Co-authored with tom-gilb, this 1977 book addressed the largely ignored problem of data entry reliability. At a time when computers were expensive and human operators were treated as interchangeable components, Weinberg and Gilb argued that input systems should be designed around human capabilities and limitations — not the reverse.
The book catalogued techniques for reducing keying errors: check digits, format validation, echo confirmation, structured input sequences. But the deeper argument was that reliability is a design property of the system, not a personal attribute of the operator. Blaming data entry clerks for errors was a category mistake; the errors were baked into the interface design.
This work sits at an early moment in what would become human-computer interaction as a field. Weinberg brought his psychological lens from psychology-of-computer-programming-1971; Gilb brought his engineering discipline and measurement orientation. The combination produced a book that was simultaneously empirical and humanistic.
The collaboration with Gilb is notable — both were outside mainstream computing culture of the 1970s in their insistence that human factors were technical concerns, not soft add-ons. The book anticipates ideas that would later appear in usability engineering and error prevention design by decades.