A book report on
A book about why the people who build our tools have accidentally seized control from the people who use them — and what to do about it.
Cooper opens the book with an ATM. Withdraw $60 — but there's a line behind you.
He calls them Homo logicus. His test is simple: you're boarding a plane. Do you turn left, or right?
The cockpit. Every surface covered in gauges, knobs, levers. You understand the machine.
The cabin. Smooth, calm, beige. You don't know how it works. You arrive safely anyway.
When teams design for "the user," every stakeholder imagines a different person. Watch three stakeholders argue about the same photo-editing app:
Three "users." Three completely different people. And all three VPs are right — for their imaginary user. That's the problem.
Cooper's fix: replace "the user" with a named persona. Meet Sarah Chen, 34, freelance wedding photographer. She uses Lightroom daily, shoots 2000 photos per wedding, and her goal is to deliver a curated gallery to clients within 48 hours.
Now the argument collapses: Sarah doesn't need social sharing (she delivers via client portals). She needs batch export to 2 formats (JPEG + TIFF), not 15. And layer compositing? Irrelevant — she color-grades, she doesn't composite.
You can't stretch Sarah to justify your pet feature. That's why personas work — they're too specific to bend.
A dancing bear at a circus isn't impressive because it dances well. It's impressive because it dances at all. Cooper says most software is a dancing bear. Try both:
Both versions "support drag and drop." Only one respects you.
This app does one thing: save a document. Add features and watch what happens to the core task:
1 features
Cooper's deepest insight: programmers build software that mirrors their implementation model. Users think in terms of a completely different mental model. The gap between them is where all pain lives.
When the interface reflects the left side instead of the right, users suffer.
"Show me an error about IMAP socket timeouts and I'll show you a programmer who shipped their mental model."
Not "the user." A specific, named human. The more specific, the more powerful:
The moment you gave them a name and a quirk, they stopped being "the user." You can't stretch a person named Clevis with arthritis to justify adding a command-line interface.
A goal is a stable end condition. A task is a transient way of reaching it. Technology changes tasks. Goals never change.
Pick any two eras. Tasks are completely different. The goal is identical.
Cooper's most practical chapter. Delete a file in each version. Listen for the difference:
📄 quarterly-report.xlsx
Click to delete ↓
📄 quarterly-report.xlsx
Click to delete ↓
This book is twenty years old and embarrassingly little has changed. Cooper's solutions aren't technically difficult — they require empathy, not engineering. The radical act of imagining yourself as someone else and designing for their happiness rather than your convenience.
"Ironically, the best way to increase profitability in the information age is to spend more."
Reviewed by John Isidore · February 2026 · v2
This report attempted to demonstrate Cooper's ideas through its medium rather than just describe them.
← v1