Reddit reviews The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
We found 19 Reddit comments about The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Sams - Pearson Education
Interesting. Alan Cooper writes about a similar example in the forward of The Inmates are running the Asylum. In his example a pilot on a South American flight accidentally selected a wrong ground station because it was lexically similar to the correct one. The plane lined up on it even though it mad no sense at all and then slammed into a mountain.
Depends on what you want to do — UX is a pretty broad field. I'm a user interface designer with a UX background, which means I've designed sites, web apps and mobile apps, but there's plenty of UX positions that don't require any sort of visual design or front-end development experience.
For example, there are labs that conduct user research and interviews, run focus groups, or do user testing. Hell, you could even apply to be a user tester at a site like usertesting.com. Not sure how much money you can make from that, but it's something.
Also, there are UX positions that go from beginning research and discovery for projects up through the wireframing, which doesn't require any visual design experience. You'll usually hand off your UX work to a designer or a developer to implement.
Some good books to read about UX are:
There's also plenty of online resources about UX. Smashing Magazine has a ton of articles on it.
If you are good at puzzles, love solving complex problems, and contain any shred of empathy, user experience could be a good field for you.
Heya! Welcome to the world of UX/UI design!
So, many years from now, I want to become a design professor because I'd get to see lots of designs like these. It's a simple idea, a simple design, but unique in a way that only somebody coming to the field with fresh eyes would make. In short, I think it's delightful.
Yes, there are some issues with the design. I won't lie, there are a lot of issues. But don't be discouraged! Start by investigating these things:
To help, I suggest making a persona before doing anything. Personas are invaluable for understanding who you're designing for and what their goals are. Here are some decent introductions to what makes for good personas:
No need to read all of those articles. I just wanted to provide a few so that you can pick whichever one or two makes the most sense to you. (For bonus points, pay close attention to how you are using the articles and why you prefer whichever ends up being your favorite.)
If you can spare about $5, I highly recommend buying yourself a used copy of The Inmates Are Running The Asylum by Alan Cooper, the guy who invented personas as a design method. I wish somebody had recommended it to me when I started design school. I would've been a prodigy!
Anyway, keep up the good work! I hope this post is helpful.
P.S. Make a zip archive of all your work up until now and store it somewhere safe. Years from now, you'll like being able to look back at the process work of your first design.
Just some I like:
Dev
Design
(I am weak in the design side, so take these recommendation with a grain of salt. I recommend them off of overall industry cred they receive and my own personal taste for them.)
below are books I have not read but our generally recommended to people asking this question
You can see a lot of these are theory based. My 0.02 is that books are good for theory, blogs are good for up to date ways of doing things and tutorial type stuff.
Hope this helps!
Battery is about to die so no formatting for you! I'll add note later if I remember.EDIT: another real quick.
EDIT2: Eh, wound up on my computer. Added formatting and some context. Also added more links because I am procrastinating my actual work I have to do (picking icons for buttons is so hard, I never know what icon accurately represents whatever context I am trying to fill).
"Don't make me think" by Steve Krug and the Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper.
Read The Inmates Are Running the Asylum and About Face by Cooper. For an advanced strategic view, The Art of 'Ware" by Bruce Webster.
Learn how to run a smoke test. Learn how to take the you out of user. Learn how to Plog. (not a typo).
Learning to code will gain you nothing. Every programmer suffers from a "more optimal than thou" attitude which, at best, will end in stalemate. At common worst -- user poison. Learn pseudocode. It may earn you the street cred being an inept code monkey never will.
You can not be a junior or probationary programmer and say word one to almost any programmer. That's not what they say before you've wasted several years learning, that's the way it is. I spent five months hearing "this can't be done," just before we did it. Every dumbass college grad. Along with the dumbass that should know better through experience. Every dumbass day. For FIVE months. Makes you wish violence was the answer.
I would never partner 50/50 with any technical cofounder who hadn't invented the technology.
== Okay. I'll say it so even the Cargo Cult can figure it out ==
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity has absolutely zero insight into anything a programmer or technical person says. Vital if you want to understand what they do after feeding you a line of bullshit. Useless for programming. Vital for management of a development effort.
Please Don't Learn to Code and when you ignore that, don't design.
The God Login I have never -- in my life -- heard any form of worker you can call a group or industry say the word "impossible" so much. Which is one reason you never ever put this ilk into any position you can't fire. From this experience I did gain a newfound appreciation for the idea nothing is impossible, so there is that. And the firings tend to cheer me a small amount.
What's on the other side of "impossible"? For one thing Apple. Of course, my advice has no application if you want to be a technical person's bitch. You are not in business to drag down the customer's expectations to the level of some worker's comfort zone.
> So on my LinkedIn profile/resume could I put a link to my online portfolio?
Yes. And you need to have your resume available in some format on your portfolio site too. I suggest Word and PDF.
Some suggestions regarding LinkedIn: spend a few hours reading through some of the tutorials online about how to set up your profile. If I've spent more than five seconds on your LinkedIn profile and it's not blindingly obvious to me that you're looking for an entry-level tech writing job, you're doing it wrong. There are also flags you can set in your profile so that you show up in the searches that recruiters do when they're looking for candidates. I know this varies somewhat by region, but where I live if you're in tech and you're not on LinkedIn, you're invisible.
> The classes. Would they benefit me more once I am employed and not really to leverage a job?
Again, some places will look at that and see it as a sign that you're interested in the profession and are working to improve your skills. Other places won't care. If you can, I'd say go for it. More knowledge is better.
> Why do you have some that you print and hand out? Why not just include them all in the online portfolio.
In the interviews for my current job, not everyone had seen my online portfolio and out of the four people I interviewed with, only one came into the room with a way to look online (he had an iPad with him). Having some writing samples I could hand out and go over with the interviewers was really helpful. It allowed them to ask questions about why I did this or that thing, and let me dive deeper into how I thought through putting documentation together. Also, have multiple copies of each writing sample. One of my interviewers took one of them with him, meaning I couldn't show that one to the next interviewers.
More about personas here: Personas | usability.gov. The book The Inmates Are Running The Asylum is the canonical work on the subject. I have this book, which is based on the work in that book:The Essential Persona Lifecycle.
Regarding my comments on the portfolio - I suggest WordPress because it's fairly easy to set up. It's got an easy install, and most any web hosting company should have it available for their customers. The domain name is up to you - I think that something like "yourname.com" is more professional than "yourname.wordpress.com," but for a portfolio it might not matter.
WordPress has a WYSWIG editor built in that you can enter and format your content with. I suggest a static page because blogs are usually in reverse chronological order and only show snippets of each entry.
Of course, you don't have to use WordPress for this. If some other platform, such as Squarespace or Wix or whatever works better for you, then use that. I know people who have built their portfolio site by hand coding the HTML and CSS so that they could get it to look exactly like they wanted to. My portfolio is hosted on GitHub Pages, using a modified version of Tom Johnson's Documentation Theme for Jekyll.
> Do your guides have indices?
No. Nothing I do is long enough to have an index. Creating a good index is a pain in the ass, and is generally something that should be done manually. There is an entire profession dedicated to indexing, actually.
Hi! It seems like a lot of these responses are process-heavy, so I'll be digging into some very practical, immediately-actionable tips.
As an example, if you're going to build the most awesome soccer game in history, you can't just start with the effects of the ball spinning and the many people in the stadium and the hair effects on the players and the I hope you get my point. Build pong. And even then, know what that means by breaking it down, which could look like this:
Look at that, now you have something that each of you can work on independently and cleanly. Then you'll realize the ball (first item) needs to "bounce" off the paddle (second item), and you start to merge code. By this point, you will have more ideas about what to do next. Always decide on that next thing to build, try to make it modular, and then you can assign and tackle it separately.
Look up and choose a game engine that suits you, your skills, your preference (based on your preliminary research), and your buddy. One of the engineers on one of my old teams was building an engine that sounded really great, so you might want to check out "Super Evil Mega Corp" and send them an email. Tell 'em Danny sent ya, I don't even know if they're done yet. :P
Once you have your engine and know you can put it up in your repository, you might want to use something like github.com to set up your project. The Getting Started steps guide you really well if you don't know how to set this up, so I won't waste your time with re-hashing the already-smooth steps here.
Go check out a copy of Alan Coopers' "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". Even in the current revision, a lot of the concrete examples harken from an older era, but all of the logic is spot on, and intended to be pitched at business types and developers about the importance of design. It also stresses not just aesthetic design, but the whole UX / UI package, through the lens of the goals of your users (the people who ultimately write the whole team's paycheck, haha).
Give it a read so you know what it's about, then go drop a copy on everybody's desk. Or send an ebook copy, or something. It's a tough cycle to break, but it's worth it!
A change in mind is good start. The Inmates are running the asyslum and About Faces both from Alan Cooper are good books.
I have been learning UI/UX all summer.
Try Alan Cooper's books: The inmates are running the asylum and About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. These books are great for the fundamentals of UX design. They might be a little bit outdated technologie wise (responsive design etc.) but they have helped me grow as an UX designer in my early days.
The inmates are running the asylum: http://amzn.com/0672326140
About Face 3: http://amzn.com/0470084111
[edit amazone links]
read this great book called the The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
and you will see why UI design is really driving us crazy..
Sacha Grief has a good $6 ebook
I also recommend reading the classics
The Design of Everyday Things
and
The Inmates are Running the Asylum
Entrepreneur Reading List
Computer Science Grad School Reading List
Video Game Development Reading List
Features aren't everything: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/0672326140
First, check out Don't Make Me Think! by Steve Krug. It's an easy read and invaluable.
If you really like that approach then you should think about going into Interaction Design (aka usability, user-centered design, UX design, information architecture, etc.). I've been doing it for about 11 years and have only recently gotten into coding. Usually I produce wireframes and specs for the coders, do user research, and conduct usability tests. There nothing quite like watching someone trying to use your design and doing something completely different from what you expected.
I haven't kept up with some of the latest books out there, but some of my formative ones are:
/r/MrRobotLounge The Inmates Are RUNning the Asylum now that Ron's in Jail - yes, about digital computers
> As the title states, you focus on the Strategy, not the implementation.
From your description it seems that you're working at a more tactical level and not a strategic level. For me, a strategist should be working with the client across their entire brand and not hyper focused on individual projects.
> The difference with UX Designers is that I don't design anything
But in the sentence prior you state:
propose a solution considering all the variables.
Design isn't using a specific tool, like photoshop. Design is a process that has deliverables like blueprints, specifications, roadmaps, parameters, blah blah blah.
> Most of the time my deliverables are low fidelity wireframes and presentations with my findings and recommendations.
So, this is design.
> I like this role because I'm a Computer Systems Bachelor, not a graphic designer
What the fuck? How much of a firm understanding do you have in the field of Interaction Design, Human Practices, and Situated Action?
You should read some of the classical books in your industry because I think you've read too many poorly informed blogs.
Plans and Situated Actions by Lucy Suchman. Lucy is pretty much the Grand Mother of modern User Experience. She changed the entire industry from being Engineering focus to User Research oriented.
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design.
AND
The Inmates are Running the Asylum
Alan Cooper is a Software Developer. He basically created Visual Basic (which in the day was a significant starting point in bringing programming to the masses (not to mention that the UI builder probably defined modern .NET to incredible levels)). Alan transitioned to Interaction Design and User Experience in the early 90s. He has great insight on what Interaction Design and User Experience Design actually is.
> The downside is that, for small teams and startups, my role is too specific.
It has nothing to do with the size of the team. It has everything to do with the type, and size, of your clients. If your agency only gets small application specific jobs then you probably don't need a strategist. However, if your agency gets clients that want support across their entire brand then you probably do.