My very good friend from high school (the one who prefers not to have his name bandied about anywhere ECHELON might notice it) once said of me that someone should pay me to design user interfaces. After several years of working in the software field I’ve lost much of my enthusiasm for the idea, largely as a result of finding that

1. no one actually gives a damn about good UI design, and
2. no matter how clueless they are, they all think they’re UI experts.

(This is not strictly true. It is, however, true of almost everywhere I’ve had the misfortune to work over the last ten years. I’m sure management at most of those places would deny the accusation, but they’ve never been willing to put their money where their mouths are. [Except Aashima Narula at RealNetworks. Aashima was great.] “Good enough” has always been good enough, even when it clearly wasn’t.)

That said, user interface design is still a minor passion of mine, and one I look forward to indulging when I retire at 35 to my horse ranch in the California wine country. (Why, yes, I did buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Why do you ask?) I still enjoy reading about it and griping about it. And I particularly enjoy articles like this one, from John Siracusa of Ars Technica, on the rise and fall of the Macintosh Finder.

The illusion was so powerful and so like the familiar physical world that the Finder itself disappeared as a separate entity. It has been said that “the interface is the computer”, meaning that the average user makes no distinction between the way he interacts with the computer and the reality of the computer's internal operation. If the interface is hard to use, the computer is hard to use, and so on. The interface is the computer.

In the days of classic Mac OS, the Finder was the interface--and, by extension, was the computer. When people raved about the Mac’s “ease of use” (especially back in the days when the Mac was home to the only mass-market personal computer GUI) what they were really raving about was the Finder. Applications may or may not have had pleasing, usable interfaces, but they were clearly “not the computer.” Applications ran on the computer. You launched applications, and then quit them. The Finder was what you saw when all the applications were closed. There was no closing the Finder. To close the Finder meant to turn off the computer. The Finder was the computer.

And, no, it wasn’t the single-tasking nature of the early Mac operating system that caused this feeling, for it continued long after the introduction of MultiFinder and, later, System 7. It was the meticulously constructed, relentlessly maintained illusion that files and folders were real, physical things existing inside the computer that you could manipulate in familiar, direct, predictable ways. [Emphasis in original]

A lot of people have excused the collapse of this illusion on the grounds that computers, and the way we use them, have “outgrown the desktop metaphor”. These people are wrong. (Or, rather, they’re missing the point. They may be right, but that’s not an excuse for crappy interfaces.) The desktop — the physical desktop — was essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. The human brain, however, appears to be here for the long haul.