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: #18281 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In this book about the darker side of technology's impact on our lives, Alan Cooper begins by explaining that unlike other devices throughout history, computers have a "meta function": an unwanted, unforeseen option that users may accidentally invoke with what they thought was a normal keystroke. Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process.

Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.)

Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book.

Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com

From the Back Cover

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.

About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Deeply flawed - aimed at those outside the industry
The most fundamental and consistent error throughout the book is the idea that usability, failure to meet requirements and lack of an adequate design phase are new phenomena, as consequences of this era's computer technology alone.

This simply isn't true. If it were books like the "design for the real world" written by Papanek over 30 years ago would have been unnecessary, Three mile island wouldn't have happened, and no one would ever misdial a telephone.

Sadly Cooper does not present proper evidence for a 'new' problem, preferring an informal and anecdotal style and in doing so extrapolating his entire argument from false foundations. He also sees the need to invent a whole unnecessary set of jargon to use, with fairly woolly and subjective definitions.

There are constant inappropriate references and analogies to other forms of engineering (particularly building), their methods and traditions.

"In the industrial age, engineers were able to solve each new problem ... they made bridges, cars, skyscrapers, and moon rockets that worked well and satisfied their human users. .... But unlike the past [computer] things haven't worked so well. "
Is he implying there were no problems before? Tay bridge, Tacoma Narrows, Ford Pinto, Challenger shuttle, Soyuz-1 and Soyuz-11. All suffering from dangerous design flaws (and not isolated) and none of them had anything to do with computers.

By ignoring the reality of past and current failures in (non Software) engineering Cooper quickly leaps to the conclusion that we "... have encountered a problem qualitatively different from any they confronted in the industrial age".
Errr, no. One of the first things we learn in engineering is how much of our wisdom has come from analysing failure and disaster fully, objectively and with academic rigour.

"When engineers invent, they arrive at their solution ... [it] will always be a derivative of the old beginning solution, which is often not good enough. "
Eh? Brunel? Stephenson? Even Santiago Calatrava doesn't shy from the title 'engineer'. Even in our beloved computer field, engineers and scientists abound; John von Neumann, Berners-Lee, Wozniak and Jobs. All brilliant innovators in their day, and derived of what exactly? Not only a questionable assertion but grossly disrespectful and immodest from someone whose claim to fame is prettying up other peoples' work. These were and are the Engineering geniuses.

In terms of descriptions of what a UI needs to be to qualify as usable, Cooper totally glosses over important concepts such as context. He avoids totally Cost-Benefit analysis of designing and building no-training, no-maintenance systems, blithely asserting that achieving that software (mirage) will reap all rewards. No proof, again.

The problem in programming is not that programmers are ill equipped or unprepared to solve the problems (though some may be), it is that no-one is demanding it of them in a coherent fashion.

Programmers are still being pushed to add 'features' buttons, wizards, gizmos and gadgets of little purpose because marketeers know they need to be able to print it on the box, and that is needed to generate the revenue.

Some programmers have the mindset he characterises, they are hardly very influential. Lack of proper requirements gathering, design, and industry-wide experience of very late, swingeing specification changes cause the problems. Programmers aren't to blame, even anti-social ones, the marketeers aren't, or the pushy ill-informed managers, the customer isn't either, but, at the same time, we all are. What we see is the consequence of nobody really knowing what they want, still less clearly stating, but everyone wanting to stamp their influence on the end product. Nice conspiracy theory Cooper, but it is nonsensical in the real world.

All the evidence sadly refutes Coopers Business Case. Products which demonstrate brilliant consideration of their target users fail miserably to make an impact (or a profit).
Look at a few of the case studies of his own consultancy work he offers;
1. A piece of support software for Logitech to bundle with their page scanners. = Logitech got out of the scanner market some time ago, didn't help their sales obviously.
2. Drumbeat web authoring. Well reviewed in its industry journals but scored poorly for ease of use. Elemental Software was bought out by Macromedia, Drumbeat was discontinued shortly after.
3. His in-flight entertainment (IFE) system (Clevis, et al.) for Sony Trans Com. Bought out by a competitor, Rockwell Collins, 2 years ago. Their new IFE will now be run, in their words, "on an industry standard Microsoft windows platform", Coopers system is not their flagship at all.

Now I am not going to say I think Cooper's advise for UI design is poor, or that his design methodologies are wrong. I think he is right in most of what he asserts there. It is just all based on flawed reasoning and syllogisms, and furthermore, most of it is not ground-breaking or even new ... there are plenty of good books out there discussing usability and making recommendations which are far more realistic and thoroughly presented than Cooper's descriptions of how he runs his consultancy.

Cooper is presenting arguments firmly directed at those who are outside this industry and relying on their ignorance of what goes on. He plays on Technophobia and peddles misinformation. He very cleverly characterises programmers as having something to protect and a reason to be put on the defensive by what he says, in doing so appears to be trying to pre-empt responses and criticisms from technically informed readers. This has (as can be seen from the mudslinging here) unhelpfully stifled debate on his assertions. As Cooper is clearly intelligent and experienced enough to be aware of the flaws I identified, I can only conclude he was having a wry giggle with this book.

The book's populist slant and claim to have "the solution" are very appealing to some, and almost guaranteed its success. Sadly, it contributes little of use to a known and serious set of problems.

Insightful, educational, but sometimes ridiculous.
The manner in which Alan Cooper points out problems with many high tech products is thoughtful and insightful. The book contains many descriptive examples and entertaining anectodes to illustrate the problem of "dancing bearware". His case for the necessity of "interaction design" is convincing. Overally the book is thought provoking and educational. So why only three stars?

His accusation of engineers being the root cause of the problem is badly misguided, with a silly generalization of programmers as a whole. I develop software professionally for a living, and I certainly do not consider myself or my peers "techno-jocks". I do not look down upon end users any more than I would expect an M.D. to look down upon me for lack of knowlege about medicine. In the organizations I have worked in, I have seen that developers have the task of interaction design UNWILLINGLY thrust upon them due to miserable product specifications coming from sales and management. I have also seen useless gadget features come from sales and management more often than from engineers. From my experience, these things alongside unreasonable project plans and "we can fix it later" attitude on the part of managers have resulted in awkward products many customers dislike.

Also, the book was too self-referential. In some portions, it appeared that the author was advertising his own company.

It's a shame the "inmates running the asylum" theme and self-advertisements were over-emphasized. Aside from these things, this is a good read for both high-tech managers and engineers.

Not Suitable for those with High Blood Pressure
I had to force myself to finish this book. On more than one occasion I had the compulsion to shred my copy, and every other copy in existance.

I entirely agree with everything in Ben Carey's review, with a few extra points.

The new panacean methodology he proposes is nothing more than renamed UML (actors for personas, use cases for scenarios, etc). Fortunately, a short while ago you didn't need to do much more than think up some funky new names for ideas to market your product in the Silicon Valley.

Worse is the suggestions that programmers are power-hungry, obtuse individuals who like nothing better than to write software that noone can use. What would be the point in creating software that was so unservicable that noone could use it?

I think the three main reasons software ends up in the state he describes are 1) sometimes there actually are badly designed interfaces (graphically and interactively) 2) the problem is sufficiently complex and extensive that there is no easy solution or 3) conflicting or dubious requirements from users and management confuse the real requirements of the software.

Rather than try to convince the people responsible for the "dancing bearware", he immediately sets about berating them. At the same time he gives credence to every manager who couldn't work a coffee pot and wanted to blame "them" for all his woes.

Don't read it before going to bed.