Aperte.org Jeremy Handcock

I read a lot about software interaction design these days. I recently read an article providing this bit of advice: create designs that allow people to forget about the software they're using. As an example, if you're trying to pay your bills using your bank's website, you should be able to focus on the financial aspect of the transaction (to whom do I owe money, and how much?) rather than the website itself (how do I see how much money is available in my chequing account?).

There is nothing terribly new or interesting here. Such advice is somewhat of a platitude in the field of interaction design, as it probably is in other design disciplines. This idea of designing for people to forget about the software they're using reminded me of something though: Mark Weiser's 1991 article, The Computer for the 21st Century.

I came across Weiser's article a few years ago when it was assigned reading for one of my HCI classes. The Computer for the 21st Century is considered to be a manifesto of ubiquitous computing wherein Weiser speaks generally about computing technology, not specifically about software user interfaces. Even so, there is a lot in this article that is worth looking at if you're interested in software interaction design. The first two sentences contain all the meat:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

You might translate the first sentence as, "The most profound software designs are those that disappear." Weiser downplays the role of technology in manifesting the disappearance:

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading.

This is an important point. Too often, I believe, people developing software products tend to think that applying a certain technology is a means of creating a great user interface. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I would say that engineering-minded folks are especially susceptible to this line of thinking. In fact, the most compelling designs are those that embrace the psychology behind what makes software easy to use, even if such designs are created with age-old technology. These are the designs that will "disappear." As Weiser says, "… only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals." Welcome to the 21st century. He wrote that 19 years ago, yet it rings out just as loudly today.