"Inmates Running the Asylum"

Having recently finished reading The Inmates Are Running The Asylum - Why High-Tech Products Drive us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper, the potential for applying some of the proposed solutions cropped up almost immediately.

While designing the prototype for the MakeTheGame e-commerce website, three key 'personas' who would be using the website were generated - we gave them names, photos, created a history and a personality. These three personas, Pete, Clive and Andrea, then became the guiding light for any design decisions we made concerning the website.

Instead of designing a website or piece of software for software engineers (an easy trap to fall into, given that the majority of early-level testing and feedback is from peers who are almost always from an SE background), Cooper proposes that user testing should be conducted as early as possible, and that dialogue between end-users and designers and developers be liaised with specialists who can talk both the language of the software engineer, and the business / real-world needs of the client. The client doesn't necessarily know how to expres what they want in software engineering terms, so the programmers end up interpreting their requirements through a filter that simply makes the solution 'easy to program'.

This translation of needs to software design requires more effort from all concerned parties - programmers' creativity rises to meet the often unique challenges of users' requirements, as they set about to create something that hasn't been done before, or do it far better than anyone else. The 'dancing bear' analogy is repeatedly used to highlight the fact that sub-standard software and design is often used simply because there aren't any excellent alternatives.