The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I think this book may have been more relevant in its time, so I don’t think there’s much point picking at any threads that bothered me about this book. It’s just that a lot of them did, and I think it was the author’s voice that bugged me, most of all. He comes across as arrogant and flailing.
I couldn’t help thinking he should have applied user-centered design to his outline to maybe tighten things up a bit, as he tended to go on, flogging a dead horse and the reader long after he could have stopped; setting up a number of straw men to knock down again and again and again. The software development process is far from perfect and Cooper has some good ideas that have taken hold that sort of help (though those ideas are also abused and susceptible to bad interaction designers, of which there are many, just like there are good and bad programmers).