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41 " One of my colleagues in the cellular-telephone business was complaining about how the engineers had made cell phones hard to use by packing in so many rarely used features. She said that cell phones were "wet dogs." When I inquired about her metaphor, she explained, "You have to really love a wet dog a lot to want to carry it around. "
― Alan Cooper , The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
42 " I do not blame programmers for hard-to-use software, and I'm very sorry to have given any programmer a contrary impression. With few exceptions, the programmers I know are diligent and conscientious in their desire to please end users and are unceasing in their efforts to improve their programs' quality. Just like users, programmers are simply another victim of a flawed process that leaves them too little time, too many conflicting orders, and utterly insufficient guidance. "
43 " The intractability of the software-construction process—particularly the high cost of programming and the low quality of interaction—is simply not a technical problem. It is the result of business practices imposed on a discipline—software programming—for which they are obsolete. "
44 " As our economy shifts more and more onto an information basis, we are inadvertently creating a divided society. The upper class is composed of those who have mastered the nuances of differentiating between "RAM" and "hard disk." The lower class consists of those who treat the difference as inconsequential. The irony is that the difference really is inconsequential to anyone except a few hard-core engineers. Yet virtually all contemporary software forces its users to confront a file system, where your success is fully dependent on knowing the difference between RAM and disk. Thus the term "computer literacy" becomes a euphemism for social and economic apartheid. Computer literacy is a key phrase that brutally bifurcates our society. "
45 " We can create powerful and pleasurable software-based products by the simple expedient of designing our computer-based products before we build them. "
46 " Most people who are paid to use a tool feel constrained not to complain about that tool, but it doesn't stop them from feeling frustrated and unhappy about it. "
47 " programmers believe that their own imperatives of construction simplicity and ease of acquisition—of prewritten source code in their case—take precedence over any suggestions made by others. "
48 " When the creators of software-based products examine their handiwork, they overlook how bad it is. Instead, they see its awesome power and flexibility. They see how rich the product is in features and functions. They ignore how excruciatingly difficult it is to use, how many mind-numbing hours it takes to learn, or how it diminishes and degrades the people "
49 " The key to solving the problem is interaction design before programming. "
50 " Infinite scrolling should never be employed for interfaces in which users need to get to the end of the list quickly, or need to return to a particular list item after navigating elsewhere. "
― Alan Cooper , About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
51 " Programmers become so familiar with code reuse that they often copy existing techniques even when they aren't actually copying code. "
52 " The programmers went off and coded for a while, then brought the finished work to Jeff for him to try. He found a book he wanted and pressed the 1-Click button, whereupon the program asked him a confirming question! The programmers had converted his one-click interface into a two-click interface. "
53 " Microsoft is famous for hiring extremely bright, highly aggressive, young people right out of school. Moody says, "I felt like I was watching a gang of adolescents who had sneaked into some corporate headquarters after hours, taken over its boardrooms, and were playing at being businesspeople." Microsoft is also famous for pushing these youngsters very hard to get the most and best out of them. Moody says, "The atmosphere on the campus is one of unrelenting anxiety and constant improvisation." The book is a remarkable chronicle of how arbitrary, demoralizing, and unprofessional Microsoft's development methods often are. "
54 " Design Is a Big Word "
55 " Public kiosks run an unfortunate risk of being a disease vector, so your first pass should try for noncontact inputs like voice, proximity switches, or non-contact gestural inputs. If "