The Productologist

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

I have been meaning to read this seminal text on application development and usability for some time (read: years), but somehow it always ended up on my reading list just below something else. After seeing some others reference the book and discuss conference talks where the author expanded on his theorems, I decided to bump The Inmates are Running the Asylum to the top of the list. After finishing it up, I was surprised, to say the least.

[Business 2.0 Homage #2]

In previous posts, I have discussed the usage of Personas as a tool for insuring that your product meets the needs of the prototypical user(s) in the context of other challenges. Look for a posting on that specific topic soon, but for now, I’ve got another example of how important it is to truly understand who the primary and secondary users of the product is.