The Inmates Are Running the Asylum

Alan Cooper published this book in 1998, with the subtitle Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Cooper, an American software designer best known before it for creating the visual development environment that became Visual Basic, had spent the early 1990s consulting on why software was so hard to use, and the book sets out the method he arrived at. He calls it Goal-Directed design, and its premise is that software should move a user towards what the user is actually trying to achieve rather than trap them in the machinery of the computer. The source describes the book as addressed to the businessperson rather than to the programmer, on the argument that knowing your users' goals and how to satisfy them is a commercial matter and that design done properly the first time builds better products faster. It is also where personas first appear as a practical interaction design tool. The discussion in the book is brief, but the device spread quickly through the software industry and personas and interaction design strategy are now standard practice. His earlier book About Face had made the case to programmers; this one makes it to the people who pay them.

Written from the wikipedia article on the software designer Alan Cooper.

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