The Inmates Are Running The Asylum starts off pretty well. It begins with some very good examples of poor design that lead to a bad user experience, as well as just how downright dysfunctional the software development process can be. There is also the beginnings of a thesis on how to solve these problems. From there however, the quality of The Inmates takes a steep nosedive. The deeper into The Inmates you go, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio becomes. Cooper's message gets buried progressively deeper under a heap of sand-kicking diatribes about software engineers, armchair quarterbacking of the designs of others, and thinly veiled plugs for Cooper's particular brand of interaction design consulting.

There are some good ideas in The Inmates, though nothing truly groundbreaking at this point in time. Cooper champions things such as goal oriented design, personae, and primacy of user friendliness. All of which are good things, but none of which are exactly new concepts in 2008. However, the actual useful information comprises maybe 75 pages of the 250ish pages in the book, and is reduced to little more than nuggets of useful information scattered throughout a sea of whining and self aggrandizement.

Cooper's armchair quarterbacking of certain technologies as 'dancing bearware' is particularly annoying. Cooper continually brings up example after example of software and technology that is breaking new ground, acknowledges the fact that the technology even exists as an amazing achievement, and then turns around and lambasts it for not magically coming equipped with the precise amount of polish and feature sets that he wants. The 20/20 hindsight through which Cooper views many technologies belies the fact that Cooper is just as blinkered when it comes to the 'big picture' issues of software engineering as the managers and programmers that he continually needles.

Cooper tries to keep the tone light, and his unique brand of humor kept me reading even as the tone of the book slid gradually into that of a polemic against all things Alan Cooper doesn't like. This book can be downright dangerous if taken as holy writ. Cooper continually takes shots at programmers, and in fact spends an entire chapter reducing them to a set of stereotypes and providing an 'animal handling' guide for the backwards, egotistical, smelly bullies otherwise known as 'programmers'. Taking Cooper's stereotypes to heart is pretty much guaranteed to cause rifts between design and engineering teams, as Cooper goes to great length to explain exactly how far beneath contempt programmers are, how they are not to be trusted, etc. The Inmates espouses a philosophy of design in which non-designer stakeholders are to be marginalized or even totally cut out of the design process. The concepts of business or technical needs influencing design are constantly sidelined, as business and technical concerns are never legitimate, but rather the result of inept managers or lazy programmers. This book should be subtitled 'How to have your design, business, and engineering teams at each others' throats in 3 easy steps'.

Overall I think that the book has some useful information, but much like Cooper does with his case studies, the reader must cherry-pick it to obtain any useful information. Coopers ideas are good (if dated), but they could have been presented in a far more concise fasion, and could have done without the extra 175 pages of masturbatory ego stroking, ranting, and poorly disguised plugs for his consulting firm.

This a classic book that anyone who build computer systems should read. Some of the specific examples are dated, though many caused me to nod in acknowledgment, especially his observations about alarm clocks and TV remotes, Inmates describes goal directed design, the concept of Pesonas, ideas which, whether they make sense for your project are not, are ones that you should be aware of. This book also explains what "polite software" is and emphasizes the market advantages to good interaction design. Even if this book doesn't change the way you work, it will help you think about the relationship between interaction design and programming. Among the interesting points Cooper makes are Customer Driven isn't aways the best model (customer influenced is better), and neither is Engineering Driven; software designers should go beyond customers say they want and help them to understand what they need. There were a few things towards the end of the book that struck me as just wrong. For example Cooper says that most developers don't believe that they are the best people to test their code. Most Agile software developers would challenge that point. Agile developers would also challenge the recurring theme that the engineering team can't make the leap to understanding the customer enough to build good interaction design. He ignores the value of a specializing generalist, which is an important concept in today's projects. It's for these points that I gave this 4 rather than 5 stars. Regardless, this is a book that anyone building software systems should read, if only to understand the concepts underlying interaction design.

Alan Cooper gives the reader insight into why so many of today's technological products frustrate and confuse users. Yet he goes past this to discuss a methodology for keeping it simple and designing for the user i.e. avoiding cognitive friction. This book has changed the way I will develop products and should be a must read for product managers of application developers. Just learning Mr. Cooper's vocabulary is worth the read. The ideas such as personas, keywords, and designing for an individual push the book way above average. This is an easy read that should be done in your spare time if you want to avoid cognitive friction with your users. It has changed the way I view technology and brought a new awareness to thoughtless technology implementation which often cause failure or misuse. The only reason I gave this book a 4 out of 5 as I feel it could have been reduced a little bit more, certain points I felt like the author was rambling about personal fustrations.

Cooper's argument in this book is simple: you have to know your users, and you have to understand what they're trying to accomplish with your software. The method that he puts forth for achieving this understanding is personas, richly-described archetypical users.

The book is easy to read and understand. He begins with a detailed description of the problem with software design as carried about by programmers who can only imagine themselves as the users of their software, resulting in software that makes really difficult things possible but doesn't bother to make easy or common things quick and easy.

After making the argument that programmers shouldn't design interfaces and making the case both for usability and interaction design, he lays out the personas concept. Cooper's guidelines for creating personas and using them are well-written and well-thought-out. However, his examples of applying them to some of his own customers are rather repetitive, and sometimes come across as somewhat whiny.

Now that it's time for my group at Microsoft to revisit our personas and determine what needs to be tweaked for our next version, I decided that I should revisit the book that first advanced the idea. It has stood up well to the test of time (something that not many computer books can do). I highly recommend it, both to usability and design professionals, as well as programmers.

The strength of this book its clear and easy-to-read writing. Cooper's examples are instructive and the theory of why design-centric business approaches are the most powerful. It's supposed to be a business-case book but I'm quite sure all programmers and even designers would find the read very worthwhile.

My only wish for the book would be that Chapter 10 onwards seemed to be the really exciting stuff, detailing the how more than the why of design-centric approaches. This part feels like a rushed summary in comparison the the attention paid to the why aspect in the rest of the book. You may want to consider Cooper's newly revised "how" book although it is mainly a designer's handbook: About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

I'm not done with that About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design but I'm starting to worry it's going to leave me wishing it had more specific methodologies as opposed to theories. Of course, it has much more methodological attention than The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition) and there's no fault in what is written, only in what is omitted.

If you're really looking for the ultimate how-to, you might want to consider attending the four-day "Cooper U". Case in point: I had the chance to ask Alan Cooper where I could learn more about how to create the design documents he writes about in the last part of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (2nd Edition) and he really couldn't say what books would be able to instruct that (including his own) and that it would be covered in his course.