 There
is an ugly secret in the software industry and it's time we faced it. With all the
potential that computing has brought to society, using a computer is often a painful,
frustrating experience. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, says "the lack of usability of
software and poor design of programs is the secret shame of the industry."
The lack of attention to good software design is costing corporations $80 billion
dollars a year, according to the Standish Group. Research by Professor Thomas
K. Landauer suggests that the quality of software may be depressing national growth by
3-4%. And, if we care, it is making millions of people miserable.
The Gartner Group has characterized the state of software development as chaos.
25% of software development efforts fail outright. Another 60% produce a sub-standard
product. In what other industry would we tolerate such inefficiency? Imagine if 25% of all
bridges fell down or 25% of airplanes crashed.
We must solve this problem.
There has been a lot of publicity about the "year 2000 problem." We would
like to propose a Year 2000 Opportunity. By the Year 2000 our goals are to:
- Improve the usability of software by at least 50%
- Increase the number of users who say they fell confident about working with computers
from 30% to 80%.
- Reduce the waste due to design chaos in the software industry by $40 billion dollars a
year.
We know how to solve this problem. Software usability professionals have developed
techniques for user-centered design. The core of our program is to encourage all
software developers to user-centered design techniques. We call on the Federal Government
to make user-centered design a requirement in all federal software contracts. We
call on the National Science Foundation to sponsor research into how people interact with
computers and how we can reduce barriers to use. We call on software developers to take
this issue seriously and bring user-centered design to all products. And we will help
business get access to the resources they need to organize user-centered development.
We want users to feel confident about their mastery of computers. We will set goals for
computer competence and will work to bring instructional resources to consumers and
business to raise the level of user competence.
Join Us
We want to help both business and users by educating software developers in
user-centered design techniques. We want to raise the level of public computer competence
by helping users find the resources they need. We want to provide a voice for the users
and for usability professionals.
Our program is built around the following elements:
Encourage software developers to employ user-centered design methods to all software.
Provide a unified consumer voice to software publishers.
Work with professional usability associations to conduct outreach programs.
Encourage the transfer of academic research to business.
Call on the government to require user-centered design in all federal software projects.
Call on the government to sponsor research into human-computer interaction.
Assist users in raising their level of computer competence.
Charlie Kreitzberg
President, Cognetics Corporation
Why I Am Launching This War
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