The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Alan Cooper begins with a clear analogy: in all other construction disciplines the architects and engineers plan the construction strategy and the craftsmen execute that strategy.   It is only in software that the craftsman is also the architect.

This becomes the basis for his premise that The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Cooper argues that we are deficient in our development process, not the development tools themselves.

"Programmers aren't evil" he insists, "they work hard to make their software easy to use.  Unfortunately their frame of reference is themselves, so they only make it easy for other software engineers, not for normal human beings."

Alan Cooper, being a former software developer himself, discusses why he believes software developers ill equipped to design usable software:

Clearly, one side of software - the inside - must be written with technical expertise and sensitivity to the needs of computers.  But equally clear, the other side of the software - the outside - must be written with social expertise and sensitivity to the needs of people.  It is my contention that programmers can do the former, but it takes interaction designers to do the latter.

The intuitive thinking here is that since developers know the software at it's most granular, then would be best equipped to ferret out usability concerns.  While intuitive, Cooper shows the fallacy of the argument throughout the book.  The skills that make for excellent programmers are not complementary to those needed to uncover and address usability issues.

Software developers (who he refers to as Homo Logicus) are different from normal humans.  Cooper defines the specific characteristics that make for great software developers work against them when trying to address usability issues.  For example, developers:

• trade simplicity for control
• exchange success for understanding
• focus on what is possible to the exclusion of what is probable
• act like jocks

On the third point he says that obsession with edge cases makes great programmers, but poor usability.  Normal people care most about likely uses/situations, "whereas programming is defined by cases at the edge of the paradigm, design is defined at the center."

I've found that it can often be easy to be lulled into the belief that working with a product on a daily basis means that you instantly know how new people will use it.  While it's tempting to believe that's true, it's also completely wrong.

Jared Spool says that the best companies (Apple, Disney, Netflix among others) are great companies because of their focus on feedback among other things.  He says he tests companies by asking random employees if, in the last 6 weeks, they have spent at least 2 hours watching someone using your design, or a competitor's design.  He asks this of everyone who influences the design.  Not just programmers or usability experts, but the entire team.

Great companies realize how easy it is to lose focus on what your users go through, and these sessions provide the opportunity for everyone on the product to see how people interact with it.  It's crucial to have people from all over the company participate, because those people will notice something that the UX team or the developers may miss from being buried in the details.

While the details can make something ordinary into something transcendent, they can also narrow your focus so much as to lose site of the broader picture.  It's crucial to have developers who obsess over those details...great developers have the genetic code that replays the details of a problem over and over again until the solution works itself out...but that same characteristic can also lead you lose sight of what's important: how typical customers interact with your product.

And no amount of brilliant design can bring back a customer who has tried and been turned off by your product.