The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Ch 1-7

by Alan Cooper

In the first half of his book Alan discusses the many problems with allowing a programmer design a program/product as of 10 years ago. He does this by bringing up two distinct categories of users, the apologists and the survivors, who deal with "cognitive friction" slightly differently. The apologists blame themselves for the their problems and troubles with technology; while the survivors are those who just barely scrape by. He discusses the differences between interaction and interface design and how they should effect how something is programed. He rants a lot about dancing bear products that were a problem at the time of the book being written and the reasons, or should I say reason, behind it, the programmers. He also makes a good argument for not wasting money on always hitting a deadline but instead actually making a good product that will help prevent customer disloyalty. Which he then goes on to discuss that if you can bring customer loyalty you don't have to worry about time to market as much and you can make better products that will bring higher customer loyalty. He raps up the first half of the book by putting almost all of the blame on programmers and saying that they are a completely different species called homo logicus.

Overall I think the first half of the book was better than Don Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" but I dont believe that the issues discussed apply as much to today's programming world because almost all of the things he discussed have been atleast partialy addressed by todays companies.