Welcome to the "Be A Good Machine" blog, and thank you for visiting. As you can see, this is my very first posting. I am writing on the occasion of this, the publication of my latest book, "It's Better to be a Good Machine than a Bad Person." The book summarizes years of experience with user interface design, especially the design of those obnoxious telephone-based self-service systems that we all have come to love-hate.

As you can see, I've chosen to shoot for the funny and sarcastic as a writing style and I think you'll agree it's for understandable reasons. The satirical tone helps us with the venting -- a sort of cathartic resolution to the pent-up anger that these IVR systems trigger in most of us. But it also allows a rethinking of our goals, clearly called for at this moment of market discontinuity.

So this is actually a serious book with a serious message. The IVR industry -- perhaps more than any other in recent memory -- has remained so silly for so long that a serious style I fear, would be lost in the hype. That is why I take the risk of attacking head-on, in the hopes that a caricature of the message will cut through and stick while a toned-down version would prove too vapid.

In the end, the book's basic message is really very simple. Our culture is swinging back from a long and loving relationship with Jetsonian product philosophy -- a philosophy which has produced some notable positively-disruptive technologies, but has also generated a lot of nonsense. The former includes the world wide web, the Personal Computer, and space travel. The latter includes the dot-com bubble, speech recognition fantasies, the earliest twitterings of emotional and social technologies, and recurring dreams of immortality.

The pendulum is now swinging back toward practical, rational, and achievable goals.

(Originally posted with the publication of "It's Better To Be A Good Machine Than a Bad Person" in 2007. Reprinted here to help set the tone for our "Be A Good Machine" blog, and also to shamelessly plug the book - which you can find on our publications page.)