From Our Editors
Cutting through a raft of technical data, Thomas Landauer explains and illustrates why computers are in trouble and why massive outlays for computing since 1973 have not resulted in comparable productivity payoffs. He marshals overwhelming evidence that computers rarely improve the efficiency of the information work they are designed for because they are too hard to use and do too little that is sufficiently useful. Landauer proposes that emerging techniques for user-centered development can turn the situation around - through task analysis, iterative design, trial use, and evaluation, computer systems can be made into powerful tools for the service economy.
From the Publisher
Winner, 1995, category of Computer Science,
Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition
presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.
Despite enormous investments in computers over the last twenty
years, productivity in the very service industries at which they
were aimed virtually stagnated everywhere in the world.
If computers are not making businesses, organizations, or countries
more productive, then why are we spending so much time and money on
them? Cutting through a raft of technical data, Thomas Landauer
explains and illustrates why computers are in trouble and why
massive outlays for computing since 1973 have not resulted in
comparable productivity payoffs. Citing some of his own successful
research programs, as well as many others, Landauer offers
solutions to the problems he describes.
While acknowledging that mismanagement, organizational barriers,
learning curves, and hardware and software incompatibilities can
play a part in the productivity paradox, Landauer targets
individual utility and usability as the main culprits. He marshals
overwhelming evidence that computers rarely improve the efficiency
of the information work they are designed for because they are too
hard to use and do too little that is sufficiently useful. Their
many features, designed to make them more marketable, merely
increase cost and complexity. Landauer proposes that emerging
techniques for user-centered development can turn the situation
around. Through task analysis, iterative design, trial use, and
evaluation, computer systems can be made into powerful tools for
the service economy.
Landauer estimates that the application of these methods would make
computers have the same enormous impact on productivity and
standard of living that were the historical results of
technological advances in energy use (the steam engine, electric
motors), automation in textiles and other manufacture, and in
agriculture. He presents solid evidence for this claim, and for a
huge benefit-to-cost ratio for user-centered design activities
backed by descriptions of how to do these necessary things, of
promising applications for better computer software designs in
business, and of the relation of user-centered design to business
process reengineering, quality, and management.
From the Jacket
Cutting through a raft of technical data, Thomas Landauer explains and illustrates why computers are in trouble and why massive outlays for computing since 1973 have not resulted in comparable productivity payoffs. He marshals overwhelming evidence that computers rarely improve the efficiency of the information work they are designed for because they are too hard to use and do too little that is sufficiently useful. Landauer proposes that emerging techniques for user-centered development can turn the situation around - through task analysis, iterative design, trial use, and evaluation, computer systems can be made into powerful tools for the service economy.