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book review - 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'

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Book title: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

Author: Alan Cooper

ISBN: 0672326140

Cooper's argument in this book is simple: you have to know your users, and you have to understand what they're trying to accomplish with your software. The method that he puts forth for achieving this understanding is personas, richly-described archetypical users.

The book is easy to read and understand. He begins with a detailed description of the problem with software design as carried about by programmers who can only imagine themselves as the users of their software. This results in software that makes really difficult things possible but doesn't bother to make easy or common things quick and easy.

After making the argument that programmers shouldn't design interfaces and making the case both for usability and interaction design, he lays out the personas concept. Cooper's guidelines for creating personas and using them are well-written and well-thought-out. However, his examples of applying them to some of his own customers are rather repetitive, and sometimes come across as somewhat whiny.

Now that it's time for me to revisit the Office:Mac personas and determine what needs to be tweaked for our next version, I decided that I should revisit the book that first advanced the idea. It has stood up well to the test of time (something that not many computer books can do). I highly recommend it, both to usability and design professionals, as well as programmers.

Related links:
Amazon's page about this book
author's website

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2007
    The problem I have with the persona system is that it can lead you down a false path all to easily, as it encourages you to bias things in favor of one persona or a few personas, and then fool yourself into thinking "Oh, this will work for everyone", instead of going for the much harder goal of overall clarity and simplicity. For example, Office 2007. There were a LOT of people, who, as you saw in various places, vehemently disagreed with my contention that the Ribbon was not nearly as intuitive or clear as the designers and various MVPs insisted it was, and they were all, to a man, really quite dismissive of my points, because "i just didn't know" as I was "Just a Mac user". As I was, at one point, typing replies IN Outlook 2007, i found this really amusing. Fast forward to late May, early June, and voila, the training costs and complaints on the ribbon are not small, nor quiet, and now many of those same "DEFENDERS OF TEH R1BB0N" are calling it a mistake. The problem is, while the Ribbon does a very good job at solving one problem, (discovery of new features), it doesn't make many of them a lot easier to use. It just puts them in your face. The theory seems to have been "well, if it's there in their face, people will figure it out", when the truth is more close to "If it's all in their face, they'll be overwhelmed by it and run away screaming from it" But there were lots of tests with lots of personas that justified what was already a done decision. It's one reason why i'm GLAD the Mac BU has resisted the cries of "Dump the Menu Bar". besides the fact that it would be dumb, the truth is, the Ribbon simply didn't work for the set of people who want to start the application and start working, with only a few often used commands and buttons visible. The Ribbon didn't make understanding things like Styles easier, it just put all the style controls in your face. But that's not the same as making Styles easier to understand, with a UI that really helps you figure out the thought process behind them. Personas seem to inexorably lead to Wizards, and wizards are simply a sign of UI design failure. "We couldn't make this easy to use, so we're going to hold your hand through n ways of using it and hope we get lucky" It's why you don't need a wizard and humpty-dozen dialogs to set up a new wireless network on a Mac, but you do on Windows. Personas also really hose people who don't fit them. I still remember being one of a (what seemed) to be a very small number of people arguing, early in the lead in to 2004 that while it was very easy to get numbers that said "Mac users are all home users or designers", that those numbers were at best misleading and at worst, wrong. But one can't argue with numbers, and once those created the persona, well, business Word/Excel users kinda got hosed in a lot of ways. It looks like THOSE numbers are now being properly ignored, but we'll have to wait and see I suppose. Personas can be handy, but all too often, they gain far greater importance than they should, and that inevitably leads to problems.