The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Chapters 1 - 7)

Comments

Kerry

John

Summary

The Inmates are Running the Asylum, by Alan Cooper, is a book that promotes "interaction design" for technological devices and software so that the user is not confused or made to feel stupid by the complexity of the technology. He makes a few important points (just Chapters 1 - 7):

1. Any device combined with a computer is still a computer; the complexity and the anti-human behavior of the computer will dominate.
2. Because of this, we need to promote the "partnering of interaction design with programming". Interaction design is different than interface design; it is not just the design of an interface that is used to communicate with the computer, but the way that the user and computer interact with each other.
3. Cognitive Friction is the resistance of humans to understand the complex systems of rules that are always changing that computers and technology follows. Interaction design aims to reduce the cognitive friction so that everyday users feel more comfortable.
4. A clear distinction is made between user and programmer. The programmer is more apt to design the system to make their job of programming easier and in a way that they feel is easy to interact with. What they fail to see is that users do not think the way that they do, and the programmers are incapable of putting themselves in the shoes of the user.
5. Interaction design and programming has to be done by different people; it is nearly impossible to both design for the irrational and emotion world of humans and simultaneously design for the deterministic and rational world of computers.

In these first seven chapters, Cooper presented the problem of software that is too hard to use, and started to explain the solution of interaction design. His main point was that interaction design is necessary before programming and will save lots of money and time in software that is accepted by users and is successful in the real world. Programmers need to give up control so that their ideas and efforts in products will not be wasted.

Discussion

I thought Cooper presented some interesting ideas in the first seven chapters of this book. I agree with his ideas that interaction design should be done before programming; without a clear vision of how the user will react to and interact with the software, its hard to keep low-level implementation details from filtering up into the interface and confusing the user. But, I don't feel that it is mostly the programmer's fault, and that all programmers have their heads stuck staring at their monitors so that they can't understand the interaction of everyday users. I think the problem sits with management, marketing, and economics more. The managers demand a certain functionality as soon as possible, and as the biggest time expense is the base programming, the engineers have to hit the ground running. If given time (and if more management realized that design is not a waste of time or budget but instead a way to make sure your product is received well by the masses), then programmers could easily help make design decisions and produce a program that users like. I just feel that the time constraints put functionality first instead of usability. Interaction designers are important though, even after the main design phase, because they can work concurrently with the programmers to make sure that the project is going along at the correct rate and it is still usable. Now that Cooper has laid down the problem, I am looking forward to the rest of the book to see what his solution is.