Summary: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum Alan Cooper

To deliver both power and pleasure to users, you need to think first conceptually, then in terms of behavior and last in terms of interface.

Well-designed products or services can generate huge levels of customer loyalty -- which can assist a company as it passes through the early growth stages.

o be a long-term success and the foundation for a growing business, the product must:

Deliver something people want and value.
Be capable of being built and performing well.
Be able to be distributed and sold profitably.

Developers now face a choice between developing an interface that is far more natural and intuitive -- thereby disenfranchising those who learned the old, hard way -- or developing something that is far more natural

Many software programs fail the easy-to-use test because:
They act the same whether you are a highly experienced user or an absolute beginner.
They only deliver the benefits the developer considers important -- not what the user really wants.
They don’t deliver warning message when things are going wrong -- only when they fail totally.
They’re inflexible and unable to modify procedures to meet changing conditions.
They don’t allow people to change their mind and undo things, or to make mistakes.

Software engineers think and behave differently from normal human beings in four ways:
They trade simplicity for control. • They trade success for understanding.
They trade what is possible for what is probable. • They act like high school ‘‘jocks’’.

‘‘You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it.’’
--Albert Einstein

the current generation of computerized tools are too hard for humans to use productively

Parkinson’s Law -- that the work will expand to fill the time available

many products end up with less robust foundations simply because they are commercial versions of prototype software which was originally intended to be a learning process.