Why must software be so hard on the user?

What's Sabotaging Your Business Software and How You Can Release
the Power to Innovate

By Harold Hambrose

Wiley. 272 pp. $45

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Reviewed by Reid Kanaley

Try this: Go to the Web site of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics -

» READ MORE: www.bls.gov

- and find unemployment figures for Upper Darby.

Easy? Not. The numbers are there; the site is a treasure trove. But chances are you'll get bogged down in screen after screen of forms and codes that could choke a macroeconomist.

This isn't to pick on the bureau, but to say huzzah to the message in Harold Hambrose's Wrench in the System. Technologists do the heavy lifting on most business software, and, as Hambrose explains, "a technologist's first loyalty is to the code, not the customer." The Dilbert comic strip has been making that point for a long time.

Wrench is an entertaining argument for a much greater role for designers, psychologists, even anthropologists in creating the complex and all-too-frequently bewildering software used by businesses.

It shouldn't surprise that author Hambrose is a design consultant, founder and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia design firm Electronic Ink.

The bone - or wrench - he has to pick with the software industry generally, and business software in particular, is that programmers and technologists unwittingly sabotage their wizardly computer code and cool hardware by failing to factor in, or even consult, we the people who'll be clackety-clacking at keyboards and trying to make sense of what we've been handed.

It is as if no one had bothered to ask, "What does this thing need to do?" writes Hambrose.

Look at your own workspace, or your office neighbor's. Hambrose says that if the computer screen and desk are littered with Post-it notes and cheat sheets of password reminders, keystroke combinations, emergency procedures and such, you're likely a victim of software that skipped any meaningful prototype stage on its way to your desktop.

Unlike many other large-scale efforts - say, construction of Manhattan's Chrysler building, or production of the first model of the luxury Lexus automobile - when it comes to software, serious thought about how it looks or how people will use it can remain an afterthought, if that.

Everybody's forgetting to draw up a blueprint, according to Hambrose.

Maybe that's why a generation of Windows users had to click on "start" to shut off the computer. At my desk, you won't intuitively "print" from several of the programs furnished by global software giants that should know better. One program menu requires me to know that "proof object" means to print. Another calls on me to find and press the "simulate button" as a precursor to printing.

"Perhaps no reflection of our nature could be more distorted than one projected by a typical computer system," Hambrose writes.

Hambrose tells how he and a colleague, with 20 years' experience between them in the use of Microsoft Word, struggled for hours to format a graphic into a presentation due to a client worth possibly millions of dollars in new business.

They certainly aren't alone. Last summer, my wife felt punished to tears during a college course on the feature-laden Office suite from Microsoft, with its 10-ton toolbars.

That's a personal aggravation. Businesses waste millions to buy, install, and upgrade software that is either underused or ignored. Implementation costs, writes Hambrose, can run to twice the purchase price of software itself. On top of that, there's lost worker time and productivity as employees try to do their jobs despite glitches, jury-rigged workarounds, and frequent calls to the help desk.

This should not be, writes Hambrose, whose company has revamped public and private Web interfaces, such as one for local company Traffic.com, as well as a front end for the data warehouse at Philadelphia's Rohm & Haas, and the look and feel of the big-screen, war-room-style software used by the Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection to monitor the real-time flow of electricity in the grid serving 13 states.

Innovation, he writes, "is the difference between asking what needs to be done and asking how it might be done better."