If you like Donald Norman, you're going to _love_ Alan Cooper (who cites Norman extensively). "The Design of Everyday Things" was a very important book. I found, though, that he was more general and theoretical and was often better at identifying problems than solutions. Cooper can be like that, too, but basically I found Cooper to put in concrete terms what Norman talked about abstractly. However, I can never look at a door with a handle that you're supposed to push (counterintuitively) without thinking of Norman's "affordances." Also, he cited my junior high school best friend's parents in the introduction. :)

>Some new cars now beep if the keys are left in the ignition, or don't allow the door to lock or even require the key to lock the door from the outside. People centred design changes.

Exactly. I'm not sure that machine- (or program-) centered design is the result necessarily of ill judgement, but just lack of resources or even laziness. Beeping when you leave the keys in the ignition (like remembering the last page a user was on in a paged dialog) takes more work. Hopefully, as we get the easier things figured out, we'll be able to spend more time on new ways of making the user's life easier. Up until now, it's been hard enough just to print an invoice. :)

>I find that users are sometimes very tolerant of systems. If you give them a new system that improves on the old, they don't complain much, even if a more elegant solution could have made their work load so much easier.

That's right. First of all, they're unfamiliar with computers anyway (if they don't actually dislike them). They don't know what's possible and what's not. So they take what they can get.

>The complexity of development will be reduced as we understand the requirements more and more. We will never produce better systems if we think we are producing them now.

Very well put.