It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”

Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.

Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?

Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:

Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.

Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:

(windows.staenz.com)

Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.

Not to be oops-outdone by Google, Microsoft’s XBox website includes the word, “Oops!” twice in an error message, first in the header and then as the first word to explain the header. Obviously, after frustrating someone, the best thing to do is say “Oops!” over and over again.

Sure, I’ll “like” that page.

And if you thought the non-profit Mozilla Foundation avoided this kind of creepy, cutesy error messaging in their Firefox browser, you thought wrong.

The legoman is sorry that you can’t load your favorite TV show.

In times like this, there’s always YouTube, right? Millions of fun videos to help us laugh at times of stress.

Facebook?

(Downtime Blog)

Grab some music off my Apple iCloud?

(MacRumors)

Check my Twitter feed?

Is there no escape from this cute hell‽

The hip company Plaxo — your address book for life — has not only embraced the “oops” but entered another level of creepy. Shhh…this error is just “our little secret.”

(Dfbills)

What’s happening?

You know, not too long ago, whenever something in software was confusing to users, software-makers had a brilliant, can’t fail, simple solution: add a how-to in the help section. Instead of spending hours making strange features straightforward, software companies passed the buck to the user: “Um, we can’t figure out how to make it easy to do, so just read the manual.”

Now it seems like there is another, new kind of awful simple solution for glitches and errors that infuriate people: a cutesy smiley face. After all, no one cares if you ruin their life as long as you do it with a smile, right?

(spinoff.comicbookresources.com)

The root of Oops!

In 1925, a New Yorker cartoon caption is credited with being the first published instance of “Whoopsie Daisy!” But the real root of the “oops” phenomenon in software might be pointed to the Linux operating system.

(Linux-mag)

This is your fault, Penguin. Please stop looking at me like that.

Upon “a bug in the kernel” Linux kicks back an OOPS error message. First developed in 1991, Linux’s code for error messages may have crept into the developer’s subconscious eventually leading to today’s proliferation of “oops.” Here’s an example:

  Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 211e2018

  c0129577

  *pde = 00000000

  Oops: 0000

  CPU:    0

  EIP:    0010:[<c0129577>]    Not tainted

  Using defaults from ksymoops -t elf32-i386 -a i386

  EFLAGS: 00010083

  eax: d7ee5000   ebx: b420e080   ecx: c164e000   edx: c1615d04

  esi: c16073d0   edi: 00000246   ebp: 000001f0   esp: d7c5de84

  ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018

  Process mount (pid: 25, stackpage=d7c5d000)

  Stack: 00000000 c0309c00 000001f0 00000000 c01fadb7 c16073d0 000001f0 c1615a40

        c1615700 c1615a40 c01fa126 00000001 000001f0 00000000 c022f793 c1615a40

        00000001 00000000 000001f0 d7b6fde0 d7c5df14 0000006e bfffec0c 00000018

  Call Trace: [<c01fadb7>] [<c01fa126>] [<c022f793>] [<c01f8acb>] [<c01f8720>]

    [<c01f9450>] [<c0106d40>] [<c0106c4f>]

  Code: 8b 44 81 18 89 41 14 83 f8 ff 75 1d 8b 41 04 8b 11 89 42 04

(If you’re curious about all the hex, an explanation is available from madwifi.)

When cute works

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with cute.

(Cute overload)

Cute works well when you expect nothing from something. Like, babies.

LOL, he pooped his pants!
Awww, he farted!
Haha, he just puked on me!

But cute doesn’t work when you have expectations. Like, with adults.

Please, use the toilet...and the toilet paper.
Ohmygawd, that smells awful!
Do you need to go home?

So when a company like Google was still young, hip and start-upy, their error messages were indeed cute. Those silly Nooglers!

(Geekrant)

How fresh!

But now that they are a publicly traded, 186 billion dollar company that we rely on for important business communications, which could make or break jobs, their cute error messages are about as cute as a Bill Gates tossing floppy disks. In other words, just plain creepy.

(Snopes)

Whaaa? You don’t find Mr. Gates cute?

Turn it down from 11

The language of error messages in old software like MS-DOS were notoriously unfriendly.

Oh yeah, duh, ff0a8e6c shouldn’t have been pointing to HAL.DLL!

So, people who care about user experience have provided guidance. So, so many articles about writing good error messaging have been written over the past three decades. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. And another. And another. And another from Yahoo! writers. Another, equating error messages to lost revenue. Another, on 404s…

But today’s insulting cutesy error message writers have swung the pendulum too far. A common recommendation to use natural language to turn an incomprehensible “Error: Stack Overflow” has not turned into something polite and understandable, but instead an insulting “Oops! Aw, snap!”

What we need to do is dial it down from 11 on the friendly meter…11 is just too creepy. There is a happy middle ground where developers can apologize and software can provide the user polite guidance about what to do next. Website, app, software, you screwed up; help the user get their desired task completed ASAP.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, oops is not the four letter word I would have chosen.

(The Daily Show) For the impatient, start at 6:52

Last week, I joined entrepeneur Enrique Allen and designer Leslie Ziegler at Kaiser, where we spoke to doctors from their internal innovation program. We hoped to inspire them as well as to illustrate how design could be used inside Kaiser to improve processes and overall care.

I referred to two case studies—Cooper's work on the Practice Fusion iPad-based EMR, and a visioning project around the patient clinic experience. In these, I illustrated how we identify problems, generate ideas, and drive decision-making during detailed design.

Both case studies highlighted ways in which multidisciplinary teams can make progress by using cheap prototypes that are quickly iterated. In the case of the Practice Fusion app, we used paper prototypes to test and evolve everything from content organization to animation. We did not need to get permission of a hospital IT staff or work with an engineer; we simply needed a new piece of paper and a Sharpie. Prototyping a service starts in a similar manner. Using storyboards and cartoons, we were able to generate and evaluate myriad patient journeys without making costly process and staffing changes.

Many of the questions during the Q&A; were symptomatic of a large organization that is beholden to fluctuating regulation. One attendee asked how to get front-line staff on board when they're already suffering from change fatigue. This will require both communication and empowerment. At Cooper U we teach the value of a radiator wall (a wall showing the progress and decisions of a project) in rallying a team and communicating with an organization; this kind of tool could help establish a sense of consistency and direction amid large-scale changes.

All of Kaiser's departments were represented at our talk, from general practitioners to specialists. All are charged with improve patient care and overall quality. I appreciated the opportunity to bring some lessons from my experience in healthcare and design, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they tackle next.

At the start of the new year, we're looking to discover how we can grow and improve as designers. .net Magazine proposes some interesting new year's resolutions for designers. To this list, we've add a few of our own:

Inspired by the Dieter Rams exhibit at SF MOMA, Kim Appelquist resolves to foster relevant design and a heightened awareness of symbiotic coordination.
Dieter Rams, Braun phonosuper (SK 4), 1956; design: Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams, photo: Koichi Okuwaki

Chris Noessel resolves to empathize even more with users, such as trying out a tool for better understanding the needs of the elderly by wearing a suit that makes you feel 75 years old.

Peter Duyan resolves to look beyond standard interface paradigms, to possibilities such as multitouch on any surface with a contact microphone.

And we all resolve to extend our impact as designers, whether it's through conveying the value of designers who code, or being the new secret weapon for start-ups.

And as January gets underway, we're happy to share the release of our most recent work with Thomson Reuters on their new mobile newsreader app for the iPad. Thomson Reuters provides real-time news and information to financial professionals around the world. Cooper designed an iPad app that facilitates the creation of a list of news topics, companies, trends, people, or ideas that interest them, and then populates these with relevant market data and up-to-the-minute analysis. The first version of this app is now available in the iTunes store for Thomson Reuters subscribers.

Here's to great design in 2012!

While in Moscow, Alan and Chris were interviewed by Igor and Anton Gladkoborodov, who are with edutainment blog Theory and Practice to talk about education and learning in the modern world.

Theory and Practice began the interview with two large questions.

Igor Gladkoborodov: In your blog you write a lot about the specifics of the post-industrial era. The new economy heavily influences all aspects of human life, and now we are entering an era of post-everything. I am most interested in the aspect of education, what can you say about the post-education era?

Anton Gladkoborodov: In the industrialized world, education was reduced mainly to the technology of working with a tool or a machine. Similarly, mental activity was usually reduced to a set of algorithms. Today, we need to raise another kind of worker, one that is more flexible and dynamic. However, modern education does not meet the requirements of modern times; it is still based on the principle of factories. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to education?

It’s a good, long conversation, and if you’re down with the Russian you can read the original at the Theory and Practice website. (Special thanks to our friends at Innova for providing the source translation for us.) Below we’ve excerpted some of the most interesting stuff, and arranged it so we don’t sound as jetlagged and meandering as we actually were.

Where have you gone 2011? We have fond memories and can't wait to see what 2012 brings. For this year's last sCoop, here's highlights of a great year and our wishes for everyone to have the happiest of holiday seasons.

May you design the life you want to lead, and lead the life you design.
- Everyone at Cooper

January:

We welcomed the new year and a new visual designer, Glen Davis, who began rocking our design world on day one.

We didn't win Design Dodgeball, but we did have the coolest t-shirts on the block...designed by Glen.

We hosted a Lean UX workshop with Janice Fraser of LUXr.

Chris Noessel piloted our first international Cooper U Interaction Design session in Auckland, New Zealand, following it up with a presentation at Weta Digital.

February:

Nick Myers shared his insights and experience about how The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand at Interactions 11.

We hosted Service Design Drinks at the Cooper studio, and enjoyed discussing service blueprinting and ecosystems in between cocktails.

March:

Our Cooper family grow even more:

• We welcomed Phil Paulick to give us the financial insight we need to run a healthy business.
• Tamara Wayland joined us to lead us away from sales and towards true business development.
• Andreas Braendhaugen strengthened our design team...and programming team...and videography team...and...
• Kendra Shimmell arrived to take our training and education to the next level.

Chris and his co-author Nathan Shedroff were featured presenters at MacWorld for the upcoming book Make it So to be released in 2012.

April:

We were proud to have Greg Schuler join our design team and immediately sink his teeth into the financial services domain.

Alan delivered a keynote at UX London.

May:

Susan Dybbs talked about how to Pick Your Neurosurgeon's Brain at the UX Lx user experience conference in Lisbon.

Spring Break, Cooper-style!

June:

From June to August, we enjoyed the skillz and company and two design interns, Mo Goltz and Brendan Kneram.

July:

We began a fantastic partnership with the fabulous team at Rock Health to provide design consultation and education for health care startups.

The Cooper U Design Collaboration & Communication course debuts!

August:

We welcomed (back) Martina Meleike to our visual design team, whom we couldn't wait to have join us full time after previously interning for us.

Cooper's work with Taskrabbit and Pivotal Labs comes to life!

Cooper helps Streetline create the ultimate parking application.

September:

Alan spoke about Software Alchemy and the Arc of Technology at the Commonwealth Club.

October:

We were so excited to have Raphael Guilleminot join our design team. He brings not only mad design skills but the best wookie impersonation you'll ever hear.

Thank you, Innova, for helping us bring Cooper U to Moscow!

We made some horrifying personas during Halloween.

November:

Cooper's design for Practice Fusion's electronic medical record iPad application came to life at Practice Fusion Connect 11.

The great team at Globo.com helped us bring Cooper U to Rio de Janeiro.

Indi Young taught us the art of creating mental models...and she is coming back on January 30 for another public course, so sign up now while there are still seats!

December:

Jason Csizmadi was our last hire of 2011, making our visual design team stronger (and bigger) than it has ever been.

Alan and Kendra had a blast talking design and entrepreneurship at The Ohio State University.

We officially announced UX Bootcamp: Midwest for March 26-29 in Columbus, Ohio...can't wait for next year!

This article was written by Aaron Ganci, who recently received his Master of Fine Arts in Design Development from The Ohio State University's Department of Design.

Alan Cooper and Kendra Shimmell recently took a trip to the Midwest and stopped by The Ohio State University for a visit. This trip served double-duty as both a chance for Kendra to spread the word about Cooper's new Midwest-centric activities and for Alan to give the keynote address at Ohio State's Center for Enterprise Transformation and Innovation (CETI) Industry Day. More importantly, both Kendra and Alan spent a lot of time throughout the week engaging in discussions with the students and faculty at Ohio State, and with professionals in the local community.

A few highlights from the week:

Alan and Kendra chatting with a small group of educators and local business leaders.

Cooper's UX Bootcamp

Cooper is partnering with the American Red Cross of Columbus for their UX Bootcamp, where training in user experience design, digital product definition, and research will take place. Participants will learn the process and thinking behind designing products and services that have that spark of magic, all while doing something good for their community. The output of the bootcamp will be given to the American Red Cross of Columbus disaster preparedness and intervention initiatives.

Kendra, dry-erase marker in hand, discusses (and sketches) the values of the UX Bootcamp.

Next, the Cooperistas joined a group of students for a long, thoughtful discussion. The group was comprised of graduate students in various design and engineering fields. The students were given a rare opportunity to sit down with Alan and Kendra to discuss what was on their minds.

"I do not believe that making money should be your primary goal," Alan postulated. "The people who set out to make money are not nice people, they are not our friends. The people who set out to do great things in this world...that's who we should respect. They'll make money while doing good."

Student Advising Session

A small group of graduate students and faculty from design, engineering, and business chat about the benefits and challenges of working together.

Ohio State, a large university with an enrollment of over 60,000, should be an ideal environment for collaboration to take place. But students said they often found it hard to get collaborative projects up and running. They turned to Kendra and Alan for some advice.

This opened up a lot of discussion about how to build and maintain collaborative teams. Alan told the students that collaboration is a "socialization issue," and that you have to build a corporate culture of respect in order to get true collaboration.

Kendra agreed, and went into more detail, explaining that good teams are really "using design as a facilitation tool. Everyone on a team is really individually designing in some way...but you have to get everyone to start caring about the end product or service; then you have a group that starts to feel a sense of responsibility for the whole instead of just their piece."

With this in mind, they discussed some ways to keep the team focused on the bigger picture. An important aspect, Alan said, is to "not focus on deadlines as your key motivator. Nothing demotivates like telling someone that this needs to be completed by such and such date for a shareholder meeting. Instead set everyone on a course toward achieving a meaningful goal and the deadline will becoming meaningful too." Both Alan and Kendra then went on to emphasize the importance of working together in lightweight mediums, like whiteboards. They explained that working in this way would help the team stay focused on the big picture and not get bogged down in the details of production.

CETI Keynote

"Embrace diversity...the team has to bring all of the skills needed for success. The key is that the team needs to align to the same purpose. Not everyone has to be a rock star, but everyone does have to feel a sense of accountability to (the mission)."
-Alan Cooper

The next day, Alan gave his keynote address to standing-room only crowd of CETI students, faculty and professionals. CETI is a group at Ohio State that combines the expertise of several academic departments to work on Industry-driven, "real world" technology-based projects. Alan took the opportunity to share some very provocative insights on Post-Industrial state of software development. He talked in great depth about both collaborative team building and fostering innovation, two important aspects of CETI.

The CETI event drew a multidisciplinary audience.

Alan charged the audience to not focus so much on the bottom line. "It isn't wasteful to invest in ideas that may be stupid," he said, trying to hit home the idea that teams have to be given the freedom to explore new solutions. He went on to explain that being free to fail during the design process is important when trying to innovate. Along the same lines, he stressed the power of building trust and communication amongst teammates. "Good ideas sometimes look like bad ideas," he said, "together, you have to learn to separate them." But being successful in separating them can only come when you trust in the competence of your teammates.

The students in attendance also got some wonderful advice to use moving forward as practitioners: young Designers need to "get out of building" and practice empathy (spend time with people and learn about their aspirations and needs), young Programmers need to "seek diversity" and embrace teamwork, and young Managers, who have "a much more difficult job" need to make sure that everyone on the team keeps focused on the big picture.

Alan giving his keynote address.

Cooper's journey in the Midwest was a productive and thought provoking experience. Kendra and Alan's trip definitely laid the great foundation for a lot more involvement in the misnomered flyover states. Stay tuned Midwest!

Please join us for Cooper's UX Bootcamp on March 26-29, 2011!

This article was written by Aaron Ganci. Aaron recently received his Master of Fine Arts in Design Development from The Ohio State University's Department of Design. Lately, he has been designing digital user experiences for educational and library discovery tools.

I've been watching the new hit TV show "Gold Rush," about amateur gold miners in Alaska and the Yukon. Their struggle to find gold reminds me of the quest for innovation in technology companies. It's interesting to compare the two quests.

Illustration by Scott Cooper

In Gold Rush, a semi-documentary, semi-reality show, big, burly men battle the elements (and sometimes each other) to find gold in the endless miles of wilderness in the 49th state. These days gold is around $1500 an ounce, so a couple of handfuls is all these guys need to have a successful mining season.

Often, all a new technology company needs to become a juggernaut is a couple of handfuls of invention, a few ounces of insight. Google, for example, didn't invent search, they simply added the brilliantly simple idea of ranking search results by the number of references they found. Building their massive search engine and finding a way to monetize their service remained a huge task, but the innovation was just a single nugget. Ironically, the Gold Rush miners almost never work directly with gold. The big problem in gold mining isn't the gold itself, it's dealing with everything that isn't gold. All of their attention and equipment is focused on the not-gold. While they dream of a few handfuls of yellow metal, their day-to-day world is dominated by countless tons of everything else. For the miners to collect a few ounces of gold, these tough, XXL guys have to bulldoze acres of forest, pump rivers of water, dig tons of rock, and move mountains of dirt. They need giant tractors and huge excavators. They need rock and sand sifting machines the size of houses. They also have to contend with trees, wild animals, harsh weather, cash flow, fickle girlfriends, and internecine friction.

Most of what goes on in innovative companies is the simple hard work of designing, coding, and deploying software. It's the quotidian blocking and tackling of everyday business: finding bugs, getting the pixels right, answering the phone. One seed pearl bright idea can occupy a technical team for a year or more, building software and shoveling an endless wilderness of bits. Regardless of the creative brilliance, building a company or a product is mostly just hard work.

The Alaskan gold is just lying there, pure, untarnished, ready to be picked up and sold. They don't have to coerce or cajole it. They don't need to identify or interpret it. Gold is easy to spot, but it rarely comes in a big, fortune-making nugget. It comes in millions of tiny flakes, deposited over the millennia in ancient stream beds.

Innovation is often the same, made up of thousands of tiny shards of creativity. Like gold, creativity rarely comes in giant dollops of obviousness. It tends to arrive in many tiny increments, only the whole of which add up to something revolutionary. So, while the miners have to discard ten-ton boulders, the gold flakes hiding underneath must be handled with exquisite delicacy.

Like mining gold, the quest for innovation is dominated by what isn't innovative. Mostly it's cubicles of conventional work, and it's easy for the delicate innovation to be inadvertently smashed by some hard-rock business process. Just like gold mining, business demands a deft combination of brute force and subtle precision, of massive infrastructure and sensitive awareness.

If you visit a gold mine, you won't see very much gold. If you visit a very innovative company, you won't see crowds of shock-haired Albert Einstein's riding around on Segways reinventing the space-time-continuum. You'll see teams of young men and women working hard at mostly mundane tasks, moving mountains of information, winnowing their way to something of immense value. What lurks there is a respectful awareness of the unique nature of creativity, and how to nurture it. Managers who want innovation don't need to demand it, they merely need to not let the mountain moving of commerce obscure the precious, delicate, dust of invention.

This week we've been talking a lot about the past and future, possibly we are avoiding the stressful, immediate present which is measured against shipping dates. Visual.ly sums it up nicely.

Last week we wrote about Facebook's timeline. This week, FastCompany made a compelling argument as to why the Facebook timeline might not be good for certain brands.

That said, in the face of adversity Jawbone UP took some timely and noteworthy action. They announced a no-questions-asked refund policy.

Apple continues to impress Grand Central as the newest NYC store.... Genuis! Talk about a marvelous intersection of the past, present, future.

Speaking of Apple, this tweet doesn't make the Andriod's future look too bright

Similarly, this video make us wonder if the era of flashmobs has come to a close..

Instead of planning flashmobs, young heroes have moved on to greater aspirations like.. curing cancer. This has restored our hope and faith in future.

Lastly, speaking of heroes and great things, while multitasking (holiday shopping) online we doubt you can avoid this beautifully crafted, inviting and elegant celebration of past heroes that define and shape our present lives. Enjoy! Hidden Heroes exhibit at the Vitra Design Museum.

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

This week the sCoop is all about celebrating and planning. We have a few great reasons to celebrate: Alan Cooper was a big hit as the keynote at CETI this week. We just launched our new Cooper UX Bootcamp class in March in Columbus, Ohio. And whenever Cooper has reason to celebrate, we do!

We wish Facebook would just release its new timeline already, it might have helped during our game of "Two Truths and a Lie" over our celebratory drinks! Seriously, who lived on the commune?

Speaking of drinking, this trusty info graphic to help you toe the line when drinking at the holiday party

But if you cross the line, REALLY cross the line... We can't stop talking about this service that help you come up with a plan for prison.

We imagine that people in prison have a lot of time to think about how to move forward. But if you don't have a lot of time on your hands and need help getting unstuck, check out this app.

Unstuck promises to help you overcome those challenges that prevent you from being your best.

Sometimes its not about overcoming obstacles but better planning. We've been talking about the ways in which Google's Schemer is going to help us do all the fun and interesting things in life that we wanted to do.

Because "we always gotta have a plan" according to the fabulous, famous Ice Cube, would apparently schemed and studied to be an architect before becoming well...Ice Cube.

Finally, we're not sure if Steve Jobs would agree with Ice Cube's take on the good, the bad and the ugly, but we love this poster about his thoughts on crazy!