suggested reading: It Looked Good on Paper
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009I just finished reading the book It Looked Good on Paper. The book focuses on ideas that seemed great but ultimately failed due to being poorly designed for the intended audience or costing too much in terms of the resources required to function. It presents topics such as The Pony Express, Y2K, and Smell-O-Vision.
Overall, the author does a great job of not only presenting the ideas that failed, but speaking to the reasons why they failed. A common theme is that each idea, while interesting theoretically, was implemented poorly for the intended audience. There is also the problem of resources to maintain some of the inventions (i.e. The Concorde super jet).
This was an interesting read for me due to the focus on poor idea implementation and my interest in user centered design and human to device interaction.