Science Quote by Jef Raskin

Raskin is smuggling a moral argument into what looks like a workflow tip: the interface is the product. If you start with implementation, you end up defending the code you already wrote, then reverse-engineering an experience that politely accommodates it. His line flips the hierarchy. First decide what the product must accomplish for a human being, then sketch the boundary where human intention meets machine behavior, and only then let engineering fill in the pipes.

The phrasing is deliberately uncompromising. "Once the product's task is known" rejects the faux-agile habit of treating goals as perpetually negotiable. "Design the interface first" isn’t aesthetic primacy; it’s epistemology. The interface is where assumptions are forced into concrete choices: what’s possible, what’s discoverable, what’s safe, what’s irreversible. When you commit to that early, you surface contradictions before they calcify into architecture.

Context matters: Raskin helped conceive the original Macintosh and spent his career arguing for humane computing. This is an anti-feature-creep, anti-engineer-led product manifesto from someone who watched clever systems repeatedly fail ordinary users. The subtext is also political inside organizations: interface-first design protects users from internal convenience. It tells teams to stop treating people as test cases for technical ambition and start treating implementation as a service role to a clearly articulated experience.

There’s a quiet sting in the last clause - "implement to the interface design" - because it implies that shipping should be constrained by the promise you made at the surface, not by whatever was easiest to build underneath.