Humaneness

With a good interface, it’s about human possibilities, not the features of a program or a device. Don’t force a person to do what he is not good at: reckoning, memorizing the way to the file, programming a video cassette recorder.

While developing interfaces, we follow a major principle: “Let the machine sweat it.”

If the computer knows that a person forgot to enter a phone number in a form, why report that “one or several fields were filled out”?

There are undoubtedly professional devices and software requiring that a person be sufficiently qualified and adequately trained to work with them. However, even then an interface should not be biased towards a robot-like trained user.

One of the most glaring manifestations of dependency on technical background in interfaces is machine-like language. In the interface developed by Art. Lebedev Studio the phrase “Documents found: 1” is mercilessly replaced with the humane “One document was found”.

Any person has a particular task in mind. The computer must not shift to the user the tasks of sorting, transforming or any other kind of intermediate processing of information—in other words, create additional difficulties.