use "geek" in its positive rather than negative connotations). But the large majority of computer interfaces aren't written to be used by other geeks, so we need to come up with better ways for coding teams to understand how their decisions relate to their users. The Raskin essay as well as the /. discussion both include some useful insights. (But as a content warning, the /. post is pretty technical if you aren't familiar with code.)
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Posted by johndan at April 26, 2005 11:14 PM | TrackBack