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Like clockwork, the Summer Olympic Games open with a flurry of fanfare and excitement every four years. Ranging from archery to wrestling, more than 300 individual events are featured. Each day is packed. Athletes, coaches, and fans race from venue to venue, as moments tick away under the burning flame. You could not see every event in person, even if you dedicated all your time to the pursuit. We face the same challenges with many experiences, from watching the Olympic Games to designing software.

On September 27, 1997, the USS Yorktown, a Ticonderoga-class missile cruiser, 567 feet long and 34 feet wide, drifted to a silent standstill off the coast of Virginia (see Figure 9-1). Moments before, a crew member had hit zero on his keyboard, inadvertently triggering a software bug and a subsequent cascade of system failures, including the ship’s propulsion. The ship sat dead in the water under the stars for over two hours—a billion dollars’ worth of American might defeated by a single keystroke.

Each year, Pauillac, a village nestled within the Medoc region of France, hosts a marathon. The Marathon du Medoc weaves through 44 kilometers of bucolic Bordeaux countryside. Points along its route include the iconic vineyards of Château Lafite Rothschild, Lynch-Bages, and many others. Green, combed hillsides of grape vines meet revival architecture capped in spires and surrounded by manicured gardens. Race day begins with a fashion show and ends with a fireworks display. Festivities throughout the morning and afternoon entertain onlookers, but each pales in comparison to the main event. If you run this marathon, you will have an unforgettable experience. If you study this marathon, you will learn a lot about user experience design.

Palmolive released a series of TV commercials in 1981 featuring Madge, a spry and chatty manicurist. Each commercial’s concept was simple: a housewife would visit a nail salon, inexplicably stick her hand into a small saucer full of green goo, then be told by Madge that the green goo was Palmolive dishwashing detergent. Surprise! By today’s standards, the commercials were certainly gender-biased, if not borderline sociopathic, as Madge seemed to take great pleasure in telling unsuspecting housewives her trademark phrase: “You’re soaking in it!” Coined by the advertising firm Ted Bates Company, the TV campaign reached legendary status by running continuously for nearly three decades. The campaign showed the power of a catchphrase and demonstrated a fundamental truth: we often do not realize our current circumstance until someone points it out to us.

In 1799, a young French lieutenant named Pierre-Francois-Xavier Bouchard made one of the greatest discoveries of all time, only to lose it two years later to the British. His discovery was neither golden nor bejeweled. However, it has mesmerized kings and scholars, generals and diplomats, readers and writers, for centuries. It is also a fine example of user experience design.

The Prince of All Cosmos shines as the star of Namco’s 2004 hit video game Katamari Damacy. He is an ambitious little fellow. At only two inches tall, the tiny prince furiously runs in place on top of a huge ball. The ball moves across the Earth’s surface like a snowball, collecting everything it touches. Growing ever larger, the spherical cluster of strange objects picks up ants, thumbtacks, fence posts, sumo wrestlers, cows, bulldozers, cruise ships, clouds, monuments, and buildings (see Figure 6-1). The prince’s appetite knows no bounds. He gathers everything he can find to complete his goal. As users, we do the same thing every day.

The Yangtze River stretches nearly 4,000 miles across central and eastern China, feeding from glacial and wetland tributaries as it weaves through the Qinghai–Tibet plateau, passing over the ghostly, submerged towns of the Three Gorges Dam, and emptying into the East China Sea. The river provides a home to many residents, including a remarkable fish called the torafugu (see Figure 2-1). It swims through both the Yangtze’s lowland waters and your software projects.

Michigan J. Frog was unlike any other frog. He sang. He danced. He was destined for stardom. In Warner Bros.’ 1955 cartoon, One Froggy Evening, a construction worker freed Michigan from a time capsule buried within a recently demolished building’s cornerstone. Upon reaching the open air, the frog stood and sang, “Hello my baby, hello my honey. Hello, my ragtime gal. Send me a kiss by wire. Baby, my heart’s on fire.” The construction worker gasped in amazement as Michigan, wearing his trademark top hat and matching cane, pranced across the lid of the time capsule, which moments before had been the frog’s boxy prison.

White lights give way to virtual sunrises deep within Norway’s longest tunnel. Located between the southwestern municipalities of Laerdal and Aurland, 15 miles of underground roadway gently unfurls beneath the unspoiled landscape of fjords and mountainsides. The Laerdal tunnel stands as an engineering triumph. Two and a half million meters of Precambrian gneiss rock were drilled, exploded, excavated, and removed. Two hundred thousand bolts secure its walls. However, the tunnel’s most remarkable attribute is its surprising psychology—a psychology befitting any project.

Let me share some of my background with you. I started thinking about writing this book several years ago. At the time, I was working at a startup. The company’s flagship product allowed employees to manage their healthcare and insurance benefits. It had a sophisticated backend, yet the application was unattractive and difficult to use.

German engineers designed a terrifying tank in the closing years of World War II. They called it the Maus—or “Mouse” in English. The ironically named tank dwarfed its Allied competition in both size and ferocity (see Figure 5-1). However, like most complex creations, it could win a battle but not a war.

This report is a contribution to X3/SPARC Database system Study Group (DBSSG). The technical work represents the careful distillation of the contribution of the authors and others who have participated in the meetings and studies of the User Facility Task Group (UFTG) which is a sub-group of the DBSSG.