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The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity
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Author: Thomas K. Landauer
List Price: $32.00
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0262621088
Publisher: MIT Press (06 June, 1996)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 64,703
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
a book to give away
I read this book for the first time 5 years ago. I worked at a telecom company and everything he wrote on the paradox of IT investments not returning any money is 100 % true. So I bought 20 copies of the book and gave them to upper management. Needless to say it didn't really help.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Still true today
Despite the claims of other reviewers, the evidence that the situation described in Landauer's book has improved since the surge in the internet and its sub-technologies (e.g., the Web) is absent. I'd refer the interested reader to a recent article in the New Yorker entitled "The Productivity Mirage" (J. Cassidy) to see some interesting numbers that bear on this question.It's not that IT investment doesn't result in productivity gains for some individuals, but that there's little evidence that it does much for most organizations as a whole. This is a point critics often miss, because most critics are computer-savvy and subjectively feel like they're more productive as a result of their computer use. Most of the problems outlined by Landauer still plague current information systems. This book is a must-read for anyone serious about user interface or IT productivity.
Rating: 4 out of 5
cogent and constructive
"The Trouble with Computers" is an eye-opening book, clearly giving a case for the thesis: Computers are difficult to use because insufficient effort is made to test programs for usability (i.e. how easy a program is for a human to use, not just whether it performs technically as expected by the programmers). Great improvements can be made with even modest testing with typical users.He gives wonderful examples of computers' being less useful than they could be. One of my favorites: After hundreds or thousands of years, humanity learned to replace inefficient-to-read scrolls with easily-turned pages. When computers arrived, we went back to scrolling. His assertion that computers hindered productivity growth is bound to irritate people and garner some negative reviews. However, this book is a very constructive one--he states and bolsters this surprising assertion and then tells us what we can do to improve the situation. Having worked in technical support for years, a branch of the booming high-tech economy which owes its existence to the difficulty of using computers, I find it amusing that anyone would dispute the thesis that computers could be made much easier to use. I highly recommend this book.
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