The Inmates Are Running The Asylum

I found it very inspiring. It gave me new vocabulary and mindset for looking at software development, the ideas of Personas and Goals.

For products at work and the products that were developed at ATR, I have seen where both these have been taken into account and not. I find the concepts give me new a framework to hang past success and the lack of these ideas attributable to failures/short-comings.

One thing I’m currently thinking is how to marry the upfront Interaction Design with methodologies like XP, but I think it works. The interaction objectives become the goals of the agile development, compared to features/tasks.

This new perspective has been interesting, already this week I have listened to feature requests not from the usual ‘how much time and effort’ and ‘what are they really asking to-do’ angles, but now also, ‘what is their goal, and how will the feature help in this’. When I stop and think about the personas using our application, what are their goals, I see how badly we are servicing some personas. There is so much more that can be done to assist the user the personas.

So in summary I’d recommend the book to users of software, but more over to developers.