The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“To err is human; to really screw up, you need a computer”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Communications can be precise and exacting while still being tragically wrong.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Change is impossible until senior business executives realize that software problems are not technical issues, but are significant business issues.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“It follows that there are two ways to increase your profitability: Either reduce your costs or increase your revenues. In the old economy, reducing your costs worked best. In the new economy, increasing your revenue works much, much better.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“We can create powerful and pleasurable software-based products by the simple expedient of designing our computer-based products before we build them.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Managers know that software development follows Parkinson's Law: Work will expand to fill the time allotted to it. If you are in the software business, perhaps you are familiar with a corollary to Parkinson called the Ninety-Ninety Rule, attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs: "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." This self-deprecating rule says that when the engineers have written 90% of the code, they still don't know where they are! Management knows full well that the programmers won't hit their stated ship dates, regardless of what dates it specifies. The developers work best under pressure, and management uses the delivery date as the pressure-delivery vehicle.”
― 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

“The time it will take to finish a programming project is twice as long as the time you've allotted for it.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Microsoft is famous for hiring extremely bright, highly aggressive, young people right out of school. Moody says, "I felt like I was watching a gang of adolescents who had sneaked into some corporate headquarters after hours, taken over its boardrooms, and were playing at being businesspeople." Microsoft is also famous for pushing these youngsters very hard to get the most and best out of them. Moody says, "The atmosphere on the campus is one of unrelenting anxiety and constant improvisation." The book is a remarkable chronicle of how arbitrary, demoralizing, and unprofessional Microsoft's development methods often are.”
― 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 become so familiar with code reuse that they often copy existing techniques even when they aren't actually copying code.”
― 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

“Most people who are paid to use a tool feel constrained not to complain about that tool, but it doesn't stop them from feeling frustrated and unhappy about it.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“The biggest drawback, of course, is that you immediately scare away all survivors, and your only remaining users will be apologists. This seriously skews the nature and quality of your feedback, condemning you to a clientele of technoid apologists, which is a relatively small segment. This is one reason why so few personal-computer software-product makers have successfully crossed over into mass markets.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“Generally, programmers aren't thrilled about the iterative method because it means extra work for them. Typically, it's managers new to technology who like the iterative process because it relieves them of having to perform rigorous planning, thinking, and product due diligence”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity