"Inmates are running asylum" [1] - is one of my favourite books, was written in 2004, which describes how bad most of the interfaces are and the reasons behind it.

Design solves problems which are not always obvious to the actual users. Using computers was always frustrating experience, but it improved dramatically over the last two decades for sure.

I don't know how anyone couldn't see that.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...

"What do you get when you cross a computer with a car?" "A computer!"

It's a "Riddle for the Information Age" that in Alan Cooper wrote in 1999 [1] in "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". One of the riddles is: "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane?" but things have gotten much much worse since then, it needs an update with the contents of this article.

He writes: "That something like this slipped through shows that the software inside the car is not coming from the same Porsche that makes the rest of the car... Acceptable levels of quality for software engineers are far lower than those for more traditional engineering disciplines..."

We have seen this coming for 20 years now easily. iDrive happened and excuses were made.

Nobody cares about response times or human-oriented design, it seems, which is incredibly baffling in a car! Where the rest of the controls are supposed to be designed with humans in mind.

My 2022 Subaru's Harman Kardon-built head-unit will block out my entire navigation view for 3 seconds if I dare to brush the volume control with my hand. I've learned to not adjust it after that because doing so only prolongs the time that I can't see where I'm supposed to be going. Also, if I am so unlucky as to lower the volume while the navigation speaks, I end up adjusting the "voiceover volume" and not the "radio/media volume." So when I wonder: "hey why did the navigation stop talking?" I have to remember that I hit the unlucky time to use the invisbily-modal volume knob. Of course, nobody cares and they let this travesty out the door because it's just the "entertainment system."

1 - https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...

Was supposed to be about this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...

But doesn't quite add up. Sorry.

Wholeheartedly agree. I see some people here would benefit from reading, 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum' by Alan Cooper.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

What a load of horse shit. No one said design is more important than engineering, rather that software without ux research and design will never be successful in the long run. Look around man, design is the key differentiator. Any engineer can spin up your software in the cloud as a startup and leverage intuitive design to undercut you. You are on hackernews, no one is arguing that engineers are less important than designers. Engineers don't do ethnographic field work to realize how users intuitively prefer to interact with a system in any given industry.

Graphic designers mocking up PSDs are useless. A UX team with designers and researchers are worth their weight in gold and bring immense value to the SDLC by helping the dev teams validate their designs against user mental models early on in the product development life cycle.

And if you think I'm talking out of my ass, here is a voice of authority: Alan Cooper, “Father of Visual Basic," with his book 'The Inmates Are Running the Asylum'

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

"The Inmates are Running the Asylum argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. They have inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, leading to products and processes that waste huge amounts of money, squander customer loyalty, and erode competitive advantage. They have let the inmates run the asylum. Alan Cooper offers a provocative, insightful and entertaining explanation of how talented people continuously design bad software-based products. More importantly, he uses his own work with companies big and small to show how to harness those talents to create products that will both thrill their users and grow the bottom line."

I highly suggest you step off your pedestal and read this book. If not, enjoy creating your architecturally efficient, crappy software that is a pain for actual humans to use.

This was just the start:

http://vimeo.com/85948693

Now companies and big governments are analyzing network graphs in real time thanks to Facebook. They can test people's reaction on real time to anything.

I don't believe that Apple's success is just about Advertisement, I use their products a lot because they are very good products.

When I was a kid I did not have money so I bought all computer gear myself looking for the best deal, then I also used my own OS(gentoo with everything super optimized). I used to joke with my friends about how Apple was all about Advertisements and nothing about quality, and people was so stupid.

Then I grow up, I started working on my own and I suffered so much for my conscienceless. First I had to change to a stable Debian because gentoo was killing me, then I had to change to standardized hardware too as it was doing my life miserable.

One day I bought a mac as a luxury because I had made some money with my company. I started using it a lot, it was so simple and it did not made me spent as much time as Linux. I made some numbers and it made sense to buy more Apple gear. It worked great.

I made tons of money buying "expensive"() stuff.

What makes Apple great is that is is one of the only companies that get how real people work, read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

Now, I am not a fanatic of Apple, I would love other companies doing the same(like doing my computers on metal) but it is not easy. In my experience companies without engineers on place do not know how to create things. Those that have engineers on place do not understand humans well enough.

()expensive is losing a customer because you could not fix something on time. Expensive is paying an engineer to pay for something that should not be broken in the fist time.

The problem of engineers designing UIs is the topic of one of my favorite books: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

The problem is that engineers are not very good at UI design. Both from UX and aesthetic standpoints designers are capable of making a better product. A good designer will give a consistently better result than a good engineer in terms of usability, UX, aesthetics and modularity.

By the way, the counterpoint to that Cory Doctorow quote how everything is a computer (airplane is a flying computer) is that the EXACT PROBLEM with software is that damn near everything is a computer. And when you add a computer to anything, it tends to go to shit. Things that worked just fine without it, now saddled with the typical software engineering mindset, are suddenly not so good. BMW iDrive, Ford Sync/MyFord Touch case in point.

Read the preview of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

The part that says "what do you get when you cross a computer with an airplane".

For good product usability, being proactive, and getting 80% of the use cases right is much more important than being making no mistake and shift the decision (and blame) to the user. Especially since most of the time the user has no technical background to make the correct decisions. I used to think like you until I read The Inmates are running the Assylum[0]. I still do for my personal workflow (that is why I prefer archlinux to ubuntu), but I try to be proactive in the error catching in the software I write.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672...

I understand the point, but there is a challenge that has to be met, particularly if you are trying to build a consumer product. It is very easy to fall into the "Inmates are Running the Asylum"[1] trap, the product looks good within the team and to like minded customers but is missing something (or everything) for the broader customer base. This lead an entire industry to spend decades building products that only techies could love...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp...