Inmates are running the asylum

As I was reading this book, my first impression of Alan Cooper was that he was a jerk. He spends so much time saying how awful programmers are. As read on though, I had to agree with him, though I still thought he could have been more tactful. But sometimes you have to be loud to get someones attention. His main point is that programmers build products for programmers. Programmers design programs without taking the common user into account. This results in a system that is easy for the programmer to use (because he built it) and difficult for the user to use. Cooper believes that anyone should be able to use a piece of software with little to preferably no training. The fact that so many users feel they can't use a computer is the fault of poor design on the programmer's part and not the user's ineptitude.

Probably my favorite part of this section was toward the end of chapter 7 when he compares programmers to jocks. He says that while the jocks find a lesson in humility when they go out into the world and find that physical bullying doesn't work anymore, there is no such lesson for intellectual bullies. I've seen some of these intellectual bullies in some of my CS classes. When going over a difficult topic in some classes, there is the one person who understands and rather than help the other student's understand, they look down on their classmates and loudly proclaim that anyone who doesn't understand must be an idiot. This prevents the people who don't understand from asking questions leaving them in a confused state.

I think this attitude carries over into the professional world when programmers don't understand why users don't understand how to use their program. "It's just a simple keyboard shortcut!" Yeah, one that you came up with and told no one about. Programmers need to realize the importance of good design. They also need to realize that they have studied this field a lot more than most people. Users aren't stupid (most of them), programmers have just had more training. And that is my soap box I found while reading this book.