Alan Cooper. Mental hospital in the hands of patients

Those interested in usability and interaction design should already have read this book. If you have not done this yet, I hope this small review will move you to action.
First of all, I would like to note that this book is a rationale, and not a book-guide. In the introduction, Alan mentions this and asks for forgiveness from the designers who were expecting to see in the book the so-called material part. However, in Part IV “Designing the Interaction is a Profitable Business”, the reader will be able to familiarize himself, however superficially, with the techniques and design tools that Cooper uses: character creation, goal definition, the “imagine” exercise and others. The book contains quite interesting examples of designing the interaction of the P @ ssport electronic system for Sony , the program for the scanner from Logitech and the program for creating the web-sites Drumbeat from Elemental. For me personally, familiarity with this book has become familiar with the practice of designing characters, whose evangelist is Alan Cooper. Designing to meet the goals and needs of a particular character, rather than an abstract user - this is probably the solution you were looking for in order to improve the quality of your software products.
In light of the fact that there is little enough literature on usability in Russian, each translated book, especially practicing authors of this level, is of great interest. And participation as a scientific editor Alexey Kopylov (UI Design Group) ensured the accuracy of definitions and the correspondence of concepts to their values.
To be objective, I will mention one, but a noticeable flaw in the book - this is the cover design, paper quality pages and illustrations. Because The book is aimed primarily at business audiences and encourages managers to introduce design, then the aesthetics of how it is presented is of paramount importance. I would very much like the “Symbol Plus” publishing house (whose contribution to the development of the IT community in the CIS countries, thanks to the publication of books by O'reilly and others in Russian, is enormous), and will pay attention to this moment.
About the author:
Alan Cooper is the founder of Cooper Interaction Design , the author of several books on interaction design, user interfaces and usability. Among the clients of his company are such giants as VISA, SAP, Sony, Sun, IBM, Ericsson

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Source: Web Development Blog and Ways to Improve It