The author starts the book our by talking about how things are designed. About how different things around us are designed poorly, not that they aren't doing their job, they just allow the users to make more mistakes than if they were designed well. He gives examples including a story of an airplane crash and his alarm clock being difficult to set. He then deviates to a more broad structure of saying that programmers don't understand design and don't care; they just want to put their features into the program and say that the users just aren't tech savvy. His ideas are described via the idea of the dancing bear. A bear doesn't dance amazingly, but it is amazing that it can dance. This is how programs were made in the early 2000s.
I feel that this book is much like Don Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things. The stress of the book is to design things well and make using them intuitive, otherwise people are not actually using the tool to it's fullest, and may not even want to use the tool. I also feel that this has changed in the last 6 years since the book was published. Design is stressed by all professors and we are instructed to create things that people can use easily, not things that just get the job done.
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