The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity [Hardcover]

Thomas K. Landauer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 10, 1995

Winner, 1995, category of Computer Science, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Governments and the general public are spending a fortune on computers, but the real potential of the new technology has remain largely unrealized: that's the hard-hitting message of the latest to join others in criticizing the computer. There's a huge gap between what is promised and delivered by computers: seldom-used features, obsolete designs, and difficult learning curves plague the systems. Landauer proposes new techniques for solving many of these problems. -- Midwest Book Review

About the Author

Thomas K. Landauer has been elected into the CHI Academy by The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) in recognition of his outstanding leadership and service in the field of computer-human interaction.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 440 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 10, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262121867
• ISBN-13: 978-0262121866
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,779,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars cogent and constructive, March 24, 2000

By 

prinskinner (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Paperback)

"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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still true today, April 1, 2001

By 

SunByrne (Pearland, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Paperback)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Debunks the myth that computers always improve things., November 10, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Silver Spring, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Paperback)

Landauer has good credentials to be talking about what's wrong with computers. He talks about the two main phases in computer history: 1)The 50s and 60s where bookkeepers were replaced in great numbers and 2) The 70s and 80s when word processors and spreadsheets came of age. He says that the productivity improvements in the first phase are obvious, but the results from the 2nd are dubious in terms of economic gain. He does point to a few big recent successes such as the communications industry. This book came out just before the Web became big, however. Landauer describes software testing methods in detail and believes better testing could make the difference in current software user productivity. He includes lots of memorable statements, at least to programmer types. He mentions that nowadays many people do things with computers simply because they can, not because it makes sense. He also points out how people pump money into PCs getting them to do things badly, which are easy and cheap to do by other means, just because they are so amazed a computer can do them.