The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems () is a book about user interface design written by Jef Raskin and published in 2000. It covers ergonomics, quantification, evaluation, and navigation. Contents The book puts forward a large number of interface design suggestions, from fairly trivial ones to radical ones. The overriding theme is that current computer interfaces are often poor and set up users to fail, as a result of poor planning (or lack of planning) by programmers and a lack of understanding of how people actually use software. Raskin often refers to the computer he designed, the Canon Cat, as an example of a system that implemented the various measures he advocates. The Canon Cat is often considered the first information appliance. Many of the ideas presented in the Canon Cat and The Humane Interface were later adopted by Raskin in his Archy project, and later by his son Aza. Raskin includes a chapter demonstrating four models of quantifying the efficiency of a software interface: the GOMS keystroke model, Raskin's own efficiency measure, Fitts' law and Hick's law. All are intended to minimize the amount of time required for the user to perform any specific task. Design rules Raskin also advocates a number of changes to conventional interface design. Among them: Modelessness a mode is a state in which the computer produces a different output for the same input than it would have if it were another state; the classic example is the keyboard's "caps lock" key. Raskin advocates either getting rid of them entirely or using "quasimodes" (a term he invented in the book); a quasimode is a state in which the user must make some constant physical action in order to keep the computer in that state, so that they cannot forget that they are in that mode; an example is the keyboard's shift key. Monotony of design there should be only one way to accomplish a certain atomic task in an application (in many modern applications, there are at least three - one through a button on the screen, one through a menu dropdown, and one through a keyboard shortcut and often more). Universal undo/redo every action should be undoable and redoable, even after a document or application has been closed and reopened. Elimination of warning screens modern software applications often ask the user "are you sure?" before some potentially harmful action; Raskin argues