The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Chapters 8-9

Reference Information
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Cooper, Alan
Sams Publishing, 2004


Summary
Chapter eight discusses how an elitist culture has formed around software engineers and the negative effect that this culture has on the end-users. Engineers value program efficiency over the needs of the user. Programmers also like to reuse code that was already written to save effort. Sometimes this code is of questionable quality and is merely copied over and over again by many people because it was already written. This illustrates the conflict between what the programmer wants (ease of implementation), and what the user wants (ease of use). There is a reverence in the industry for technical skill. Therefore, the most talented and experienced programmers are exempted from helpful duties such as answering customers' questions. This actually insulates them from understanding what the customer really wants. The author believes that the mindset that is so prevalent throughout the industry of the need to preserve resources (what he calls scarcity thinking) hampers the improvement of interaction design by keeping the focus on technical details.


Chapter nine, entitled Designing for Pleasure, introduces the concept of personas. A persona is a precise description of a user and what he would want to accomplish. Simply asking the real user typically yields poor results; the user does not really understand the problem. The users that are used for designing the software are entirely fictional. In fact, it is far better to design for only one of these personas. Having a small percentage of the total market absolutely love your product will guarantee success, as was discussed in an earlier chapter. In this way, designing for one user is actually the best way to design for the population at large. The more specific the persona, the better the results will be. Giving each persona a name is one of the most important parts since it begins to build the character of the user. Counter-intuitively, it is more important that the persona to be specific than to be the most accurate depiction of an actual user. Having personas allows the team to openly discuss the various skill levels of the users - this helps avoid writing the product for super-users. They also allow for easy determination of required features; programmers all-to-often want to make the software too general. The persona should not target the buyer since it is the actual user that matters. The author recommends creating between three and twelve personas per each project. However, only one of these will be the "primary persona". This is the user whose needs trump those of all of the others. This persona must be absolutely satisfied with the end product.


Opinion
Chapter nine was quite fascinating, apart for the ridiculously long example. The idea of personas - and that the software should be designed for only one user - seemed enormously useful. This is something that I would like to apply to my own projects.

I don't know what this is, but it says Persona, and that's relevant