The Origins of This Book


I have been inventing and developing software-based products for 25 years. This problem of hard-to-use software has puzzled and confounded me for years. Finally, in 1992, I ceased all programming to devote 100% of my time to helping other development firms make their products easier to use. And a wonderful thing happened! I immediately discovered that after I freed myself from the demands of programming, I saw for the first time how powerful and compelling those demands were. Programming is such a difficult and absorbing task that it dominates all other considerations, including the concerns of the user. I could only see this after I had extricated myself from its grip.

Upon making this discovery, I began to see what influences drove software-based products to be so bad from the user's point of view. In 1995 I wrote a book[2] about what I had learned, and it has had a significant effect on the way some software is designed today.

[2] About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, IDG Books, Foster City CA, 1995, ISBN 1-56884-322-4, http://www.cooper.com. In March 2003, my coauthor Robert Reimann and I released a revised second edition of the book. It was completely rewritten, including updated examples and seven brand new chapters. It is called About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-76452-641-3.

To be a good programmer, one must be sympathetic to the nature and needs of the computer. But the nature and needs of the computer are utterly alien from the nature and needs of the human being who will eventually use it. The creation of software is so intellectually demanding, so all-consuming, that programmers must completely immerse themselves in an equally alien thought process. In the programmer's mind, the demands of the programming process not only supersede any demands from the outside world of users, but the very languages of the two worlds are at odds with each other.

The process of programming subverts the process of making easy-to-use products for the simple reason that the goals of the programmer and the goals of the user are dramatically different. The programmer wants the construction process to be smooth and easy. The user wants the interaction with the program to be smooth and easy. These two objectives almost never result in the same program. In the computer industry today, the programmers are given the responsibility for creating interaction that makes the user happy, but in the unrelenting grip of this conflict of interest, they simply cannot do so.

In software, typically nothing is visible until it is done, meaning that any second-guessing by nonprogrammers is too late to be effective. Desktop-computer software is infamously hard to use because it is purely the product of programmers; nobody comes between them and the user. Objects such as phones and cameras have always had a hefty mechanical component that forces them into the open for review. But as we've established, when you cross a computer with just about any product, the behavior of the computer dominates completely.

The key to solving the problem is interaction design before programming. We need a new class of professional interaction designers who design the way software behaves. Today, programmers consciously design the code inside programs but only inadvertently design the interaction with humans. They design what a program does but not how it behaves, communicates, or informs. Conversely, interaction designers focus directly on the way users see and interact with software-based products. This craft of interaction design is new and unfamiliar to programmers, so when they admit it at all they let it in only after their programming is already completed. At that point, it is too late.

The people who manage the creation of software-based products are typically either hostage to programmers because they are insufficiently technical, or they are all too sympathetic to programmers because they are programmers themselves. The people who use software-based products are simply unaware that those products can be as pleasurable to use and as powerful as any other well-designed tool.

Programmers aren't evil. They work hard to make their software easy to use. Unfortunately, their frame of reference is themselves, so they only make it easy to use for other software engineers, not for normal human beings

The costs of badly designed software are incalculable. The cost of Jane's and Sunil's time, the cost of offended air travelers, and the cost of the lives of passengers on Flight 965 cannot easily be quantified. The greatest cost, though, is the opportunity we are squandering. While we let our products frustrate, cost, confuse, irritate, and kill us, we are not taking advantage of the real promise of software-based products: to be the most human, powerful, and pleasurable creations ever imagined. Because software truly is malleable far beyond any other medium, it has the potential to go well beyond the expectations of even the wildest dreamer. All it requires is the judicious partnering of interaction design with programming.



Inmates Are Running the Asylum, The. Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy &How to Restore the Sanity - 2004 publication
ISBN: B0036HJY9M
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 170

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