The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Chapters 8 - 14

Comments

Kerry

Summary

In the second half of The Inmates are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper, he starts giving examples of ways to fix the interaction design problems faced in software development that he presented in the first half of the book. His most important points are below:

• Persona Design: Interaction designers focus on developing not for all possible users but instead for a few specific "personas", or model users. These personas are specified as much as possible; each one has a name, background, occupation, and reasons why they would be using the software. Designing for personas allows the programmer to only develop features needed and make the program easier to use and address the users' needs.
• Designing for Goals: Programs should not be designed solely to allow a certain task to be performed; they should be designed to meet a user's practical goals. This means goals that they want to accomplish on a daily basis (while ignoring the edge cases), and also personal goals that they want followed when using the program (for example, not being made to feel stupid).
• Interaction Design First: You must let interaction design happen first before the programming happens, and not be tacked on at the end. And this does not mean just simple user interface design; interaction design tackles the deeper issues of how the program interacts with the user and the choices that the user has to make.
• Give the Designer the Responsibility: The interaction designer must have "skin in the game" and be given all the responsibility of the program. They design the program, create the specifications, and give it to the programmers. Since the programmers aren't responsible for the interaction with the user and the success or failure of the product, they will follow the design document much more closely.

In general, Cooper says that design must happen first, and must be given as much time and resources as needed. If you do this, then the time and money spent during development and programming of the product will be reduced, and your product will be much more successful. He illustrated these concepts using many examples from his design experience with his own consulting firm.

Discussion

I liked the second half of the book much more because of the fact that he stopped accusing programmers of being so horrible and actually gave sensible ideas on how to fix the interaction design problem. I especially liked the idea of designing for a specific persona - it definitely seems that you will have a much more successful product if you design for and completely satisfy one type of person, and it follows that you will also make people sort of similar to them happy as well. I liked the examples that he gave of his design experience, because they accurately illustrated his concepts, but sometimes it got a little too much and sounded like he was trying to convince us to call him up to come solve our design problems. Again, this book was written in 1999 and a lot of the issues (with Microsoft especially) have been fixed and we're facing many different interaction problems today with new technology such as touch.