Thanks to Darryl Hebbes for pointing me towards this one: Humanized Inc.
In the eighties, one of the original Apple Mac gurus, Jeff Raskin, came up with some crazy ideas about human computer interaction. Most of his ideas were just too radical. Now his son is taking those ideas forward with a new business venture.
The design trip
One of Jeff’s inventions was the auto-cancelling, semi-transparent notification. This was a “crazy idea” but it’s- now built into many email clients and mobile phones.
Jeff was also the first to point out the the whole concept of file names and the way that file-save and file-open work are actually fairly “in-humane” – they don’t match the things we as users want to think about, when we want to think them. And he was a big fan of GOMS – modelling the most efficient way to get an operation done in terms of keyboard and mouse clicks.
The design trip culminated in the creation of the Canon Cat. A computer with a radically different approach to the user experience that Jeff called a “humane” interface. It featured “Leap keys” and kind of continuous notepad – you never really created files, you just started a new page. You used search to find the page you were looking for. It flopped wildly.
Raskin wrote an amazing book called The Humane Interface which I would REALLY recommend.
Jeff died in 2006. Many of his most radical ideas are sitting out there waiting to be brought into the main stream. They make a lot of sense, but you just need to think outside the paradigm of how you use computers at the moment. (After all do you really find using your computer effortless? Of course not. Maybe Jeff’s ideas can make that happen.)
Enter Humanized Inc.
It’s a new company recently set up by Jeff’s son. How cool.
They’ve started with a tool to make it easier to start applications and bring windows to the front. They’ve also got a special spell checker. They’re working on an RSS reader next. I can really do with that last one.
When it comes to easy software they recommend the “Telephone test”:
We ask ourselves, “Would I be willing to teach my Grandma how to use this over the phone?”. If the answer is “Definitely”, we know we’re doing well; if the answer is “Maybe”, we know we can do better; and if the answer is “No”, then it’s time to rethink the whole thing.
I think this is wonderful.