Book Club (Classics series): The Inmates are Running the Asylum

As part of a series of book clubs looking back on "classic" and influential books about user experience, we'll be kicking it off with:

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity – By Alan Cooper

(View on Amazon.ca (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672326140))

About the book: Imagine, at a terrifyingly aggressive rate, everything you regularly use is being equipped with computer technology. Think about your phone, cameras, cars-everything-being automated and programmed by people who in their rush to accept the many benefits of the silicon chip, have abdicated their responsibility to make these products easy to use. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum argues that the business executives who make the decisions to develop these products are not the ones in control of the technology used to create them. Insightful and entertaining, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum uses the author's experiences in corporate America to illustrate how talented people continuously design bad software-based products and why we need technology to work the way average people think. Somewhere out there is a happy medium that makes these types of products both user and bottom-line friendly; this book discusses why we need to quickly find that medium.