The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Quotes

“The fact that these measures are objective is reassuring to everyone. Objective and quantitative measure is highly respected by both programmers and businesspeople. The fact that these measures are usually ineffective in producing successful products tends to get lost in the shuffle.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“There is a lot of obsessive behavior in Silicon Valley about time to market. It is frequently asserted that shipping a product right now is far better than shipping it later.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“One of my colleagues in the cellular-telephone business was complaining about how the engineers had made cell phones hard to use by packing in so many rarely used features. She said that cell phones were "wet dogs." When I inquired about her metaphor, she explained, "You have to really love a wet dog a lot to want to carry it around.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“It's cheaper to put an entire microprocessor in your car key, microwave, or cell phone than it is to put in discrete chips and electronic components. Thus, a new technical economy drives the design of the product.”
― 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

“Design Is a Big Word”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“The key to solving the problem is interaction design before programming.”
― 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

“Because the software-creation process is out of control, the high-tech industry must bring its process to heel, or else it will continue to put the blame on ordinary users while ever-bigger machines sit dead in the water.”
― 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

“The obnoxious behavior and obscure interaction that software-based products exhibit is institutionalizing what I call "software apartheid":”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“All modern manufacturing disciplines have roots in preindustry except software, whose unique medium appeared well after industrialization was a fait accompli. Only programming comes directly from academia, where there are no time limits on research, student power is dirt cheap, profit is against the rules, and a failing program can be considered a very successful experiment. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and other leading software companies reside in "campuses." Universities never have to make money, hit deadlines, or build desirable, useful products.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“What's more, the only available economic upside comes from making your product or service more desirable by improving its quality, and you can't do that by reducing the money you spend designing or programming”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“When today's executives regard programming the same as manufacturing, they imagine that reducing the cost of programming is similarly simple and effective. Unfortunately, those rules don't apply anymore.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

“The intractability of the software-construction process—particularly the high cost of programming and the low quality of interaction—is simply not a technical problem. It is the result of business practices imposed on a discipline—software programming—for which they are obsolete.”
― 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

“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

“As our economy shifts more and more onto an information basis, we are inadvertently creating a divided society. The upper class is composed of those who have mastered the nuances of differentiating between "RAM" and "hard disk." The lower class consists of those who treat the difference as inconsequential. The irony is that the difference really is inconsequential to anyone except a few hard-core engineers. Yet virtually all contemporary software forces its users to confront a file system, where your success is fully dependent on knowing the difference between RAM and disk. Thus the term "computer literacy" becomes a euphemism for social and economic apartheid. Computer literacy is a key phrase that brutally bifurcates our society.”
― Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity