Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14487 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com
The recurring metaphor in The Inmates are Running the Asylum is that of the dancing bear--the circus bear that shuffles clumsily for the amusement of the audience. Such bears, says author Alan Cooper, don't dance well, as everyone at the circus can see. What amazes the crowd is that the bear dances at all. Cooper argues that technology (videocassette recorders, car alarms, most software applications for personal computers) consists largely of dancing bears--pieces that work, but not at all well. He goes on to say that this is more often than not the fault of poorly designed user interfaces, and he makes a good argument that way too many devices (perhaps as a result of the designers' subconscious wish to bully the people who tormented them as children) ask too much of their users. Too many systems (like the famous unprogrammable VCR) make their users feel stupid when they can't get the job done.

Cooper, who designed Visual Basic (the programming environment Microsoft promotes for the purpose of creating good user interfaces), indulges in too much name-dropping and self-congratulation (Cooper attributes the quote, "How did you do that?" to Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, upon looking at one of Cooper's creations)--but this appears to be de rigueur in books about the software industry. But those asides are minor. More valuable is the discourse about software design and implementation ("[O]bject orientation divides the 1000-brick tower into 10 100-brick towers."). Read this book for an idea of what's wrong with UI design. --David Wall

Topics covered: User interfaces--good ones and bad ones--and where they come from. Also, how to improve the ones you create.

Download Description
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, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. Business executives have let the inmates run the asylum! In his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Alan Cooper calls for revolution - we need technology to work in the same way average people think - we need to restore the sanity. He offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line.

From the Back Cover
The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line.

Customer Reviews

A Must Read Classic, Albeit with Some Dated Ideas
This a classic book that anyone who build computer systems should read. Some of the specific examples are dated, though many caused me to nod in acknowledgment, especially his observations about alarm clocks and TV remotes, Inmates describes goal directed design, the concept of Pesonas, ideas which, whether they make sense for your project are not, are ones that you should be aware of. This book also explains what "polite software" is and emphasizes the market advantages to good interaction design. Even if this book doesn't change the way you work, it will help you think about the relationship between interaction design and programming. Among the interesting points Cooper makes are Customer Driven isn't aways the best model (customer influenced is better), and neither is Engineering Driven; software designers should go beyond customers say they want and help them to understand what they need. There were a few things towards the end of the book that struck me as just wrong. For example Cooper says that most developers don't believe that they are the best people to test their code. Most Agile software developers would challenge that point. Agile developers would also challenge the recurring theme that the engineering team can't make the leap to understanding the customer enough to build good interaction design. He ignores the value of a specializing generalist, which is an important concept in today's projects. It's for these points that I gave this 4 rather than 5 stars. Regardless, this is a book that anyone building software systems should read, if only to understand the concepts underlying interaction design.

No Cognitive Friction Here..
Alan Cooper gives the reader insight into why so many of today's technological products frustrate and confuse users. Yet he goes past this to discuss a methodology for keeping it simple and designing for the user i.e. avoiding cognitive friction. This book has changed the way I will develop products and should be a must read for product managers of application developers. Just learning Mr. Cooper's vocabulary is worth the read. The ideas such as personas, keywords, and designing for an individual push the book way above average. This is an easy read that should be done in your spare time if you want to avoid cognitive friction with your users. It has changed the way I view technology and brought a new awareness to thoughtless technology implementation which often cause failure or misuse. The only reason I gave this book a 4 out of 5 as I feel it could have been reduced a little bit more, certain points I felt like the author was rambling about personal fustrations.

an essential handbook for designing software
Cooper's argument in this book is simple: you have to know your users, and you have to understand what they're trying to accomplish with your software. The method that he puts forth for achieving this understanding is personas, richly-described archetypical users.

The book is easy to read and understand. He begins with a detailed description of the problem with software design as carried about by programmers who can only imagine themselves as the users of their software, resulting in software that makes really difficult things possible but doesn't bother to make easy or common things quick and easy.

After making the argument that programmers shouldn't design interfaces and making the case both for usability and interaction design, he lays out the personas concept. Cooper's guidelines for creating personas and using them are well-written and well-thought-out. However, his examples of applying them to some of his own customers are rather repetitive, and sometimes come across as somewhat whiny.

Now that it's time for my group at Microsoft to revisit our personas and determine what needs to be tweaked for our next version, I decided that I should revisit the book that first advanced the idea. It has stood up well to the test of time (something that not many computer books can do). I highly recommend it, both to usability and design professionals, as well as programmers.