Skinnable User Interfaces

osOpinion has an interview with Jef Raskin, …Jef Raskin Talks Skins…, one of the original UI designers for the Macintosh.

Skinning is all the rage with many applications these days (like earthli.com’s themes). A lot of the time, it seems that the designer is more interested in the fun had making the skin or the look of it than the actual usability of it. Apple recently drew criticism for keeping its UI, “Aqua”, closed to skinning in order to provide a more consistent interface for users.

Raskin argues that the need for skinning arises from inadequacies in the provided interface and that allowing skinning and changing of other visual preferences leads to less efficient work. He also argues that for efficiency, ease-of-use and shallowing the learning curve, there actually is a “best” way of building an interface. It’s a copout to say that a bad interface is skinnable; the user shouldn’t have to work to make your software usable.

Customization should also be limited to a higher-level set of changes, rather than individually-tweakable settings. He mentions an example:

“I remember one client of mine who boasted about his customizable desktop and how he never had to reboot his software. I set the system font to red and the background to red. You couldn’t see a thing. He spent a few minutes trying to find and open the now-invisible menus that would let him change one of the colors. … He had to reboot. His system was good in that it automatically saved the user preferences, so it came up red on red. He had not only to reboot, but to reload the software, losing all his demo data.”

You may note that that’s why earthli has just one structure, but allows you to change colors for elements of that structure. However, you’re forced to choose from a set of colors, rather than being able to customize colors for individual components yourself.