Alan Cooper
Sams Publishing
Chapters 3-5:
In chapter three we look at the idea of deadlines and how they are managed. In fact we learn that deadlines can sometimes be the ultimate factor that can kill a program and that more programs have died because of going out too early than have for not finishing features or not having an interface completely fleshed out. Cooper really talks about what done should look like and the idea that shipping something late is not the end of the world. In fact he actually sometimes encourages this just to make sure that the program is not rejected and the idea that if a completing product turned out then even if you quickly release another version then people might not come back to your product or try it again. He also stresses the idea that if you have a feature that is not completed it is probably better to leave it out then hastily shove it into a program and have it messing up different things that people work on. In fact sometimes having too many features that are only slightly buggy can be a lot worse than not having the feature and the user requesting it and then releasing it in a later version. In this way it also seems like the company is listening to the user and building their product to better suit them. In chapter 4 Cooper talks about the rather humorous notion of the Dancing Bear, that is, technology that doesn't work no matter how many versions of it there is and who designs it. He gives the mother of all examples and talks about VCR's and how it was impossible to tell what they were doing and despite companies trying to make them better and easier to use they were still nearly impossible to navigate and lots of money was wasted on trying to find ones that were intuitive and practical. He expands these ideas to the idea of email and calendar software and how their simple features that were probably not even considered to be bad simply go overlooked and end up becoming dancing bears of the program. Last he talks about the idea of customer disloyalty and how a product or program becomes desirable to the masses. He references chapter three a lot and talks about how these kinds of plans and features carry over to the idea of desirability and how time to market plays an important role but also that comparison is equally important. Simply put, if you have a similar product that takes longer to market and is more expensive it doesn't matter that you have feature X most people will not switch or even try. Same thing with releases each needs to be good to prevent disloyalty.
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite books, while it is a little longer and in some cases the examples seem to go on for forever there is some really good knowledge and the ideas that are being pushed forward are very solid and I can really relate to them. The idea of the dancing bear is really very smart and the fact that this happens a lot with products is really something that computer scientists need to watch out for and prevent. It also seems like this book is doing a rather good job of supporting ideas that were talked about in the Extreme Programming book in that programming in groups and making sure you make stories that the user will understand as a way to design a product is important. I think also that the fact that he head on tells you that some things will be wasting money is a really good idea. Simply put, if you try to do too much and rush out a program it really is going to be wasting more money than letting the project go for a bit longer and then having a good release, or even scrapping the project and cutting your losses and then putting those people on a new project or on other project, both of which have costs but in the end might help save you money. The bets chapter here is the one about disloyalty, what it means and how it is gained through comparison and markets. It is the idea that you need to have a good product every time all the time and that if your product fails even once it could possibly cause disloyalty and make the product seem inferior. I think this is very true and similar to the movie The Social Network, while the movie was overall not *great* one of the big things Zuckerberg pushed was the idea that the site cannot go down, otherwise it will become an afterthought. I liked these chapters a lot and really don't think I will mind reading this book if the chapters continue in this manner.
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