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For those scoffing at this, you might be interested to know that the brains behind this was Jef Raskin, he of the book "The Humane Interface" [0,1] and was responsible for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designi... [2] https://www.mac-history.net/apple-history-2/mac-history/2012...

Something similar to this is discussed and championed in The Humane Interface:

https://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing...

It is sad nobody mentions book The Humane Interface by Jeff Raskin.

Raskin would say, that this is not a question of red or green. It is a question of habit. If user deletes enough items, you will train him to press "Yes" button and not to think about the question. It will be his habit. Uninterruptible sequence.

Anybody deleted his important files just because he is "trained" to press sequence F8 - Enter in his favourite file manager?

Raskin recommends to provide undo. User content is sacred and should not be lost. You can also try to randomize the dialog. User will stop the sequence and think what he is doing. But if user performs the delete operation often, he will be greatly annoyed.

Read it. It is a great book with many valuable gems. http://amzn.com/0201379376

⬐ lttlrck

"Cancel"/"No" should be on the left (go back) and "OK"/"Yes" on the right (proceed).

(There may be guidelines that do the opposite and I guess RTL locales may reverse it).

Deliberately ignoring HMI guidelines and switching button placement is irritating and does not remove the muscle-memory (?) problem. Doing it randomly is nuts and leads to mistakes that are IMO not the users fault.

It you want to interrupt a sequence, there are kinder ways of doing it like double confirmation.

⬐ ASneakyFox

Please do not randomly change buttons. Thats the worst idea ever. Where does this guy do his research?

Jef Raskin was a computer/ui designer who worked on the Canon Cat before becoming the leader on the Macintosh program at Apple. Steve Jobs took over the program and Jef was, by some accounts, forced out of the project. He expressed strongly opinionated ideas about what computer interfaces should be in a way that many see as rants about what might have been.

His book, The Humane Inerface (http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...) does have some interesting thoughts on how novice and expert users have completely different ways of interacting with machines.

⬐ pdw

Wasn't it the other way around? Raskin started the Macintosh project, and then did the Canon Cat after Jobs forced him out.

⬐ tygorius

As has been pointed out, you've got the sequence reversed. Raskin was on the original Macintosh team first. His ideas for the project included keeping the cost down. Things like using an 8-bit CPU (the 6809?) rather than the still-pricey 68000, a character-based display rather than bit-mapped, etc. He later created his own company and used those ideas in what became the Canon Cat product -- something that looked like a shrunken ADM-3A terminal. It kept all your documents on a floppy disk eschewing normal filesystem in favor of a Forth-based image system (not too unlike Smalltalk images).

Unfortunately he was convinced his ideas for interfaces should be protected by patents, virtually guaranteeing that things like his "leap" keys would never be adopted.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was a tremendous sense of possibility for what computers could do for us on the personal level. I think Nelson, like Alan Kay, is worth revisiting on that basis: reminding us of possibilities, not so much who was right and wrong or who was first to think of X.

Plan 9's UI works in a quite similar way. I'm not up to date on my history of those systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is heavy cross pollination between the two.

Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...

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The article linked to at the very beginning is not available on the original site. Here is an archive.org link: http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tum...

⬐ tujv

Rob Pike says that Oberon was an influence on his Plan 9 text editor, Acme.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/acme.html

Your comments remind me a bit of the interface for the Canon Cat designed by Jeff Raskin. You may be familiar with his classic book...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...

For anyone who hasn't read it, Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface is a great book. Makes you really stop and think about how we interact with objects around us - physical and virtual.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...

⬐ specialist

I still find a lot of inspiration from the earlier UI books (ideas), before everything settled down. Lots of crazy, awesome ideas. Now it's just how to books.

I've been anticipating the ZUI for ages. eg It's the correct answer for a window manager. It's the only way to maintain continuity, preventing users getting "hyperlost", kinda like what breadcrumbs try to accomplish.

Did you see the new flashy zooming Calendar transitions in the WWDC Mavericks demo? It appears to have the right balance between zooming and level of detail (LOD). Me want!

FWIW, I did not anticipate the dynamic 2.5D in the forthcoming iOS 7. That's gonna be huge.

I own two Canon Cats, which I bought after reading Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface.

While technologically they are decades out of date, from a UX perspective, there is a lot to be learned from using one.

Some of the concepts, such as a document-oriented system that never requires the user to launch or quit an application, nor to "save" their work, would still represent a leap forward today.

I'd love to see a modern OS built with the concepts of a humane interface today. Even the iOS and Android systems carry legacies of the WIMP interface instead of Raskin's humane approach.

I've spoken at the BIL Conference about the idea of bringing Jef Raskin's (and others) ideas into the modern age: http://www.bilconference.com/videos/rethinking-modern-gui-ja...

This is a great historical repository, but worth reading for the ways some of the concepts can be used today.

And of course, anyone who's interested in what made the Cat special should read Jef Raskin's book: http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...

⬐ Samuel_Michon

"a document-oriented system that never requires the user to launch or quit an application, nor to "save" their work, would still represent a leap forward today."

Have you looked at iOS or Mac OS X Lion?

⬐ jaysonelliot

Yes, I use iOS regularly on the iPad and iPhone.

While saving work is thankfully disappearing as a paradigm in iOS (I don't use Lion, so don't know), it's still application-based, meaning that if there's a tool I like in one app, I don't have access to it unless that app is open, and I can't call the tool up on its own.

iOS is a major leap forward, but at its heart, it's still more suited to consumption than creation.

Raskin described a plug like that in his human factors book that I read. Probably:

http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...

My favorite UX books:

The Design of Everyday Things (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Donald-Norman/d...)

The Humane Interface (http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...)

Contextual Design (http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...)

⬐ danilocampos

I'm 11 pages into the Design of Everyday things and loving it so far. Thank you for the recommendation.

⬐ ary

I need to second your recommendation of The Humane Interface. I reread it often.

⬐ xyzzyb

That last one is more about systems analysis than user experience.

⬐ d_mcgraw

I'm reading The Design of Everyday Things right now. It is an amazingly good book. The examples are awesome. It really is changing the way I look at everything.

⬐ imwilsonxu

The Design of Everyday Things is cool, indeed. Norman's a great author who keeps questioning what we take for granted.

However, if you are looking for something more pragmatic, Steve's Don't Make me Think and JJG's The Elements of User Experience should be the top of your reading list, especially on web design.

This is great! It reminds me of Zoomworld, described by Jef Raskin in his book The Humane Interface, and even the Demo picture on the front page demonstrates some of those ideas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...