The Best Interface Is No Interface — the physical book itself — bares an unmistakable affinity with Apple’s elegant, spare aesthetic. The book’s subtitle — “The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology” — could just as well be a motto of Apple’s, especially given its direction under chief design officer Jony Ives, and his embrace of a Dieter Rams-inspired, simpler, flatter, “less is more” design philosophy.

The parallels between Krishna’s book and Apple’s ethos even continue into the fiber of some of Krishna’s arguments. When Krishna laments the attitude that breeds “thoughtless habits and the self-delusion that the way things have gone the past few years is the way we should keep going forever,” he inadvertently touches on Apple’s restless innovation with regards to the status quo of functionality and design. Apple has constantly broken with their users’ expectations and comfort zones, introducing new features and tweaks that these users didn’t even “know they needed,” as the saying goes. Apple, in this sense, has been disrupting early and often, long before the D-word became a hallowed mantra in tech circles.

But the affinities between Apple and The Best Interface Is No Interface (henceforth TBIINI) end here.

In the vein of 2014’s similarly wryly titled There’s Not an App for That, TBIINI scans the landscape of design only to poke holes in it. Krishna’s critical salvos hit with great clarity and wit. An early chapter presents a montage of question and answer: How do you make a better car? How do you make a better fridge? How do you make a better trash can? (Yes, a better trash can.) A better restaurant? Vending-machine?

In every case, as Krishna sarcastically exclaims, why, you “slap an interface on it!” And in each case, Krishna proffers an outlandish but very real example of some company outfitting their trash can, vending machine, or fridge with an interface, LED or touch-screen, so you can comment on your cousin’s wedding pictures while returning the milk to the fridge or buy some McDonalds stock while taking out the trash.

Krishna doesn’t merely cherry-pick some of the more ridiculous headlines and developments in tech. His irreverence is always geared towards exposing underlying trends that have been cemented in key areas of decision-making in design. And these trends, stresses Krishna, need to be disavowed — or, at the very least, examined and consciously grappled with rather than unthinkingly embraced.

“As businesses figure out how to take advantage of the latest in tech, they often turn to slap an interface on it! as the answer but actually end up with worse customer experiences and costly mistakes.” — Golden Krishna

At the heart of TBIINI lies the idea that UX (user experience) is not equivalent to UI (user interface). It’s a statement that can sometimes have the clang of two squabbling disciplines, one wishing to cordon itself off from its neighbor, with whom it is not infrequently lumped together or confused. But Krishna gives the familiar UX ≠ UI song a very compelling turn, revealing the clear and present repercussions of conflating the two, and doing so in a manner accessible even to those uninitiated in either.

What is UI? Navigation, menus, drop-downs, links, error messages, banner ads, swipe animations, clicking, scrolling, checkboxes, updates, and alerts. What is UX? People, happiness, problem-solving, needs, love efficiency, joy. “Somewhere along the way,” writes Krishna, “we confused the two.”

Krishna urges a refocusing of the former, UI, with greater, more attentive consideration for the latter, UX.

One of the core principles of TBIINI is to “leverage computers instead of serving them.” The significance of this principle can be illustrated — albeit negatively — in the curious case of Apple’s touch bar.

The MacBook Pro, as evident in its name, has historically been designed for and marketed towards professionals, especially those working in video, photo, music, development, and design fields. I’ve spoken with several such professionals about their working environments and their everyday relationships with their laptops, and have even observed them at work as well. In each case, the following was clear: when immersed in their respective workflows, one of the last things they wish to do is to look away from their screens — that is, their work — even for a second.

Producers, editors, designers, and developers often rely on memorized hotkeys when performing more complex functions, as in programs like Photoshop, Premiere, and Avid. These users will blindly rely on the keys’ haptic feedback response, or the physical sensation of feeling and pressing them, in order to correctly achieve the desired combination or command (the same way the rest of us normally type). Without any feedback response — which the smooth, glassy touch bar doesn’t afford — these users would find themselves glancing down at their keyboards every so often, or, resolved to keep their eyes glued to the screen, would find themselves more frequently committing mistakes. (When we type on our mobile phone’s digital keyboard, for example, we are far more error-prone than we are when handling our laptops’ physical ones.) And looking down at the acutely thin sliver of OLED screen on their keyboards every few minutes or seconds would constitute a seriously undesirable disruption of workflow — gradually disengaging these users with every glance away from their display, sapping concentration, and distracting them from the task literally at hand.

Many of the aforementioned professionals, moreover, employ setups in which the laptop’s own mouse and keyboard are largely disregarded. Not only do these setups rely almost exclusively on external keyboards and mice, they also utilize specialized tools and accessories that allow users to accomplish tasks in far simpler and more intuitive ways than those afforded by the touch bar. Take, for instance, the MX Master, a wireless mouse from Logitech, which features a second scroll wheel located where the user would normally rest her thumb. This second wheel is intended for horizontal navigation, providing a perfectly effortless means for scrubbing through video or audio timelines in editing programs.

Krishna emphasizes the importance of embracing typical processes like these instead of being seduced by sleek glass and handsome pixels. Whereas the MX Master and its horizontal scroll wheel invisibly blend into ones work environment, the touch bar is rather conspicuous. And it remains conspicuous in even the most casual of situations: as Lisa Gade mentions in her written review, the simplest commands (such as dimming the screen or raising the volume) are made more difficult and demand a greater number of keystrokes and swipes than they would normally. For all the responsiveness of the touch bar’s digital interface, in actual practice, we are the ones who have to accommodate ourselves to it. Our experience, in this case, is only further complicated; the interface only becomes an impediment to where we want to go and what we want to accomplish.