There is a tidy irony available here, and it is worth resisting. The tidy version goes: Jef Raskin devoted his career to humane interfaces, and his son Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll, one of the least humane interaction patterns ever shipped. Father builds the cathedral of user respect; son builds the slot machine. It is a clean story and a misleading one. The more accurate reading is that Aza Raskin has spent the past several years making, in public, an argument his father would have recognized as his own — and that the family thread running through both men is not a contradiction but a continuity.

I want to take that continuity seriously, because it says something about what Jef Raskin’s principles actually demand of the people who hold them.

What Infinite Scroll Is, and What It Costs

Infinite scroll is the design pattern in which a feed loads more content automatically as the user reaches the bottom, so that the page never ends. Aza Raskin is generally credited with inventing it, around 2006, as a way to remove a small friction: the user no longer had to click “next page.” Seen narrowly, it is a usability improvement. Fewer clicks, less waiting, a smoother experience.

Seen in its eventual deployment across social platforms, it is something else. A feed with no bottom removes a natural stopping cue. The old paginated list ended; you reached the last item and decided whether to go on. The infinite feed never presents that decision. It is, by design, a surface engineered to keep the user engaged past the point at which the user would otherwise have stopped. Aza Raskin himself has, in interviews over the past couple of years, estimated the aggregate human time that infinite scroll consumes and described the pattern in language close to regret. He has called it one of the things he wishes he had not built, and he now works on the ethics of attention-capturing technology rather than its construction.

That public reversal is the interesting part. It is not a man disowning his father’s field. It is a man applying his father’s standard to his own work and finding the work wanting.

The Standard Both Men Share

Jef Raskin’s foundational commitment was that the interface exists to serve the user, and that a design which works against the user’s own interest is a design failure regardless of how well it performs on any other metric. He measured interfaces by how efficiently they let people accomplish what they set out to do — not what the software’s owner wanted them to do. The whole apparatus of The Humane Interface is built on the premise that the user’s goals are the thing the interface is accountable to.

Infinite scroll fails that standard precisely. It optimizes for engagement, which is the platform’s goal, at the expense of the user’s goal, which is usually to find something specific and then leave. The pattern is efficient at retaining attention and inefficient at serving intent. By the elder Raskin’s measure, that is not a neutral trade-off; it is the interface working against the person using it.

When Aza Raskin says he regrets infinite scroll, he is, whether or not he frames it this way, invoking the family standard. He is saying that a pattern can be a usability improvement at the level of a single click and a humane-design failure at the level of a life. That distinction — local convenience versus aggregate cost to the user — is exactly the kind of distinction his father insisted designers were obligated to make.

Why This Is Not Hypocrisy

It would be easy, and unfair, to read Aza Raskin’s position as a man profiting from a harm and then lamenting it for credit. The more defensible reading is that he is doing what his father’s framework actually requires, which is uncomfortable. Humane design is not a feeling of goodwill toward users; it is a discipline of measuring outcomes against the user’s own interests and being honest when your work fails the measurement — including, especially, your own past work.

Jef Raskin was not sentimental about design. He corrected the historical record on the Macintosh even when the correction was awkward; he criticized interfaces he had once admired; he treated wrong models as intellectual pollution to be cleaned up rather than feelings to be spared. A son who builds a wildly successful pattern, then publicly concludes that it harms the people it serves and turns his attention to repairing the harm, is behaving in a recognizably Raskin way. The willingness to say “I was wrong about this, and here is the evidence” is the through-line.

What the Episode Teaches About Humane Interfaces

The infinite-scroll story is useful because it exposes a limit in how Jef Raskin’s principles are usually summarized. People remember the modes argument, the LEAP key, the case against the desktop metaphor — the mechanics of interaction. They remember less often that underneath the mechanics is an ethical claim: the interface is accountable to the user, not to the user’s attention as a resource to be harvested.

The attention economy that infinite scroll helped enable is a large-scale violation of that claim, and it is one his original framework did not fully anticipate, because the framework was written before engagement metrics became the dominant currency of software. The younger Raskin’s recent work — on what he and his collaborators describe as the human downgrading produced by attention-capturing design — can be read as an attempt to extend the family standard to a problem his father did not live to confront. The mechanism is new. The principle is the same one: build for the person, measure against the person’s interest, and be honest when you have failed.

The neat irony, then, is the wrong frame. There is no clean reversal here, father humane and son not. There is one standard, held across a generation, applied first to keystrokes and now to the economics of attention, by people willing to turn it on their own work. That is not the betrayal of Jef Raskin’s project. It is its continuation.

Related:

• Modes Came Back: Voice Assistants and Hidden State →
• Core Principles of Humane Interface Design →
• The Humane Interface →
• Back to Ideas →

External references: Aza Raskin’s public statements on attention and technology appear through the Center for Humane Technology; for the design-ethics literature see the ACM Digital Library.