A 1996 essay by
Human-Computer Interface pros Don Gentner and
Jakob Nielsen, in which the assumptions behind the
GUI first popularized by the
Macintosh are laid bare, and the fact that we still design our computer interfaces to the technical limitations of 12 years ago (at the time of the essay's publication) is challenged.
Here's a summary, which I found at the KDE developer site's User Interface Guidelines page:
"Abandon the guiding priciples of interface design:
Replace them with:
It isn't the intention of the essay to denigrate the Macintosh or its interface; the "anti-" part means "opposite," not "hatin'." The authors quote Apple Fellow Alan Kay's quip that the Mac was "the first personal computer good enough to be criticized." The Mac was, in fact, so good that its interface concepts are now almost inescapable in the world of computing, and we have dragged along a lot of bathwater with the baby as we've moved forward. The essay is an excellent place to start if you're wondering where HCI is headed. (Although it doesn't deal much with the necessary step of driving a stake through the heart of the hierarchical file system; that's more Alan Cooper's hobby horse.)