We are all Inmates; read this book, for it is time to heal.
Written: Jul 11 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lays out the problem and recommends a solution, explains the best process to date, the humor is humorous, relevant to all stakeholders in interactive development
Cons: Solution not detailed enough for designers to easily apply (many holes need to be filled in), repetitive at times, idealistic (like my review)
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| elan's Full Review: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech ... |
When writing The Inmates are Running the Asylum, I think Alan Cooper wanted to finally explain why software sucks. That he does, and he even presents a solution, a new process for the development of interactive products.
Cooper explains why and how developers—not designers or management—held the power in the processes we've followed. He explains why developers can't simultaneously be designers. He explains why these factors are the primary causes for hard-to-use software, unhappy customers, lost market share, and why it takes at least three versions to get something almost right.
Cooper presents a process, used by his firm Cooper Interaction Design (naturally), that promises to make users happy the first time around. His process takes some of the power away from developers, but in exchange lets them focus on what they do best—develop. At the same time, marketing and business folks are heard and they get the information they need to do their jobs. Oh, and did I say users become ecstatic?
I am a web designer. For the past seven years, I have designed and developed software. I've worked in large and mid-size corporations and Internet startups. Problems were the same everywhere. What were the common factors causing the problems? Mainly the beliefs held by the developers, designers, marketers, managers and myself about how to create software. Cooper exposes our beliefs so that we can actually see our own blind spots. Then he shatters our beliefs and gives us something better. He understands that our beliefs direct our actions and the results we get, and that changing our beliefs is the highest-leverage activity one can partake in.
In the past, I assumed that for my products to be wildly successful they needed satisfy all the needs of all potential users. Cooper shatters that belief with his persona-based design. He says focus on a few archetypal users, defined primarily by their personal (not just professional) goals. Make them ecstatic and the product will succeed for more than you had envisioned. He adds that we should stop trying to worry about each scenario of interaction with our users, but focus heavily on the most important, daily activities. These tidbits and others will help you change the mentality that infiltrates this industry, originated and propagated by the people in power—developers who's mantra for decades was to serve the processor, not the user.
If you are a developer, prepare to be pigeonholed. Part of me was hurt (I have a spent some years of my life as a developer), but the more I let myself feel the hurt, the more I realized Cooper was right. The job I did as a developer was counter-productive to making users happy. To be a great programmer you have to think like a computer. You can't think like a computer and a human user at the same time. As Cooper puts it, computers are logical, apathetic, and predictable, while humans are illogical, emotional and unpredictable. Swallow that bitter pill. It is true, we are.
If you are in marketing, prepare to understand, better than ever before, how a creative development process "should" work and why projects have consistently disappointed in the past. If you are in management, please, please, please read this book. Stop being ignorant of the real problems and believing that what you learned in business school will help you deal with developers and designers. You'll understand better what motivates developers and designers. Since you are in the position to fund, set high-level priorities and advocate a process, you need to know how the development process "should" be done. Take responsibility for the projects you lead and stop adding to the junk that users already suffer with.
If you are a designer, you'll finally understand why developers don't implement what you design. You'll understand why you keep losing those daily battles to some random "schedule" and to vaunted claims about the needs of some fuzzy user who is completely different in each person's imagination. You'll understand what you need to do from the beginning to get the quality you've always desired in the end. Your job of constant advocacy for the masses of users may actually yield results and not burn you out. You'll learn tools and tricks to keep your design meetings moving forward and to get the entire team working towards the same goals. There are books galore on creating shared visions, but I haven’t read one besides Inmates that tells me how to do it for interactive development.
Be forewarned, Cooper does not go into enough detail so that you can just apply his process. This book was written to be read by all the people involved in an interactive development project. It is not simply a recipe for an interaction design process. Cooper needs to write another book to do that and he alludes to this in his introduction. The interaction designer has a lot of work to do to fill in the holes.
I highly recommend this book to other designers and to all who have wondered if the processes they use are actually supposed to succeed. You can't keep doing the same thing and expect different results. So let's stop and give Cooper's way a try.
Recommended:
Yes
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elan
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Member: Elan Freydenson
Location: Fair lawn, NJ
Reviews written: 1
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