The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

When I started to skim through this book, the first thing I noticed is how much the computer industry has changed. It seems like Cooper is really mad at every person he used to work with... Back in the day, programmers were in charge of everything, even if that meant designing a program for computer noobs. We have all been there before - sometimes it requires too much effort and it is easier to say never mind. It is easy to take that road, but usually it is not constructive.

I do have some experience in industry, and I have to say that it is completely different than what Cooper describes. I really believe that poorly designed systems are a thing of the past... Lets face it - if you don't subscribe to interactive design, your product is going to fail. The methods used by the programmers Cooper talks about are nostalgic to my early programming years. Writing code that even the writer cannot understand a few months later. Ah, those were the days.

But enough reminiscing. There are some pretty good points that Cooper makes in between his angry rants. I think breaking users into apologists and survivors is a really neat idea. However, I do not think that just the two categories can fully explain all users. I think they are more of a stereotype to get a point across. Programmers used to be apologists - we would defend all systems because we knew that there was some merit behind them, regardless of how difficult it was to understand. After all, programmers were the authors of some of that nonsense. When I think of an apologists, I think of my parents...

Now, I think programmers are starting to realize that we cannot be apologists anymore. There was a renaissance (sort of) amongst the computer world not too long ago - products should be easy to use. Wow, what a novel concept! I think the main reason this came to be is because people generally got tired of crappy software. And all it took was a few good companies to notice that and start developing for the user. Look at where we are now...