The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen) - NN/G

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The Anti-Mac Interface

Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen

August 1, 1996

1996-08-01

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Summary:<br>We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.

Originally published as: Gentner, D., and Nielsen, J.: The Anti-Mac interface, Communications of the ACM 39 , 8 (August 1996), 70–82.

(See also: my appreciation of the Macintosh on its 25th anniversary.)

By exploring alternative interfaces that transcend the principles behind conventional graphical interfaces, a human-computer interface emerges that is based on language, a richer representation of objects, expert users, and shared control.

At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.

Physicists and mathematicians often stretch their imaginations by considering what the world would be like if some of their basic assumptions and principles were violated (for example, see [1]). This has led to new concepts such as non-Euclidean geometry, positrons, antimatter, and antigravity. At the least, violating basic assumptions is a useful mental exercise, but a surprising number of the resulting concepts have provided useful descriptions of the real world.

In this article, we explore the types of interfaces that could result if we violate each of the Macintosh human interface design principles. We focus on the Macintosh interface because it is a prime example of the current interface paradigm, and Apple Computer has published an explicit list of Macintosh human interface design principles [2]. These principles have not significantly changed since the introduction of the Macintosh; style guides for other popular graphical interfaces, such as Motif, OPEN LOOK, and Windows [16, 18, 22], list a very similar set of principles as the basis for their interfaces.

We should state at the outset that we are devoted fans of the Macintosh human interface and frequent users of Macintosh computers. Our purpose is not to argue that the Macintosh human interface guidelines are bad principles, but rather to explore alternative approaches to computer interfaces. The Anti-Mac interface is not intended to be hostile to the Macintosh, only different. In fact, human interface designers at Apple and elsewhere have already incorporated some of the Anti-Mac features into the Macintosh desktop and applications. The Macintosh was designed to be "the computer for the rest of us" and succeeded well enough that it became, as Alan Kay once said, "the first personal computer good enough to be criticized." This article should be taken in the same spirit.

The Macintosh was designed under a number of constraints, including:

It needed to sell to "naive users," that is, users without any previous computer experience.

It was targeted at a narrow range of applications (mostly office work, though entertainment and multimedia applications have been added later in ways that sometimes break slightly with the standard interface).

It controlled relatively weak computational resources (originally a non-networked computer with 128KB RAM, a 400KB storage device, and a dot-matrix printer).

It was supported by highly impoverished communication channels between the user and the computer (initially a small black-and-white screen with poor audio output, no audio input, and no other sensors than the keyboard and a one-button mouse).

It was a standalone machine that at most was connected to a printer.

These constraints have all been relaxed somewhat during the 12 years since the introduction of the Macintosh, but we will explore what might happen if they were to be eliminated completely.

In This Article:

The Macintosh Human Interface Design Principles

The Anti-Mac Interface

Conclusions

References

The Macintosh Human Interface Design Principles

According to the Macintosh guidelines [2], the design of human interfaces for Macintosh system software and applications is based on a number of fundamental principles of human-computer interaction. These principles have led to excellent graphical interfaces, but we wonder: How do these principles limit the computer-human interface? What types of interfaces would result from violating these principles?

We will address these two questions for each of the Macintosh human interface design principles. (The Macintosh design principles and their corresponding Anti-Mac principles are summarized in Table 1.)

Table 1. The Mac and Anti-Mac design principles.

Mac<br>Anti-Mac

Metaphors<br>Reality

Direct Manipulation<br>Delegation

See and Point<br>Describe and...