Alan Cooper
"No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it."
Alan Cooper
"The high-tech industry is in denial of a simple fact that every person with a cell phone or a word processor can clearly see: Our computerised tools are too hard to use."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 15.
"Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 15.
"The high-tech industry has inadvertently put programmers and engineers in charge, so their hard-to-use engineering culture dominates. Despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech industry. It is the engineers who are running the show. In our rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, we have abdicated our responsibilities. We have let the inmates run the asylum."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 15.
"In a marketplace of equally poorly designed products, added features will not influence a broad segment of the market."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 78.
"In the information age, as computers invade our lives and more and more products contain a chip of silicon, we find that what lies between us humans and our devices is cognitive friction, which is something new and something that we are ill-prepared to deal with. Our engineering skills are highly refined, but when we apply them to a cognitive friction problem, they fail to solve it."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 92.
"None of our current crop of software based products is capable of delivering power and pleasure to people outside of the techno-smitten minority. The engineering community says merely that users will have to become 'computer literate'. I believe history will view that phrase in the same way that we treat Marie Antoinette’s famously condescending phrase, 'Let them eat cake'. The French Revolution gave food to the masses, and the coming design revolution will give technology to the masses."
Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, p. 244.
"Most digital products today emerge from the development process like a monster emerging from a bubbling tank. Developers, instead of planning and executing with their users in mind, end up creating technological solutions over which they ultimately have little control. Like mad scientists, they fail because they have not imbued their creations with humanity."
Alan Cooper, About Face 2.0, p. 5.
"If a 10-year-old child behaved like software, he'd be sent to his room without supper."
Alan Cooper, About Face 2.0, p. 7.
"Programmers, deep in their thoughts of algorithms and code, 'design' user interfaces the same way that miners 'design' the landscape with their cavernous pits and enormous tailing piles. The software interface design process alternates between the accidental and the non-existent."
Alan Cooper, About Face 2.0, p. 9.