Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

We need to ask ourselves not only what computers can do, but what computers should do.

Overemphasis of efficiency leads to an unfortunate circularity in design: for reasons of efficiency early programming languages reflected the characteristics of the early computers, and each generation of computers reflects the needs of the programming languages of the preceding generation.

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations; most computer users have found that they now need more, and more expensive clerks, even though they call them "operators" or "programmers.

Systems are complex. A computer system is not just hardware, not just software, not even just people plus hardware plus software. The procedures, formal and informal, that have evolved with the system are part of the system; so is the current load on various components, and so is the attitude and experience of the users. Even among the commonly accepted “parts” of a system, clear lines of separation do not exist. Hardware merges with operating system, operating system merges with programming language, programming language merges with debugging tools, debugging tools merge with documentation, and documentation merges with training, and all of them mingle with the social climate in which the system is used.

I've moved on, grown and learned in the years since then, and am designing interfaces that make the Mac's GUI feel as clumsy to use as the Mac made the old DOS-based systems feel primitive.

We build our computers the way we build our cities — over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

One of the prophets of the personal computer industry, Alan Kay, has said that the true personal computer has not yet been made. I disagree. We have, as the ancient curse warns us, gotten what we asked for. We do indeed have computers being bought by individuals for themselves; they are "personal computers". The problem is that many of us didn't want computers in the first place -- computers are merely boxes for running programs -- we wanted the benefits that computer technology has to offer. What we wanted was to ease the workload in information related areas much as washing machines and vacuum cleaners ease the workload in maintaining cleanliness.

It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you.

Computing was about controlling complexity and we have failed miserably.

It would be wonderful if we could just tuck in a few loose ends and change a handful of details of present systems to have them work properly. Unfortunately, we have learned that the GUI concept has fundamental flaws that cannot be corrected by small changes. These flaws have to do with incompatibilities between the designs of both GUIs and command-line interfaces and the way our brains are wired. As we cannot change the way our minds work, we must change the interface design.

Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701 (an early computer), writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.

...задача дизайнеров заключается в том, чтобы создавать интерфейсы, которые не позволяют привычкам вызывать проблемы у пользователей. Мы должны создавать интерфейсы, которые, во-первых, целенаправленно опираются на человеческую способность формировать привычки и, во-вторых, развивают у пользователей такие привычки, которые позволяют упростить ход работы. В случае идеального человекоориентированного интерфейса доля участия самого интерфейса в работе пользователя должна сводиться к формированию полезных привычек. Многие проблемы, которые делают программные продукты сложными и неудобными в использовании, происходят из-за того, что в используемом интерфейсе «человек-машина» не учитываются полезные и вредные свойства человеческой способности формировать привычки.