Death Comes to Bob the Waiter

The experience of an invisible user interface is a subject that begs for analogies. Alan Cooper compares the user's state of easy concentration and productivity to the exhilarating experience of planing in a racing dinghy—that is, of skimming across the surface of the water at a very high speed. (Apparently he is unaware of sailboards, which plane far more often than dinghies.) He describes this as "flow" and introduces flow this way: "Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in their book Peopleware, Productive Projects and Teams define flow as a 'condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement.' Flow often induces a 'gentle sense of euphoria' and can make you unaware of the passage of time. More significantly, a person in a state of flow can be extremely productive, especially when engaged in process-oriented tasks such as 'engineering, design, development, and writing.'"

But my favorite analogy for this subject comes from Peter Bickford's chapter (first an article) "Transparency, or Death Comes to Bob the Waiter," in which he compares an invisible user interface (or, as he calls it, a transparent interface) to a good waiter: "This is the concept that computer interfaces should attempt to serve the user as unobtrusively as possible (like a good waiter). It lets users concentrate on their work—not on the interface itself." He further states, "Great waiters serve your food, refill your glass, and clear your dishes without ever interrupting the flow of conversation." By contrast, bad waiters "shatter any sense of romance by stopping by every five minutes to ask 'How's everything going?' and 'How's everyone's warm duck salad tonight?'" This is why we hate bad waiters.

Now let's look at the ways in which a user interface can act like Bickford's bad waiter.