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Title: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity by Alan Cooper ISBN: 0-672-31649-8 Publisher: SAMS Pub. Date: 06 April, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.95 (110 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: A very dangerous guide for any organization
Comment: I work for a large computer company that makes software. This book was instrumental in creating and organizing our human interface engineering department.
I don't think you can put a price tag on the amount of damage this book and the attitude it promotes has cost us.
On the one hand, the examples presented are insightful and on target; on the other hand, Mr. Cooper is a usability consultant, and his goal is to convince you that you need a usability consultant. My company drank the kool-aid, and has even paid for training services based on his work.
Part of convincing you that you need a usability consultant is convincing you that your programmers will be congenitally incapable of doing good UI without one.
Now, of course, human interface engineering departments eat that up, since it justifies their existence. Human interface engineering departments are a Good Thing. Having two teams (which must collaborate on producing a product that the market will want) at each others throats, waging political wars and each casually making the assumption that the other is incompetent does not lead to an effective organization. But it is the organization that Mr. Cooper's advice can easily lead to.
I can say categorically that our product's user interface is *worse*, not better, as a result of the attitudes Mr. Cooper promotes - not due to inattention, but due to the fact that in many cases were everyone agreed improvement was needed, the mutual animosity between the HIE department and the Development department was so great that the decision ended in a stalemate and nothing was done. We are only now pulling away from that era.
Read it warily, if you are thinking about how to set up your organization, and remember that it is written with an agenda that may not be set up to benefit you.
Rating: 3
Summary: Useful ideas but infuriatingly arrogant
Comment: The Inmates are Running the Asylum makes the business case for interaction designers playing a central role in the development of technology products. It starts by providing examples of technology that is difficult, frustrating, humiliating, and even dangerous to use. Cooper argues that, although people have gotten used to being humiliated by technology, it doesn't have to be this way. His claim is that most technology, especially software, is designed by engineers who think differently than non-technical people: they enjoy being challenged by difficult problems and they are trained to think in terms of "edge cases" rather than on the common case. Thus when engineers design software, they tend to create products with far too many neat features that clutter the interface and make it difficult to do the simpler tasks. In the second part of the book, Cooper describes an approach that he and his design firm uses to simplify products and keep them focused on the users' needs, eliminating or hiding more complex features that few people use. He gives some specific and compelling examples of how they took a different approach to an interesting design problem and keep the product simple while still being powerful. He makes the case that you can grab a market with powerful, feature-rich, complex software that is frustrating to use, but you don't build customer loyalty that way; as soon as a well-designed version of that product comes along, your customers will defect. If you delight the user with your products, on the other hand, you will engender deep loyalty that will help see you through some poor business decisions. His primary example of this is the fanatical loyalty that Apple garners from its users, compared with the rage that Windows users feel toward Microsoft. Apple has weathered some horrendous business decisions and still survives, whereas Microsoft users are more than happy to defect when a better product comes along, and in fact revel in the defection.
I also don't think he makes it clear enough that he's not proposing doing *fewer* features to make products simpler and easier to use, he's talking about doing *different* features. For example, he argues that software should not be so lazy; it should stop making the user do work that the computer is better suited to doing (e.g. remembering where they put files), and it should stop making users go through the same steps over and over again, as if it were the first time they had ever met this user. He argues that "Do you really mean it?" popups are evil (and I couldn't agree more - as most of my coworkers know), and instead it should be easy to undo anything, so it's not so catastrophic to do something you didn't meant to do. I agree with all that, but of course building a reasonable "undo" mechanism is a very complex feature. To cure the "How could you possibly want to quit my ever-so-important application?" popup syndrome, it would be much better to make the software very fast to start up, and to have it come back in exactly the state you left it in, so that quitting when you didn't mean to is not a problem. All of this is well worth doing, but it is lots of engineering work; it's another feature. I'm all for shifting engineer resources to these features instead of the "but somebody *might* want to do this obscure thing" features, but it should be clear that this is not doing fewer features, it's doing different ones, ones that help smooth the user's interaction with the software. Cooper seems to imply that engineers are so lazy that they don't want to do these features, but most engineers work very hard and care about their product. The key is to make it clear why doing this feature right will make such a big difference to the product. My experience has been that the more you understand the work involved in doing a feature, the better you can work with engineers. Not only can you better trade off engineering effort for user benefit, but engineers respect you for understanding what you're asking.
Having said all that, I can't deny that I finished this book with some very specific ideas about improving my own designs, and a renewed sense of the importance of what I do. I just wish Cooper could have articulated the case without putting interaction designers "on a throne."
Rating: 4
Summary: Great design approach, but arrogance and repitition hurt
Comment: It's worth reading this book -- even despite the painful tone he often takes -- just to pick up on the ideas of creating concrete personas and how you use them to develop your product. We do that today at Microsoft (at least in Developer Tools), and it's a highly successful way of not only building a good product, but also in helping hundreds of developers understand why a feature is 'in' or 'out', no matter how much they might like it personally.
It's also mentioned quickly, but the idea of how much work customers are willing to do for an amount of benefit can affect your designs for the better as well. Fundamentally, you should add value with no documentation and no setup -- if somebody paid money, they should feel rewarded as soon as they start to use your application. Then, after they want to do new things, you can require more work of them to do it. However, it should never be more work than the benefit that they derive! This is an important lesson that, say, most media player application writers would be advised to learn...
Of course, as many other reviewers have pointed out, it might have been nice if he had created some personas for who his readers were. I doubt that any of them would have had a goal of being preached to.
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Title: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert M. Reimann ISBN: 0764526413 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 17 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465067107 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces by Carolyn Snyder ISBN: 1558608702 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Pub. Date: 02 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $34.95 |
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Title: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug ISBN: 0789723107 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 13 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman ISBN: 0465051359 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 23 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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