The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High

Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum uses the author's experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.

As a software inventor in the mid-70s, Alan Cooper got it into his head that there must be a better approach to software construction. This new approach would free users from annoying, difficult and inappropriate software behavior by applying a design and engineering process that focuses on the user first and silicon second. Using this process, engineering teams could build better products faster by doing it right the first time.

His determination paid off. In 1990 he founded Cooper, a technology product design firm. Today, Cooper's innovative approach to software design is recognized as an industry standard. Over a decade after Cooper opened its doors for business, the San Francisco firm has provided innovative, user-focused solutions for companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Align Technologies, Discover Financial Services, Dolby, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Softek, Hewlett Packard, Informatica, IBM, Logitech, Merck-Medco, Microsoft, Overture, SAP, SHS Healthcare, Sony, Sun Microsystems, the Toro Company, Varian and VISA. The Cooper team offers training courses for the Goal-Directed® interaction design tools they have invented and perfected over the years, including the revolutionary technique for modeling and simulating users called personas, first introduced to the public in 1999 via the first edition of The Inmates.

In 1994, Bill Gates presented Alan with a Windows Pioneer Award for his invention of the visual programming concept behind Visual Basic, and in 1998 Alan received the prestigious Software Visionary Award from the Software Developer's Forum. Alan introduced a taxonomy for software design in 1995 with his best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. Alan and co-author Robert Reimann published a significantly revised edition, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, in 2003.

Alan's wife, Susan Cooper, is President and CEO of Cooper. They have two teenage sons, Scott and Marty, neither of whom is a nerd. In addition to software design, Alan is passionate about general aviation, urban planning, architecture, motor scooters, cooking, model trains and disc golf, among other things. Please send him email at inmates@cooper.com or visit Cooper's Web site at http://www.cooper.com.

Foreword
Computer Obliteracy
Riddles for the Information Age
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with an Airplane?
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Camera?
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with an Alarm Clock?
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Car?
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Bank?
Computers Make It Easy to Get into Trouble
Commercial Software Suffers, Too
What Do You Get When You Cross a Computer with a Warship?
Techno-Rage
An Industry in Denial
The Origins of This Book
Cognitive Friction
Behavior Unconnected to Physical Forces
Design Is a Big Word
The Relationship Between Programmers and Designers
Most Software Is Designed by Accident
"Interaction" Versus "Interface" Design
Why Software-Based Products Are Different
The Dancing Bear
The Cost of Features
Apologists and Survivors
How We React to Cognitive Friction
The Democratization of Consumer Power
Blaming the User
Software Apartheid
It Costs You Big Time
Wasting Money
Deadline Management
What Does "Done" Look Like?
Parkinson's Law
The Product That Never Ships
Shipping Late Doesn't Hurt
Feature-List Bargaining
Programmers Are in Control
Features Are Not Necessarily Good
Iteration and the Myth of the Unpredictable Market
The Hidden Costs of Bad Software
The Only Thing More Expensive Than Writing Software Is Writing Bad Software
Opportunity Cost
The Cost of Prototyping
The Dancing Bear
If It Were a Problem, Wouldn't It Have Been Solved by Now?
Consumer Electronics Victim
How Email Programs Fail
How Scheduling Programs Fail
How Calendar Software Fails
Mass Web Hysteria
What's Wrong with Software?
Software Forgets
Software Is Lazy
Software Is Parsimonious with Information
Software Is Inflexible
Software Blames Users
Software Won't Take Responsibility
Customer Disloyalty
Desirability
A Comparison
Time to Market
Eating Soup With a Fork
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Driving from the Backseat
Hatching a Catastrophe
Computers Versus Humans
Teaching Dogs to Be Cats
Homo Logicus
The Jetway Test
The Psychology of Computer Programmers
Programmers Trade Simplicity for Control
Programmers Exchange Success for Understanding
Programmers Focus on What Is Possible to the Exclusion of What Is Probable
Programmers Act Like Jocks
An Obsolete Culture
The Culture of Programming
Reusing Code
The Common Culture
Programming Culture at Microsoft
Cultural Isolation
Skin in the Game
Scarcity Thinking
The Process Is Dehumanizing, Not the Technology
Interaction Design is Good Business
Designing for Pleasure
Personas
Design for Just One Person
The Roll-Aboard Suitcase and Sticky Notes
The Elastic User
Be Specific
Hypothetical
Precision, Not Accuracy
A Realistic Look at Skill Levels
Personas End Feature Debates
Both Designers and Programmers Need Personas
It's a User Persona, Not a Buyer Persona
The Cast of Characters
Primary Personas
Case Study: Sony Trans Com's P@ssport
The Conventional Solution
Personas
Designing for Clevis
Designing for Power
Goals Are the Reason Why We Perform Tasks
Tasks Are Not Goals
Programmers Do Task-Directed Design
Goal-Directed Design
Goal-Directed Television News
Goal-Directed Classroom Management
Personal and Practical Goals
The Principle of Commensurate Effort
Personal Goals
Corporate Goals
Practical Goals
False Goals
Computers Are Human, Too
Designing for Politeness
What Is Polite?
What Makes Software Polite?
Polite Software Is Interested in Me
Polite Software Is Deferential to Me
Polite Software Is Forthcoming
Polite Software Has Common
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The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials