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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteJef Raskin’s interface-design principles are two laws, not three: software should protect people’s work and avoid wasting their time or making them do unnecessary work. For software teams, they offer a useful prompt to examine not only the product’s effect on users but also whether developers have the tools and working conditions to build it responsibly. That broader organizational application is an ethical argument, not a universal legal duty established by Raskin’s laws.
What are Raskin’s laws of software?
In The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin frames two laws for computer-user interaction:
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A computer should not harm your work or, by failing to act, allow your work to come to harm.
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A computer should not waste your time or require more work than is strictly necessary.
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Humane Livestock Handling: Understanding livestock behavior and building facilities for healthier animals- Used Book in Good Condition
The distinction matters: the commonly cited formulation has two laws, even though the assignment’s original title refers to three. It would be misleading to invent a third. These principles put practical questions at the center of design: is a person’s work safe, and can the task be completed without avoidable effort? Smithsonian Libraries and Archives catalogs Raskin’s book as a 2000 publication.
What makes software humane?
Raskin defines a humane interface as one that responds to human needs and takes human frailties into account. That shifts the design standard from asking whether a feature technically works to asking how it behaves for people who can make mistakes, lose focus, or encounter interruptions. The publisher-hosted excerpt of The Humane Interface gives the definition.
Protect people’s work
Apply the first law by looking for ways a product can lose, damage, or leave work vulnerable through inaction. Consider what happens when a session ends unexpectedly, a user makes a consequential change, or the system fails to communicate that an action did not succeed. The point is not that every product must use the same safeguard; it is to make the risks to users’ work visible and design around them.
Remove needless effort
Apply the second law by tracing a user’s task from start to finish. Look for repeated entry, avoidable steps, confusing recovery paths, and requirements that make people remember details the software could handle. Fewer clicks alone are not the goal: an apparently shorter path can still waste time if it is unclear or makes errors harder to recover from.
Why humane development work belongs in the discussion
Raskin also argues that programming environments have received too little benefit from human-factors research and that simple programming tasks can be made unnecessarily difficult. That observation offers a bridge from the interface people use to the tools and workflow developers rely on. If a team’s tools or processes create preventable friction, they can make it harder to give users reliable, considerate software.
This is an extension of Raskin’s ideas, not a third law: his two laws concern the computer’s relationship with its user. The organizational connection is that protecting users’ work and reducing needless effort are more achievable when the people building and maintaining software have conditions that support careful work.
What a developer’s duty of care can mean
The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct calls on computing professionals to contribute to human well-being and avoid harm, and asks them to consider the effects of their decisions on affected people. For leaders, it also addresses workers’ quality of working life, including development, accessibility, physical safety, psychological well-being, and human dignity. The ACM Code provides the full principles and guidance.
In practice, this supports an ethical and organizational case for caring about both sides of software: the people who use it and the people who make it. It does not establish that every developer has a specific, legally enforceable duty of care in every jurisdiction. Nor does the Code present its principles as an automatic formula for resolving each ethical question; it guides professional judgment.
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Use the laws as prompts, not a compliance checklist
Teams can use Raskin’s two laws to start a review of a product and the conditions in which it is built. They are questions for discussion and judgment, not a mechanical pass-or-fail test.
- For users: Where could work be harmed or lost? What unnecessary effort does the product impose? How can people understand and recover from mistakes?
- For developers: Which tools or process steps make ordinary work harder than it needs to be? Do team conditions leave room to address risks and maintain software responsibly? Are people’s well-being and dignity considered?
Keep the two levels distinct. A user-facing design problem calls for changes to the product; a workplace problem calls for organizational attention. Both matter to humane software practice, but they are not the same claim.
About Raskin’s book
For readers who want the fuller treatment, Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems was published by Addison-Wesley in 2000. Bibliographic records are available from Smithsonian Libraries and Archives and Google Books.
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