I think it's safe to say that Alan Cooper's tone softens somewhat in the second half of this book. While the first seven chapters concerned themselves primarily with calling out the hubris and generally dickish behavior of programmers, the latter seven offered constructive suggestions and real-world examples of how to fix the problems present in the software industry. It was refreshing to see solutions offered to balance out all the acidic complaining. His concept of developing for "personas" rather than the generic "user" has a lot of merit - I even found myself using this process with my project team when developing our sketch application.
As I stated in my summary of the first seven chapters, I think a lot of the things Cooper has to say in this book lack the impact in 2010 that they had in 1999 largely because so much of it is part of the industry now. Companies
do focus on interaction design. Programmers
aren't the huge jocks they used to be (at least not to as large a degree). The software we have now is better than what we used to make. Is some of it still dancing bearware? Probably. I don't think that kind of software will ever completely disappear. However, I think it's safe to say at this point that (forgive me)
the inmates are no longer running the asylum.
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