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. Try to withdraw $60 from this one.
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. You're in control.
The cabin. Smooth, calm, beige. You don't know how it works. You arrive safely anyway.
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. We're so amazed it works that we never ask whether it works well.
How many features does the average person actually use? Drag the slider.
Not "the user." Not a demographic. A specific, named human being. He calls them personas. The more specific, the more powerful. Try it — build one:
Notice what happened? 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. Personas kill bad arguments by being too specific to bend.
A goal is a stable end condition. A task is a transient way of reaching it. Technology changes tasks. Goals never change.
← Drag to compare → Same goals. Opposite tasks.
Cooper's most practical chapter. Try deleting a file in each version:
📄 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
This report attempted to demonstrate Cooper's ideas through its medium rather than just describe them.
How did it do? You've been interacting with design decisions this entire time.