One of the first books that Charles told me to read was a book written
by the inventor of Visual Basic. Visual Basic is one of the most
popular programming languages thanks to Microsoft and Alan Cooper. Alan
apparently wanted to redo it but Gates pushed him to release it. Thanks
to their work ( and thousands of others), we now have things like
Visual Studio .NET 2005.
When I worked for BTG in high school, Dr. Temple told me to read the
SEI-CMM to get an understanding of all their "official" software
development methodology. Until then I had coded for my business using
PHP, Bash, Perl without any requirements documents and just worried
about getting the job done. The job definately opened up my eyes as to
what could be done with a planned action of software development.
"Inmates" is one of those books that causes a paradigm shift in one's
mind of how to do things. For me the book changed the way I perceived
business and technology because it doesn't necessarily contradict
traditional methods to design and develop software, but it forces one
to go through a strong interface design phase before delving into
construction. Why would you build a house without knowing who is going
to live there and what they need?
Inmates has a simple philosophy to Interface Design. Define the
Personas. Define their Goals. Work to meet their goals. I have always
been a goal and objective oriented person and after reading this book,
I have looked at the world of software and especially interfaces from a
completely different vista. I'm editing the Executive Summary I wrote
when I read the book to a presentable form. It'll be here when I'm
finished.
Hi, nothing here yet.