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

Foreword

I recently met with a senior executive at one of the world's largest technology companies. His official title is Vice President for Ease of Use, and he is responsible for a great number of software products, large and small. He is a brilliant and accomplished fellow with roots in the formal Human-Computer Interaction community. He is steeped in the ways of “usability”—of testing and observing behind one-way mirrors—as is his company. But he came to talk about design, not testing, and about personas, not users. He said that his company has completely ceased all postdevelopment usability testing and has instead committed to predevelopment design efforts. He further asserted that all of his staffers trained in the art of in vitro user observation ...