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.

I recently decided that it was time to get a replacement to my dead USB mouse, which I used when I moved my laptop to conference rooms, prospect and customer sites and while traveling. I had put off replacing it, since the laptop provided by my employer has both a track pad and keyboard nub pointing device and I figured that I could get by using one of those when I had to undock from my desk. However, I have come to the conclusion that pointing devices that are built into the laptop are fine for general UI navigation (starting apps, opening files and the like), but not so much for hard-core navigation inside an app or through a document. Enter the Logitech VXNano.

On my way back from a trade show, I spied an article in the airline magazine about how companies are starting to use the “novel” technique of Ethnography to understand how customers really use their products or to test out prototypes in real-world situations (this seems to be a hot topic, because after seeing the article in the airline mag, I also found a recent post about it at Requirements Defined, a blog from the folks at Seilevel and Experientia).

Whenever my BW gets asked what I do (and it’s suprisingly often), she usually just says, “Oh, he’s in Marketing…he does stuff with technology.” Now that may sound like BW is a little ditzy, but she’s not. In fact, she has an advanced degree and is one of the smartest people I know.

The problem is that my chosen career, Product Management, doesn’t register with most people who aren’t in high tech.