Author: Alan Cooper
Summary:
This book attempts to compare humans and computers and tries to explain the interactions between them. It comments on many difficulties most users find. It also tries to explain the problem by pointing the finger at the software engineers who are making the products. Cooper claims that bad systems are the software programmer's fault because the programmer does not think in the same way normal humans think.
Apart from not being human, programmers are terrible at design, always, period. He proposes the introduction of a field known as the interaction designer and explains that this is necessary to the production of good usable software. Cooper also says that the bad design is not completely the programmer's fault because they are comfortable with technology not with being a part of the human society. Overall, the entire idea I got from the book was that software sucks because programmers do as well.
Personal Reflection:
I did not like this book at all. I kept trying to be unbiased while reading and found that Cooper had many good points to be made... he just never fully made them. His main reason for every problem I remember from the book was, "does software not make sense to you? blame a programmer" or "software is badly designed because programmers cannot read our minds."
Despite my distaste for the book, I did find one topic useful. This topic was the metaphor of "dancing bearware" or software that works, but does not work well. Everyone who sees the software working is too entranced by it actually working to see how badly designed it is.
Other than this sole useful information that was surprisingly not directly explained by "programmers are dumb" (it was eventually tied into "programmers are dumb"), the book had little to no use to me, nor did I care to read it.
Overall, the book just made me angry.
I finished reading the second half of this book, and you told me it would be better, and I guess by the strictest definition of "better" it is slightly less unbearable, but he still uses "homo logicus" to describe programmers and there's still that us vs. them mentality. Thumbs down.
ReplyDeleteI did say it got better, but I never said it was a good book. It went from awful to slightly below average by the end. Some good points were presented, somewhat talked about and then discarded. Typical Alan Cooper style ;)
ReplyDelete