The desktop metaphor must die

The endless News Feed casinos that were designed specifically to turn a generation of people into machine-state information banks? Inhumane.

It all became too much, too fast. To quote a dear friend of mine, human beings simply aren’t equipped with the necessary bandwidth to process the explosion of information that our world has normalized.

The App economy is also just a massive waste of human capital—just think about all the wasted time we have collectively spent engineering the same feature again and again for every new App, when we could have been crafting unique commands that users can choose to obtain a la carte.

And when we strip away all the chrome—all the Aero and Paper and Frosted Glass, all the evidence of the “design systems” we have poured billions into developing and maintaining—we come face to face with a skeleton of XEROX PARC’s 1973 invention.

File naming and organization as a whole is an exercise in futility. When saving a document, for example, our locus of attention is not on coming up with a unique and memorable name—we just want to save our work. Seemingly minor moments of friction such as this burdens our cognitive load, distracting us from our intentions and from entering flow sta... See more

To make things worse, it turns out that the desktop metaphor underlying so much of our computing was not equipped to handle it either. In response to the increased stimuli, our Desktops simply started generating more clutter. Windows upon windows of tabs and tabs, folders within folders of Untitled(1). Never-ending, nebulous clutter.

20 years ago, Jef Raskin (the founder of the Macintosh project) asserted that the desktop interface strategy was “inefficient and inhumane.”

Raskin defines the ideal humane interface as “responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.”

The true revolution will come when we are able to demand and author change from a grassroots level.