Alan Cooper > Quotes

“Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“The Only Thing More Expensive Than Writing Software Is Writing Bad Software”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Sort of like the pilot saying, "We're gonna make Chicago on time, but only if we jettison all our baggage!" I've seen product managers sacrifice not only design, but testing, function, features, integration, documentation, and reality. Most product managers that I have worked with would rather ship a failure on time than risk going late.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“When your number one job is serving the needs of users, and some external force tries to divert your efforts to some other goal, your number one job now changes to removing that external force. It doesn’t matter if that external force has more economic or political power than you do. Your job is clear.”
― Alan Cooper

“Eric Raymond says, "Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to reuse.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Usability’s strength is in identifying problems, while design’s strength is in identifying solutions.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“High cognitive friction polarizes people into two groups. It either makes them feel frustrated and stupid for failing, or giddy with power at overcoming the extreme difficulty. These powerful emotions force people into being either an "apologist" or a "survivor." They either adopt cognitive friction as a lifestyle, or they go underground and accept it as a necessary evil. The polarization is growing acute.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“You can predict which features in any new technology will be used and which won't. The use of a feature is inversely proportional to the amount of interaction needed to control”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Interaction design isn’t merely a matter of aesthetic choice; rather, it is based on an understanding of users and cognitive principles.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“You can blame the "stupid user" all you want, but you still have to staff those phones with expensive tech-support people if you want to sell or distribute within your company software that hasn't been designed.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“When programmers speak of "computer literacy," they are drawing red lines around ethnic groups, too, yet few have pointed this out.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“To deliver both power and pleasure to users, interaction designers think first conceptually, then in terms of behavior, and last in terms of interface.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Writing software is not a variable cost, but it's not really a fixed cost either. Writing software is an ongoing, revenue-generating operation of the company, and it is not the same as constructing a factory. The expensive craftsmen who build the factory leave and go to work on some other job after the building is erected.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Like putting an Armani suit on Attila the Hun, interface design only tells how to dress up an existing behavior.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Product successes and failures have shown repeatedly that users don't care that much about features. Users only care about achieving their goals.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Homo logicus are driven by an irresistible desire to understand how things work. By contrast, Homo sapiens have a strong desire for success. Programmers also want to succeed, but they will frequently accept failure as the price to pay for understanding.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Most software is used in a business context, so most victims of bad interaction are paid for their suffering. Their job forces them to use software, so they cannot choose not to use it—they can only tolerate it as well as they can. They are forced to submerge their frustration and to ignore the embarrassment they feel when the software makes them feel stupid.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Computer literacy, however, is really a euphemism for forcing human beings to stretch their thinking to understand the inner workings of application logic, rather than having software-enabled products stretch to meet people’s usual ways of thinking.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“The real interaction designer's decisions are based on what the user is trying to achieve.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“The programmers went off and coded for a while, then brought the finished work to Jeff for him to try. He found a book he wanted and pressed the 1-Click button, whereupon the program asked him a confirming question! The programmers had converted his one-click interface into a two-click interface.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“programmers believe that their own imperatives of construction simplicity and ease of acquisition—of prewritten source code in their case—take precedence over any suggestions made by others.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“For example, many software dynasties have been established on the backs of very young, very inexperienced programmers. They were likely given a free hand with programming issues, and the pairing of immense responsibility with immense authority can often be a crucible for creating greatness. The same forces apply in interaction design. If someone is given the responsibility for product quality, and she is given authority equal to it, she will often rise to the challenge regardless of her experience. If you take a suitable person and give her full control over the quality and behavior of a product, you will have a much, much better product than if you don't.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“When the creators of software-based products examine their handiwork, they overlook how bad it is. Instead, they see its awesome power and flexibility. They see how rich the product is in features and functions. They ignore how excruciatingly difficult it is to use, how many mind-numbing hours it takes to learn, or how it diminishes and degrades the people”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“In all other construction disciplines, engineers plan a construction strategy that craftsmen execute. Engineers don't build bridges; ironworkers do. Only in software is the engineer tasked with actually building the product. Only in software is the "ironworker" tasked with determining how the product will be constructed. Only in software are these two tasks performed concurrently instead of sequentially. But companies that build software seem totally unaware of the anomaly.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“In September 1997, while conducting fleet maneuvers in the Atlantic, the USS Yorktown, one of the Navy's new Aegis guided-missile cruisers, stopped dead in the water. A Navy technician, while calibrating an on-board fuel valve, entered a zero into one of the shipboard management computers, a Pentium Pro running Windows NT. The program attempted to divide another number by that zero—a mathematically undefined operation—which resulted in a complete crash of the entire shipboard control system.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Software experts are—of necessity—comfortable with high-cognitive-friction interaction. They pride themselves on their ability to work in spite of its adversity. Normal humans, who are the new users of these products, lack the expertise to judge whether this cognitive friction is avoidable.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“I do not blame programmers for hard-to-use software, and I'm very sorry to have given any programmer a contrary impression. With few exceptions, the programmers I know are diligent and conscientious in their desire to please end users and are unceasing in their efforts to improve their programs' quality. Just like users, programmers are simply another victim of a flawed process that leaves them too little time, too many conflicting orders, and utterly insufficient guidance.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Goals are not the same as tasks or activities. A goal is an expectation of an end condition,
whereas both activities and tasks are intermediate steps (at different levels of organization)
that help someone to reach a goal or set of goals.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design