Product Description

Technologies have a life cycle, and they must change as they gain maturity. Alas, the computer industry thinks it is still in its rebellious years, exalting in technical complexity. In this book, the author shows why the computer is difficult to use, and why this is so fundamental to its nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386896 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 316 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
While Donald Norman acknowledges in The Invisible Computer that the personal computer allows for "flexibility and power," he also makes its limitations perfectly clear. Currently, computer users must navigate a sea of guidebooks, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and wizards to perform a task such as searching the Web or creating a spreadsheet. "The personal computer is perhaps the most frustrating technology ever," he writes. "It should be quiet, invisible, unobtrusive." His vision is that of the "information appliance", digital tools created to answer our specific needs, yet interconnected to allow communication between devices.

His solution? "Design the tool to fit so well that the tool becomes a part of the task." He proposes using the PC as the infrastructure for devices hidden in walls, in car dashboards, and held in the palm of the hand. A word of caution: some of Norman's zealotry leads to a certain creepiness (global positioning body implants) and goofiness (electric-power-generating plants in shoes). His message, though, is reasonably situated in the concept that the tools should bend to fit us and our goals: we sit down to write, not to word process; to balance bank accounts, not to fill in cells on a spreadsheet. In evenly measuring out the future of humanity's technological needs--and the limitations of the PC's current incarnation--Norman presents a formidable argument for a renaissance of the information appliance. --Jennifer Buckendorff

From the Author
How to produce human-centered technology.
As I wrote "The Invisible Computer," I was struck bya paradox. On the one hand, there is very substantial agreement that ease of use and understandability are important. Similarly, good industrial design; simple, short documentation, and convenient, pleasing products are superior. I wondered why, if ease of use and understandability seems so important, much of the computer technology today violates all these things - yet the companies prosper. In fact, Apple Computer, the one company that tried hardest to make products that were easy to use, understandable and with sophisticated aesthetics driving both graphical design on the screen and industrial design of the products, has failed to win market share.

So why is it that good products can fail and inferior products can succeed? This became the theme for the book.

The story is complex: it takes a book to explain. But there are three themes.

One: A successful product must be balanced: marketing, technology, and user experience all play critical roles, but one cannot dominate the others.

Two: There is a big difference between infrastructure products, which I call non-substitutable goods, and traditional products, substitutable goods. With traditional goods, a company can survive with a stable, but non-dominant market share. Coke and Pepsi both survive. Cereals and soaps have multiple brands. With infrastructure goods, there can be just one. MS-DOS won over the Macintosh OS, and that was that. MS-DOS transitioned to Windows, and the dominance continued. VHS tape triumphed over Beta. Most infrastructures are dictated by the government, which assures agreement to a single standard. When there is no standard, as in AM stereo or digital cellular options in the US, there is chaos.

Three: Different factors are important at different stages in the development of a technology. In the early days, technology dominates. Who cares if it is easy to use? All that matters is better, faster, cheaper, more powerful technology. In the middle stages, marketing dominates. And in the end, the mature stages, the technology is a commodity. User experience can dominate, user experience and marketing. As in soap and cereal. As in watches. Swatch sells its watches for their emotional appeal, not their accuracy: accuracy is taken for granted.

The computer industry is now mature. The customers want convenience and value for their money. They want ease of use, emotional appeal. But the computer companies are all teenagers, resisting the pressures to grow up. Too bad. The customer is not well served.

Customer Reviews

A verbose articulation of ideas described better by others
His basic argument in this book is that the computer industry has matured to the point where it can no longer just cater to the early-adopter technologists and must appeal to the masses to continue growth. Unfortunately, the industry doesn't know how to do this and continues to deliver technology for technology's sake, leading to fat computers and technology that aren't that useful or appealing to most people, and are beginning to exhaust the technologists too. He introduces some recent, but standard models of technology adoption for discussing the problems, customer-centered design in cross-disciplinary teams (marketing, engineering, and user experience) for designing products that transcend the problems (explicitly discussing Contextual Design a few times), and "information appliances," multitudes of small, task-focused technology products that will replace our big, cumbersome, general-purpose (but not great at any) PCs.

Norman's forte is definitely cognitive and experimental psychology in product design, and not being a technological or product development process visionary. I found very little new or interesting content in the book, and I don't think he articulated even some of the derived ideas very well. The whole book could have been condensed into a long magazine article. His prose is wordy and redundant, and the book is regrettfully lacking in many of the detailed case studies and examples he's used in previous books to elucidate his ideas. I want the idiosyncratic and outspoken psychologist professor back, such as he was in The Design of Everyday Things, or the powerful academic argument of Things That Make Us Smart. His short stint as a VP of HPs "Information Appliances" division, and his earlier work at Apple, was not enough to give him a deep understanding or insight into the problems of the current technology-product market.

He does make some good book recommendations, however, and I'll add my favorite articulation of the problem, that I think articulate the problem and potential solutions much better:

C. M. Christensen, _The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail_, 1997. G. A. Moore, _Crossing The Chasm: Marketingand Selling High-Tech Goods to Mainstream Customers_, 1991. T. K. Landauer, _The Trouble With Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity_, 1995.

Suitfeed
Yeah, right. Edison didn't know what he was doing because he wasn't "customer centered" enough to make flat records. All he ever did in his life was invent sound recording, plus four or five other basic technologies and major pieces of several more. And he died a rich man. What a slacker. If he'd been really smart, and emulated Gould, Fisk, and Morgan, he might have been a real *success.*

If you're fascinated by suitspeak and willing to embrace mediocrity and corporate B.S., then you'll get a lot out of this book. But if you've been working in the business for ten or twenty years, then Norman's blatherings are going to look like just more pin-stripe, synergy-leveraging suitfeed.

And, BTW, the set-top box he touts as a good idea was a failure. Edison failed the same way with his first invention (the vote recorder), but was honest enough with himself to call a failure a failure. Norman fails to.

Way too long for the central argument
Donald Norman seems to have taken up a position like that of Eric S. Raymond of Open Source, but in usability. This is a business-argument pitch for information appliances. It draws very heavily in its early chapters from the book "Inside the Tornado", I think by Moore.Inside the Tornado was a book adopted as Marketing Bible by my previous employer, an entrepreneurial venture in the digital imaging industry that may yet sink, but not because of the book. Inside the Tornado is right, but if you've absorbed it, you'll be irritated with the first half of this book.For people who read and appreciated his earlier books and are looking for interesting theoretical or experimental stuff on or near the topic of cognitive science will be disappointed. Don't buy this book for that reason.If you have only a weak grasp of information appliances, what they are, and why they're good, you will want to read this book.I wish someone else wrote this book, though.