It was an enormous chartreuse General Electric machine that filled the room with blinking lights. With that serendipitous introduction, Kreitzberg was hooked on computers. Kreitzberg has left his French horn behind and today is president of Cognetics Corp., a Princeton Junction, N.J.-based software and application design company. When not running Cognetics, Kreitzberg is likely to be out preaching the gospel of improving software's accessibility. As a result, he says, the productivity gains that computers promise have not been realized fully.
Software is just too difficult to use for both cultural and technical reasons.
And through the Internet, companies are hoping to link with consumers and even conduct commerce through these computers. It's essential that people feel competent and comfortable using these machines. We haven't broken that usage barrier, and it's having serious effects on both end users and software development. That's what I want to attack with Lucid Computing. At the heart of the movement is the idea that user-centered design should be integrated into all phases of the system development process.