Jan
18
2007
Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

The central theme of this book is how the IT industry resembles an asylum taken over by inmates - with software products completely missing the goals of their customers due to a combination of programmer psychology and sales-driven feature explosion. Alan Cooper argues that programmers drive the development process using their own image as a guideline, and overloading the software with features which require expert knowledge. On the other hand, sales and marketing push for features that can be used by beginners in order to expand the customer base. Most of the software users are, according to Cooper, ‘perpetual intermediaries’, so their needs are not addressed at all. Cooper advocates fighting back against this unnecessary complexity and refusing to give in to the mass craziness. His proposed solution is interaction design, a relatively new design practice focused on improving the way users access software. Continue Reading »