The main contribution of the book is the framework it provides. It includes a special emphasis on software design. It also provides a practically oriented, theory-based process for understanding, controlling, and designing for the interaction between the human and technology. The book contains an overview of system development, the design process, design methods and practice, information resources, software design and the user.
The authors state that their fascination with design is derived in part from its complexity. In the preface they state that there are ". . . no simple answers" to the questions they will raise. They have certainly, by design, left the reader with more questions than answers. They conclude by acknowledging that obviously there is much need for additional research, and that other researchers will have other questions to ask. The book gives an excellent, yet cynical, overview of the current state of our understanding of design as a process and highlights the human factors specialists' current difficulty in conveying, quantitatively, the implications of their so far limited understanding of the human operator performance and response in a technological system. The book is a bit of a catharsis on the way to development of an outline of a behavioral theory of design.
However, it is efficiently done. The authors review ideas from key research in the behavioral aspects of hardware and software systems development, and in doing so have clarified terms from the literature that should serve readers both inside and outside the human factors and ergonomics (HFE) discipline well. The most refreshing and enlightening part is chapter 4 on design practice, in which the authors report the results of a survey of design professionals (most of whom have an HFE background). Many of the authors' initial beliefs are refuted by the results of the survey, which suggest that "Obviously we still have a way to go in terms of complete acceptance [of HFE in design practice], but the situation seems not to be as bad as was described in earlier writings."
An earlier portion of the book focuses on concerns that human factors research has not been broadly applied in design of technical systems. The authors also suggest that in order to develop a useful HFE database (p. 134), a great deal of additional research would be needed, and on the one hand suggest that enthusiasm seems to be lacking in the human factors community for developing such a database. However, in fairness to the discipline (p. 135), the authors acknowledge that if sufficient funding were available, researchers