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.

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's personas are either zombies, or about to become so.

That zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover

Background:

That zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover was resting peacefully in his grave when he awoke with a powerful hunger. In spite of his mostly-decayed flesh, he was able to push his way to the surface to begin his (second) life of mayhem.

The bulk of this zombie's time is spent gathering brains to eat. What should be a simple activity is complicated by the fact that most humans are reluctant to share.

When not eating brains, this zombie spends the bulk of his time shufflin’, shufflin’.

How we can help the zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover:

• Use flashing lights and recorded human sounds to guide him in the right directions
• Provide interaction cues that are hard to miss. Really hard to miss.
• Make it possible to interact with very crude gestures and two, one, or no arms.

Factors affecting the zombie that kind of looks like an undead Crispin Glover.

That scary fast zombie in the sweater

Background:

While still alive, that scary fast zombie in the sweater was a well-respected zombie fighter, once taking out a small mob of 20 zombies single-handedly. Unfortunately he was bitten during a careless moment relieving himself in the woods, and he quickly succumbed to the zombie virus. Ever the over-achiever, he went on to destroy 2/3^rds of his former zombie hunter colleagues within the first four hours.

These days that scary fast zombie in the sweater is a victim of his own success. In his local area human flesh–his preferred meal–has become scarce. Animal meat is available but is more difficult to catch. As a consequence, he must hunt ever farther distances, staying alert for any sign of human activity.

How we can help that scary fast zombie in the sweater:

• Augment his reality with the weak points and hidden and unguarded entry points of buildings
• Keep messages focused, directed, and delivered as soon as possible
• Provide tools to make detecting the weakest–yet uninfected–humans easy

Factors affecting that scary fast zombie in the sweater.

Emily

Background:

Emily received a zombie bite during the struggle as her small band of humans attempted to relocate from a boarded-up restaurant to a more easily-defended former mental asylum. Since then she has felt the inevitable progression of zombification. She has worked hard to keep the infection a secret from the other humans, especially her younger brother who is barely holding on emotionally as it is. She knows her brother won’t have the strength to kill her once she has become fully zombie, so she knows suicide is her kindest option. But she can’t help but hold out hope that somehow, some way, her life will be spared.

How we can help Emily Lashinger:

• Help her monitor trending and critical biometrics during her descent into zombism.
• Keep her (and any of her fellow survivors) updated of any advancements towards the cure
• If a cure is not found or accessible, provide a clear indication of the appropriate moment to turn to suicide
• If she hits "snooze" on suicide, alert the other survivors privately.

Zombologists: Stefan Klocek, Jenea Hayes, and Andreas Braendhaugen.
Special thanks to Monstrous.com, KQED.com, and Flickr user katyhutch for their willing zombification.

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today’s personas are Antone and Vladimir.

Antone D’Entremont, tortured soul

Background:

Antone grew up in southern Louisiana in the late 1700s, the son of a wealthy landowner. After his childhood sweetheart died, he gave up all hope for life. He told his troubles to a young gentleman who came through town, who promised him an end to Antone’s misery. Instead, he was turned to a vampire, and forced to live a life of eternal suffering, unable to visit his family ever again. Today he broods away his evenings in his family’s decaying plantation.

Challenges with technology:

• Preferring the quill and ink of his childhood, Antone has never gotten the knack of using a keyboard.

How we can help Antone:

• Provide a social interface for finding like-minded souls
• Offer an intuitive interface that does not require calls to tech support (he can’t really call during normal business hours)
• Automatic alerts when his loved ones are in harm's way

Vladimir Korzha, bloodthirsty bat

Background:

Vladimir, known as “Vlad” to his vampire offspring, grew up as a Romanian prince in the early 1400’s. After the tragic killing of his entire family by vengeful serfs, he vowed to devote his life to avenge their death. Vlad was turned to a vampire by a Romani witch during one of his bloody killing sprees. He was thrilled when he realized that his new powers would allow him to continue his killing spree through time immemorial. Today he works as a night watchman in a hospital.

Challenges with technology:

• Vlad gives in to his passions quickly, which takes him away from technology. Any interface must offer quick hits and just-in-time, glanceable information.

How we can help Vladimir:

• Provide a locational interface for locating “willing” prey
• Offer a non-reflective screen, so his co-workers will not realize he has no reflection
• A small, portable interface that fits underwing and works in low light conditions

Next persona Zombie, Zombie, & Emily
Prior persona Romulus: North American Woodland Ape
Unwilling victims: Jim Dibble and Greg Schuler.
Special thanks to Flickr user craigCloutier for the CC use of this image
and to Flickr user Alex Holzknecht for the CC use of this image

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Romulus.

Background:

Romulus has long been the subject of intense curiosity among outdoorsmen and thrill-seeking yokels. Seldom seen with human eyes, the general public tends to doubt his very existence, and yet evidence thereof continues to circulate, most often in the form of grainy VHS footage of creatures that look oddly like humans wearing gorilla suits. Romulus cherishes his privacy, of course, and he goes the great lengths to preserve it. And yet, he often feels as if he is missing something, and many are the nights when he he finds himself longingly gazing at a group of hikers laughing around a campfire. The loneliness of the wilderness can weigh on a soul, even the sturdy soul of a North American Woodland Ape.

Challenges with technology:

• GPS can be unreliable in wilderness redoubts of the Pacific Northwest
• Fat, furry fingers
• Replacing lost iPhone charger without being seen is almost impossible

How we can help Romulus:

• Aid socialization without compromising his veil of privacy.
• Provide better knowledge of "off the beaten path" routes in order to ease the stress of travel.
• Make it easier to filter for ape-friendly options for B&Bs; and restaurants.

Prior persona Metansiptah: Vengeful Mummy
Next persona Antone and Vladimir: Modern vampires
Cryptozoolists: Doug LeMoine and Martina Maleike.
Special thanks to Wordpress User Lake Placid Film Forum for the use of their image.

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Metansiptah.

Background:

Metansiptah was not a well-liked ruler. He was poisoned by his Chief of the Scented Oils during his morning ablutions with a paste of arsenic trioxide. The priest reciting his Book of the Dead prayers skipped several spells in order to trap Metansiptah's soul within his mummified remains. His tomb builder placed the correct curses against disturbance, but then left deliberate clues to the location of its entrance. For the past three thousand years, Metansiptah has been awakened from his unending twilight every few decades by the greedy and the foolhardy.

How we can help Metansiptah:

• Accommodate non-ASCII text types
• Use "magical" interaction metaphors to match his Middle Kingdom mental model
• Don't expect speed
• Utilize ubiquitous, location-aware technology to aid his hunt
• Metansiptah has plenty of time, so err on the side of information clarity rather than density

Next persona Romulus: North American Woodland Ape
Prior persona Sammy Bishop, AKA Destro: Gremlin
Egyptologist: Chris Noessel

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Sammy Bishop Destro.

Background:

Little Sammy Bishop was once just a normal boy. But once scratched by a gremlin, he became something else altogether. Destro roams the airports, construction sites, and back alleys of Detroit. Whenever possible, he joins forces with his friends to sabotage things like airplanes, semi-trucks, and heavy construction equipment.

Salient traits:

• Mischievous
• Self-involved
• Addicted to crushing
• An anarchist

How we can help Destro:

• Get him connected with others who are ready to annihilate huge mechanical systems.
• Give him access to lightweight, yet large tools that are optimized for damage.
• Provide contextual help that keep him hidden during his spontaneous, reckless missions of sabotage.

Prior persona Alexi Devers: Lycanthrope
Next persona Metansiptah: Vengeful Mummy
Paranoid airplane travelers: Susan Dybbs and Peter Duyan

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Alexi Devers.

Background:

While recently on a solo full-moon hike of the Samaria Gorge in Greece, Alexi thought he escaped a pack of wild dogs with only a few scratches. That next week he returned to Athens where he and his girlfriend Debbie are studying abroad. Three weeks later he's discovered they weren't dogs, he got more than scratches, and he has much more serious problems than his upcoming finals.

How we can help Alexi:

• Make calendar alerts find him wherever he is--and don't let him hit snooze.
• Outfit his smart phone with a snug-fitting strap that can handle a variety of shapes and kinds of movement, made of a material that can be easily cleaned.
• Provide map directions home that find an optimal path which avoids being seen.
• Connect him with like-minded others across the globe with easy access to ancient mystical texts and automatic language translation.

Prior persona Juan Espinoza: Class 5 Full-Roaming Vapor
Next persona Sammy Bishop, AKA Destro: Gremlin
Special thanks to Flickr User Cara Photography for the CC licensed use of this portrait.
Loup-garou-ionado: Chris Noessel

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper realizes that we can serve the spirit, spook, and creature population better if we understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. In service of this we present a short series of Halloween personas. Today's persona is Juan Espinoza.

Background:

Juan was a senior conductor for the Next Stage Railway in 1889, when a demonic cow on the track derailed the train, killing all aboard and decapitating him in the wreckage.

How we can help Juan:

• Use mechanical controls to match his 19th-century mental model and skill set.
• Make things accessible so they are easy to detect and operate without eyes, ears, or the ability to make physical contact with objects.
• Support multiple languages.

Next persona Alexi Devers: Lycanthrope
Spectral investigator: Chris Noessel

Platfora, a new startup in the Hadoop business intelligence space, is working with Cooper to design an elegant, intuitive interface to bring clarity to the chaos of big data.

After Platfora received 5.7 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz; Cooper worked on a rapid, collaborative two-week timeline with a team of five designers to create their website, www.platfora.com. Platfora CEO Ben Werther said, "we wanted to convey the clarity and simplicity that we are striving for in our product experience — without showing actual screenshots. Cooper's design work on our website conveyed this message perfectly."

A clean sans-serif designed by Minneapolis type foundry Process combined with rich, vibrant visualizations designed by the Cooper team combine for a unique and beautiful site we're proud to have been linked to in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and New York Times.

Immediately after launch, the site received rave reviews on Twitter:

See the site at www.platfora.com.

Related Reading

• Cooper helps TaskRabbit design new iPhone app for help with chores
• The litl: a design miracle!
• Mental Models for product and service strategy
• Take the visual interface design class

Cooper is proud to announce design strategy expert Indi Young will be coming to our studio on November 14 to lead a one-day workshop in techniques for creating mental model diagrams.

Understanding users' workflows and work environments is key to developing appropriate products and services, but to really create an experience users love, you have to understand how they think. Indi Young has pioneered techniques for getting at these key understandings during user interviews, and for translating that understanding into powerful communication pieces called mental model diagrams.

The workshop gives users hands-on experience in the process she describes in her book Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Creating winning design solutions starts with the mantra, "Know thy user." This means more than just identifying users' workflows and work environments; it means understanding how they think.

This one-day workshop will reveal how to capture the thought processes and intentions of your audience into a simple and persuasive mental model diagram, and how to use that diagram to steer the course of your organization immediately and for the long term.

Participation is limited to 20 attendees, so register now!

Dodgeballs are flying through the office as we prepare for next week's Bay Area Design Dodgeball tournament. We've broken a glass (or two) and scattered some sketchpaper, but our aim is improving and we're all looking forward to knocking chunky glasses, porkpie hats, and ironic smirks from the heads of our opponents next Friday. We're coming for you, fuseproject.

Naomi Duckworth turned our Cooper U classroom into a photo studio to create some beautiful new materials for our classes.

In fact, We're updating a lot of Cooper U curriculum, introducing new courses, materials, techniques, and activities to address the situations we see in our consulting work.

We're taking our new approach on the road with some consulting and training in Brazil and Russia over the next couple of months. We'll be back to show it off in our courses in October and November. Seats are filling up; you can register online today.

Visual Design at Cooper. Video credit: Andreas Braendhaugen, Music: Dave Zohrob

Get a quick look at the office of Cooper with some thoughts on the role of visual design in digital interfaces by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design and branding.

Our thoughts go out to everyone on the east coast dealing with the bad weather. Here are a few things to keep you busy if you're stuck indoors.

• What I learned from raising $1million for my startup.
• Johnny Holland's new post on what Boon brings to user experience from computer science.
• Another interesting read came from Forbes on why Amazon can't make a Kindle in the US.
• Nick spoke at Rock Health this week about the importance of visual design and the principles that make engaging, memorable experiences.
• We've been reading up on Steve Job's legacy and were humbled to read of the many patents he made happen.
• Check out the variety and pick your favorite of the many possible panels Cooperista's have in contention for SXSW.
• The importance of the narrative.
• We love medical devices, we love animals and we LOVE the Cat Scan.

South by Southwest (SxSW) is an annual gathering of creative folks, technologists, musicians, and filmmakers in Austin, Texas. It's big, Texas-style fun with interesting folks from around, and we've got some grand plans for next year's event. This is where you come in.

How you can help

Software Alchemy and the Arc of Technology

Alan Cooper

An outspoken pioneer in the modern computing era, and best known as the “Father of Visual Basic” and inventor of “personas”, Cooper will share rare insights into the evolution of software and interaction design based on human goals and needs - and a new vision for meeting the personal and business needs of the upcoming era. In conversation with Silicon Valley legend and former DEMO producer Chris Shipley. An insider vision of how the process of software and interaction design has unfolded over the last 25 years, and how lessons learned from that process can be applied to a compelling business case based not on traditional manufacturing but on a model of software design - bringing effectiveness over efficiency.

Healing Healthcare: Notes from the Front Line

Susan Dybbs with Graham Hughes MD; SAS, Ryan Panchadsaram, Pipette; Maggie Breslin, Center for Innovation at Mayo Clinic

Communication breakdowns, system failures and expensive, often misguided procedures, are common and symptomatic of our unhealthy healthcare system - a system that will not be healed by a single solution. Many companies and organizations are trying to tackle the problems of this complex ecosystem. But who can be the beacon to guide the way? Who can provide the innovation and the infrastructure to get it done? While startups can design solutions outside the confines of timid regulated bureaucracies, large healthcare organizations have the influence and customer base to move the industry and alter regulations. This panel will explore the barriers to healthcare innovation as well as highlight how these barriers can be overcome. We will discuss how to use cross-sector alliances to seed innovation into reality, illustrate the importance of clinical trials and describe how to navigate the labyrinthine reimbursement system to bring products to market.

Building team chemistry in baseball & technology

Doug LeMoine with David Bairstow, Thomson Reuters

Making a great product isn’t really all that different than making a World Series run. In both cases, the organization must assemble the right mix of talent, motivation, independent spirit and willingness to be coached. The right combination of these qualities results in a team who moves faster, makes better decisions, gets to better outcomes, and has more fun. None of this is easy, but it’s do-able, and we’ve assembled some vivid examples of how to do it right (or wrong) from things we know well: design, finance, and baseball. We’re going to discuss the tools and practices that we use to ensure that our teams are talented and high-functioning, and we’ll draw inspiration from our own roles in assembling design teams at Cooper and in building mobile products at Thomson Reuters. What role do performance-enhancing drugs play in product development? Tune in to find out.

The Visual Interface is Now Your Brand

Nick Myers

Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace and more and more interactions between companies and customers now happen via an interface. Careful consideration of the software's design is of paramount importance to any company wishing to grow their customer base or loyalty. At the center of this change sits the user experience, which has become a huge influence in how customers perceive a company's brand. Traditional marketing principles and practices aren’t effective in software. So how do you create an experience that is usable, desirable, and still stands out? Myers, an interface and brand specialist in design, marketing, and development for 16 years, will highlight the differences of software from other forms of media, you’ll gain insight for creating a truly unique experience that guides executives and teams, and can influence your company’s culture. You’ll learn new techniques such as defining the ideal experience, exploring first impressions with visual language studies, and designing signature interactions. These techniques build a memorable experience that’s hard for your competitors to mimic and your customers will fall in love with.

Zoom! Interfaces! Presentation!

Chris Noessel

One of the most exciting presentation techniques of the last several years at conferences like SxSW, TED, and others around the world is the zoom interface. And why not? They let your audience fly with you between the superstructure of the Big Idea and the telling detail. They turn motion into information. And they lay thoughts out to be seen, considered, and poked at. It’s a way of presenting that matches the way people think, and makes the presenter’s thinking more clear in the process. They advance thought. Chris Noessel has been giving such presentations using custom software since 2002 (notably with the Make It So series of presentations at SxSW), and now that commercial software is available to do much of the same thing, it’s time to see him lay bare the secrets and techniques.

Cultivating a Better Life with Design

Kendra Shimmell with Brian Stone, The Ohio State University; Alexa Andrzejewski, Foodspotting; Teresa Brazen, Adaptive Path; JooYoung OH, Ziba

How can we become more intentional about the design of our "everyday" environments and interactions in order to cultivate better relationships, experiences, and the direction of our lives? Great designers and innovators share an innate curiosity, carefully studying the world around them, taking cues from a variety of cultures and disciplines, to inform the design of great products and services. That same attention should be paid to the cultivation of our life experiences. How can we take our design practices and recycle them back into our personal and family lives? A better life by design. Our panelists will share their stories; their techniques for the careful cultivation of their life experiences. We'll show how to bring your personal and professional worlds together into a more symbiotic relationship. We’ll show that there are clear sets of tools and principles learned from our professional lives—and how to best apply these tools in your life.

No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Skeptic’s Role in Design

Suzy Thompson

In creative, collaborative environments, a great deal of time and energy are focused on keeping everyone working together harmoniously. Positivity and can-do attitudes are in, criticism and judgments are out. I call bullshit. With all this attention on getting along, we’ve lost sight of the vital role of critical thinking - leaving clients, users, and the integrity of our profession hanging in the balance. This session will turn a critical eye to the world of design to examine the dangers of today’s kum-ba-ya approach to collaboration, and dive deep into the crucial role that skepticism plays in successful design practices. Covering everything from the basics of why, how, and when to inject a healthy dose of skepticism into your design process, to advanced collaboration techniques for getting the most out of your most critical thinkers, this session promises that even if you walk in a believer, you’ll leave a skeptic.

Women's Wisdom for a Connected Century (interaction category)

Tamara Wayland with Christie Dames, TechTalk; Suzanne H. EL-Moursi, SapientNitro; Lauren Serota, Frog

How can smart, ambitious women use the lessons of feminine tradition to move a into world where the old rules, written and practiced largely by men mentoring men, have been redrafted by women mentoring women -- a natural reaction to a system that was so badly broken, it no longer worked for either sex? Learn how the lessons and role models of our grandmothers and other women of an earlier era can help us move into new techniques and visions of mentoring for the 21st century - both for women and men.

Women's Wisdom for a Connected Century (music category)

Tamara Wayland with Hesta Prynn, Hesta Prynn; Emily White, Whitesmith Entertainment; Ashley Capps, AC Entertainment

How can smart, ambitious women -- and men -- use the lessons of feminine tradition to move a into world where the old rules, written and practiced largely by men mentoring men, have been redrafted by women mentoring women -- a natural reaction to a system that was so badly broken, it no longer worked for either sex? Learn how the lessons and role models of our grandmothers and other women of an earlier era can help us move into new techniques and visions of mentoring for the 21st century - both for women and men.

Between the stock market roller coaster, BART's brush with the first amendment, and the nine Cooper proposals in the SXSW panel picker, we had a pretty busy week.

• Kendra led a vibrant session of our Visual Interface Design session Monday and Tuesday. Get your spot in September 13-16 Interaction Design session soon as seats are filling fast.
• We held our first office hours with the teams at Rock Health.
• It's always nice to receive a mention in an app review; our work with TaskRabbit on their app moved someone to compliment the UI on iPhone app reviews "It's very rare that a user interface actually impresses me, but the TaskRabbit iPhone app managed to do just that."

Also interesting: Smashing Magazine's compilation of UI tools is a gold mine. Jeff Bezos has been busy designing airbags for phones. And, inspiration for anyone who likes Magnum PI, sandwiches and waterfalls.

Finally, we bid a fond farewell to our amazing interns, Mo and Brendan, as they return for the final sessions of their masters programs at the IIT and Carnegie Mellon. You'll be seeing these guys around; they are 100% amazing!

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Golden Krishna, Peter Duyan, Jayson McCauliff, Suzy Thompson, Nick Myers

If you own a car in a city like San Francisco, you've probably experienced that particular mix of rage and despair as you drive around your block for the umpteenth time, looking for a parking space. Maybe you've even thought to yourself, "There has got to be a better way!" as you finally bumper car park along the curb blocks from home. Thanks to the folks at Streetline, there is a better way.

Streetline worked with Cooper to create Parker, an app for iPhone and Android that helps drivers easily locate and pay for available parking. When we began, Streetline was an early-stage start-up operating under intense pressure to deliver to market. We worked closely with their developers to bring predictability and order to a process that is wasteful (of resources and time) in addition to being stressful.

Big congratulations to the Parker team for shipping an amazing product &emdash; and securing an additional round of funding!

Get Parker in the App Store, and learn more about our work with Streetline in our case study. Speaking of parking, you can even auction off your spot with Parking Auction.

Device Design Day debrief (D4)

Jenea Hayes: The subject of brand was a theme that came up often, with oft-tweeted quotes like Robert Brunner's "brand is a gut feeling" and Charles Gorant's "brand is a relationship with an expectation of value." These concepts are not particularly revolutionary, but they went over very well in a room full of designers who are tired of colleagues and clients who conceive of brands on the level of "MOAR LOGO."

Brunner's challenge of "how many people in this room have an Apple logo tattooed on their body?" that was accompanied by a screenful of images of Harley Davidson tattoos was especially evocative. In retrospect, I don't think his example means what he thinks it means. Tattoos are a significant part of biker culture; does Harley Davidson get to take credit for that? Meanwhile, hundreds (thousands?) of examples of Apple logo tats (presumably among a less inked population) are only a Google Image search away. A Harley tat is perhaps an inevitable expression of a subculture, but an Apple tat is an expression of over-the-top fanboyism.

A minor quibble. The larger point still stands.

Speaking of fanaticism, I became an instant fangirl of Willow Garage. Here's one reason why: Willow Garage researchers were having a problem in which experiments were being disrupted by humans because of an invisibly ponderous robot. Rather than be satisfied with a "please do not disturb, experiment in progress" sign, they went to the experts for advice. Pixar animators designed subtle but organic movements and reactions for the robots that are instantly recognizable. It was an compelling reminder of the density of information that can be conveyed by well-designed motion and sound. Details matter in design.

Golden Krishna: At the end of the day, when yawns and naps were ready to commence, in walked the founder of NonObject, Branko Lukic, the last speaker of D3. Ambition and idealism were not lost in his first words: "Thank you for coming to see this lecture and I'm excited to share with you some thoughts about the future of design." Certainly, ears perked on that statement, and his lecture, with logic that only occasionally seemed rational, was utterly intriguing. He boldly stated that pasta is a perfect design (as evidenced by its consistency over time; unchanged by Facebook, for example), and declared, "The reason I would like to share this with you is because you are human." Was it rational to assume that we were all human? Perhaps.

Greg Schuler: Device Design Day (D3) started out on a high note with Robert Brunner's talk "Ideas Not Objects". Brunner asked the group to define brand before suggesting that it's a "gut feeling" that can't really be controlled. Later he asked, "Would your customer shed a tear if you were gone?" Designers often think of Apple as a desirable brand but Brunner pointed out a better example: Harley-Davidson. After all, how many people have Apple tattoos? Brunner issued this advice: "If it was easy everyone would do it!."

Leila Takayama's "Personal Robot Devices" and Mike Kruzeniski's "The Elements of Interactive Style" kept the bar high, but I found that some other speakers delivered messages that seemed half-hearted despite their triumphant titles. Branko Lukic's talk is another story altogether, and I wasn’t surprised that a woman in the audience confessed, "I am deeply inspired by the DIY and the pasta."

RockHealth

Ready, set, DESIGN! After weeks of constructing a sturdy foundation, it was time for the RockHealth teams to get in there and make their products a reality. Chris and Susan helped the teams get started in this week's workshop.

Other scoops

This first week of August has been good fun from start to finish! Jim, Faith, and Rock Health agilely went from stories to a plan of action.

Alan's post on ideas, innovation, and creative teams reminded us of an interesting perspective on innovation from Clay Christensen and Art Markman about busting innovation myths.

We took a break to watch the Giants game with our amazing summer interns Mo and Brendan.

Today, Golden, Greg, and Jenea are doing their part at Device Design Day. Get some design goodness of your own at in the upcoming Visual Interface Design session August 15-16.

Other interesting scoops this week

TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.

TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.

Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.

Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done!

Suzy and Stefan presented to Rock Health on research synthesis and guerilla persona creation.

This week's inaugural session of the Cooper U Communication and Collaboration class is getting great feedback. Sign up for September’s session to get some of this good stuff.

"Fabulous, if you want to get some creative ideas about design and communication. Just check it out!"
"A great course with a lot of useful, real-world tools and techniques!"
"Great material on a really complex topic."

Our new neighbor TruckStopSF moved into the ‘hood and brought some good stuff of their own. See more at @truckstopsf or http://www.truckstopsf.com.

We're excited to see our work with TaskRabbit get rave reviews. Read all about it at Wired, or TechCrunch or Forbes. from Collen Taylor @ Gigaom,

“The user interface is feature-rich and slick, but still easy to navigate. The home page lays out different categories in a roulette wheel format that makes it quite fun to browse for available tasks and post errands. An especially handy feature is the ability to post voice recordings for a task description without having to type. All in all, using the app is a very pleasant experience.”

Looking ahead, get your tix to hear Alan to tell it true about the alchemy of software and the arc of technology at the Commonwealth Club Tuesday, September 13th at 6PM.

From time to time, we have a crazy week. The sCoop compiles the exciting stuff we’ve got going on in-house, along with interesting tidbits from around the Internet.

Cooper designer Andreas Brændhaugen received anonymous praise for his work on Pulse on the Fastco design blog. Pulse cofounder Akshay Kothari: "We said [to Andreas], 'We don't have that much money. Can you spend just one full day with us?... Just 10 hours with him was probably the best investment we ever made." ... He "took out all the crap," leaving a stripped-down, simple UI where the "content does all the talking." The upgraded version shot up to the top of the app store charts almost overnight.

Protip: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, go grab another projector, laptop and iPad.

Alan's post about automobile interface design appeared on Khoi Vin's radar just as he was drafting his recent post about the end of client services "As the founder of a premier user experience design consultancy, Cooper might disagree with me on the viability of the design services model. But I found myself fully agreeing with him when he says, 'Automobile manufacturing companies like Ford need to acknowledge that they are no longer making automobiles with attached computer systems. In reality, they are making computer control systems with attached motion mechanisms.' This is a sterling example of my contention that, more and more, all businesses are becoming digital businesses."

Golden grappled with some error messages

Ye Olde Cooper got a mention in the “Original Gangster” category by @ezyjules: “Original Gangsters @cooper_journal @frogdesign @ideo >>> New Jacks @MIRnewyork @punchcut @madebymany @ustwo).” Thanks, dude.

Doug and Renna discussed research methods during week 2 of our series of workshops with Rock Health Tuesday. Cooper U wrapped up an incredible session of Interaction Design in anticipation of starting next week's relaunch of Design Communication & Collaboration. Sign up to join what is sure to be a great session starting Monday.

We are thrilled to announce that Cooper will be partnering with Rock Health to provide design consultation and education for their inaugural class of health care startups. Cooper designers have always been keenly interested in design for healthcare environments, and Rock Health is the first seed-accelerator exclusively for health startups! It aims to provide an ecosystem in which these startups can succeed, including mentorship in tackling design challenges. Announced this year at SxSW by the CTO of the White House, Aneesh Chopra, the startups are backed by companies such as Harvard Medical School, and Nike.

Rock Health co-founder Halle Tecco and a a passionate team have assembled a fabulous group of mentors and partners who will guide the start ups. Over the next few months, Cooper will be providing a crash course in design research, interaction design, visual design and hands-on mentoring .

We're super-excited to get started, so stay tuned for more posts on our Rock Health workshops.

Over the years, client organizations have taken this advice to heart, with more and more forming user experience teams that focus on assessing and meeting user needs. However, just having a seat at the table is not enough. As designers, we can help shape and facilitate the overall conversation.

To bring designs to fruition, designers need to collaborate effectively. While technologists and business executives value design, they often sense that design decisions are subjective and arbitrary. To get buy-in, designers need to help their partners understand design rationale and decision-making. Through collaboration and communication, designers can ensure that all team members have a shared understanding of the stakeholder objectives, the user needs, and the intent of the design.

Cooper now offers “Design collaboration & communication,” a course that sets the stage for collaborating on design and communicating design decisions. In two days students learn how to involve others throughout the design process, so that the design vision is agreed upon each step of the way. Communicating design throughout the process reduces the likelihood of other team members misinterpreting or altering the design during development.

The course covers the following topics:

• Designing workshops to conduct with stakeholders to ensure a shared product vision
• Choosing appropriate research methods
• Involving others in research synthesis
• Prioritizing what should be built based on business objectives, technical constraints, and user needs
• Articulating the value and benefit of design decisions
• Defending design without becoming defensive
• Determining the right level of documentation for your development process
• Moving the discussion from features and functionality to user goals and business goals

Whether you follow a traditional waterfall model or an agile development process, the communication and collaboration techniques in this course can help you gain buy-in for your design decisions.

This course provides great techniques for designers who want to create buy-in and build credibility within their organizations. The course is also great for cross-disciplinary teams of designers, product managers, and developers who want to communicate more effectively.

Our next public offering of this new course is July 25 & 26, 2011 in our San Francisco studio. A Cooper designer can also deliver the course at your office, and the content can be tailored to fit your particular needs around design planning and collaboration.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

Almost everyone enjoys a great meal out with friends, but splitting the bill can be unnecessarily complicated. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the way groups of people pay the check while dining out.

Credits: Greg Schuler, Peter Duyan , Bo Ah Kwon , Suzy Thompson and Chris Noessel.

Related Reading

• Another design for social awkwardness The Drawing Board: Taking The Call
• More service design Economizer
• Another drawing board The Drawing Board: Feeding The Cats

Cooper is pleased to announce the arrival of our newest directors: Kendra Shimmell, Director of Design Education & Training Services, and Tamara Wayland, Director of Client Relations. Kendra and Tamara will spearhead important initiatives for Cooper’s growing strategy and design consultancy. We are excited about the skills, talents, and energy that they bring to Cooper’s mission of helping clients create products and services that delight users.

About Kendra Shimmell

As Director of Design Education & Training Services, Kendra Shimmell will lead initiatives for training and mentoring in the practice of design. She will oversee our design practicum, Cooper U, which includes popular courses on interaction design, visual design, and design communication. Kendra also plans to expand our training and mentoring offerings to include courses and workshops on research methods, interaction design techniques, service design, agile design practices, and the integration of design into organizations of all sizes. Kendra plans to reach out to the broader design community, sharing Cooper’s proven design practices with the community, as well as searching out innovative research and design strategies to fold into the Cooper design practice.

Kendra is excited about her new role: “The design community has multiple challenges: How do we respond to the demand for ‘quicker, faster, now’ while maintaining the integrity of the user experience? How do we fold design into the new organizational model of integrated development teams? How do design teams understand the shifting contexts of design problems that involve mobile design, service design, interaction design, and industrial design? I see Cooper U as a place for us to experiment with ways to meet these business and design challenges within the context of the design community.” She is especially excited about working on these challenges at Cooper: “Cooper is a firm investing in the articulation of the practice of design, and sharing with and learning from the greater design community.”

Kendra has over ten years of design experience across a broad range of products, including health care systems, retail environments, medical devices, durable goods, consumer electronics, financial services, and enterprise management applications. She has extensive public speaking, facilitation, and training experience, including talks at SXSW and the IXDA Interaction conferences. Kendra joins Cooper from Adaptive Path, where she was Lead User Experience Designer.

About Tamara Wayland

As Director of Client Relations, Tamara Wayland will nurture client relationships, making sure that Cooper does great design work that meets client needs. At Cooper, Tamara will work directly with clients to identify their underlying business problems and to strategize on how design can help solve those problems. Tamara is looking forward to strengthening Cooper’s client relationships: “I see myself as a partner with our clients. My goal is not just to move the client’s project forward, but to to help the client move their business forward.” Tamara is excited to join Cooper: “Cooper has a great history in interaction design, and does a great job of articulating how design impacts business. I’m especially excited about Cooper’s focus on bringing together design and development.”

Tamara has over 18 years of experience in the interaction design space. Tamara joins Cooper from Adaptive Path, where she served as Director of Client Relations. Prior to Adaptive Path, Tamara worked with several firms in the branding, marketing, and design industries, including frog design, Young & Rubicam, and CKS.

When the New York Times activated its highly anticipated metering system this week, there was no shortage of opinions on the matter. As opinionated people, the designers here at Cooper started to feel a little left out, so we put our thoughts together on the user experience of the new service. Enjoy, and chime in with your own thoughts and opinions below.

Suzy Thompson

Overall, I think they've done several things right, like the fact that home subscribers (even those like me who now only get the Sunday edition) get an all-access pass to the online content. Also, they're not throwing up a paywall over all of their content — folks can access up to a certain amount of content a month before you're asked to become an online subscriber. And they've thought about how to ensure that folks can read articles that someone has shared via email, FB, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I think that the iTunes store has pretty effectively proven that if you make it easy to do so and provide demonstrable value, people are more than happy to pay - even for something they could get for free elsewhere.

I do worry, though. Because the NYTimes isn't just a business. Their journalism is a public service that everyone benefits from. And unlike a burger or a pair of jeans, where some folks are willing and able to pay for higher quality and some aren't, and the provider can scale back production to match demand, journalism can't be scaled back and still maintain its quality. The fact that I view it as a public service is part of why it's so important to me to contribute financially — just like giving $$ to PBS. Sure, there are some who use it and don't pay for it, and I probably don't use it enough to justify what I pay for it, but I want it to be there and available to everyone. That, above all else, is what worries me about the paid subscription model. Because the prospect of a world in which only Fox News or USA Today can profitably succeed in the news business terrifies me.

Jim Dibble

I understand why the NYTimes is putting this policy into place. They are my go-to place for US and international reporting. We only recently canceled our NYTimes paper delivery — since I no longer work in Pleasanton, I don't have the long BART commute to read the paper. (Thank you, Cooper!). And it just felt like a waste of resources (trees, ink, and gasoline) to deliver a paper that we typically recycled without reading.

However, I'm utterly confused why readers have to pay more to view content on multiple platforms. In the morning and on BART, I read the NYTimes on my iPhone. At work and at home at night, I read the paper on my laptop. I'm not sure why I need to pay twice as much just because I'm using two platforms. I'm surprised that they didn't follow the kindle sales model, where you purchase a book and own it in the cloud, regardless of which platform you use to access it.

It would be great if they provided a way to ask for articles of interest to you. For example, if I'm interested in reporting on the Middle East, it would be great to be able to have a special category for those articles. It would also be great to have articles that assume that I'm well-versed in a particular region. For example, if I'm familiar with what has already happened in Libya, many of the new articles will review the recent history of what has occurred, so that I have to wade through information that I already know, in order to find out about the most recent developments.

Peter Duyan

So, after reading the “letter to readers” and looking at the subscription breakdown, I feel a little deflated. Initially, I was actually excited to pay the NYTimes for their digital media, and to help support them as they find a way to continue doing what they do best. However, I don’t like their subscription models at all for a very specific reason. I only read (almost only) the NYTimes on my smartphone, and I feel like I should have the option to pay for mobile-only content. If and when I buy an iPad, I’m pretty sure I would be interested in smartphone and tablet use, but still have little or no interest in the “online” content. Basically, I want to be a mobile-only user and that option isn’t open. From my perspective, they are missing the point if they don’t let their users pay for content on whatever device they choose.

Doug LeMoine

I think journalists should get paid, and I think publishers should figure out a way to make digital journalism pay. I don’t understand people who talk about metering like it’s some violation of their civil rights, and yet I’m also a nerd, so I must admit that I did Google “nytimes metering hack” yesterday (out of curiosity, really), and I found some very interesting CSS (that I did not install).

Still, I do have a problem with the metering service as the NYTimes has implemented it: It seems both too complicated and too stupid at the same time. Why are there so many different options? Why are there different prices for iPads and iPhones? Why is the digital thrown in for free with print? Why is the NYTimes.com version a required baseline for all plans? And why the heck is the Dealbook blog exempted from metering? The investment bankers have been bailed out by the middle class yet again, it seems.

I would bet that these “tiers,” if you can call them tiers, were an effort to try to create “choices.” But the way they’re broken out makes me think that they’re simply the configurations of devices and content that were easier to track on the back end. I would argue that it gives the impression of "choice," without really making sense as a set of choices.

I'll go one step easier with a user-friendly model: How about one price for print + digital, and another for just digital? And how about charging the investment bankers double for Dealbook? That would help the NYTimes recover some of the $40M they supposedly spent installing the metering system.

Golden Krishna

Adding a paywall is like moving newspapers from the online street corner to the concert hall. Journalists shift from being free street entertainment to performers in a luxury experience that viewers will likely expect to work smoothly and look beautiful. I fear that paywalls will shut the doors on the common, limit access to the kind of information that should be freely available to all, but I am eager to see the good design that results as papers compete for online eyeballs that are willing to pay for their services.

The recently launched MSNBC redesign really grabbed our attention yesterday. While we don't universally love everything about it, we found ourselves playing around with it a bit longer than we would have expected to. Here's a sampling of some of the comments heard around the studio.

Doug LeMoine:
This is a pretty impressive effort toward designing an interaction framework for a massive media conglomerate with a dozen sub-brands, content licensing deals with who knows how many third-parties, and an absolute clustercuss of a styleguide. I’d say that the designers performed capably under this duress, delivering strong mechanisms for staying upright and pointed downhill amidst the avalanche. I like the nifty “upscroll” that reveals an info-rich header (but crikey this particular header has a heckuva lot going on). The “annotated scrollbar” holds the experience together, providing a modicum of navigational predictability across the various content sets. I have a variety of visual critiques, large and small, but overall I’ll high-five MSNBC for not being afraid to spook loyal readers with new ways of interacting with content.

Imon Deshmukh:
Of course it feels strange at first, and I’m not sure if I would have noticed the option to scroll up to uncover content, had nobody mentioned it. My reaction is similar to how I felt when I first saw the new Cooper site [Editors' note: stay tuned for this!]: I’m not sure if it’ll really work, but it’s something I haven’t seen before and it feels more than an attempt to be different just for the sake of it. Even if it doesn’t work out, trying something new and different when everyone is watching is something I can appreciate and admire.

Tim McCoy:
Kudos to MSNBC for abandoning the cluttered, segmented, ad-saturated layouts typical of news websites for a truly content-forward experience. It’s a lot of change to encounter all at once, so the experience is a bit foreign, but I think that will pass with time as readers learn new idioms and the design adjusts to the strains of use. It is an odd hybrid of the information density of a sovereign desktop/iPad app and the long-page scrolling breadth of a web page. And it speaks volumes about how interconnected our content has become that the editors expect to provide every story with some combination of images, videos, interactives, and related articles.

Dave Cronin:
I really appreciate the fact that the MSNBC team tried some daring stuff with their redesign. As with any such effort, some of these innovations will probably turn out to not-so-good, others will turn out to need some tweaking, and if we’re lucky a couple of these ideas will help us all move forward with how we deal with all kinds of information coming from every different direction. I’m really digging the use of the upscroll to access headlines (in a similar vein to where search lives on the iPhone), and I like how far the vertical scroll has been pushed even further as a primary navigation element, as well as the nifty little jump buttons along the scrollbar. The site is certainly not perfect, though. While I can tell there is an underlying grid, it could certainly be stronger—it looks like every vertical layer is on a different horizontal rhythm. And while I know it’s tough to do anything graceful with big display ads, these feel particularly clunky, especially the way they stick with you as you scroll, breaking the vertical orientation of the page a bit.

Congratulations to the litl team for a great showing at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), taking home awards in packaging, hardware and software, the latter of which we're proud to have contributed to. We're thrilled to have been part of such an amazing team and grateful for the recognition from the IDEA panel and litl.

Here's what the judges had to say about the litl user interface:

Designed to remove the barriers between you and web content, it is extremely simple to use and eliminates the clutter and distractions of traditional computer interfaces.

Credits from the litl blog:

Thank you and credit to John Chuang, Aaron Tang, Chris Bambacus, Chris Moody, Havoc Pennington, Eben Eliason and Ron Frank of litl; Daniel Kuo, David Fore, Jenea Hayes and Noah Guyot of Cooper; and Christian Marc Schmidt and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

The best-rated automatic cat feeder on Amazon has some serious interaction design problems, risking both well-fed cats and confident owners. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the machines that take care of our four-footed friends.

Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

As you may know, Alan Cooper, our fearless leader and co-founder, is the creator of Visual Basic (or at least the visual part-- Bill Gates is the one who decided to marry it to Basic). MSDN has recently put together an interesting series of interviews around the history of Visual Studio, including this one with Alan.

Regardless of the countless poorly designed applications that have been brought into the world by Visual Basic, it's hard not to see the monumental impact Visual Studio has had on the way software is created. Hear from the godfather himself about the making-of and implications of his game-changing work.

If you're having issues (or have issues) with Silverlight, you can find other formats of the video here on the MSDN site.

Here's a video featuring Eoin Woods, a software architect at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), talking about Apex, the new equities portfolio management system being built for the company's well known active management group:

Cooper worked with closely with BGI users and developers for almost 2 years going from from concept to detailed design and well into construction.

Much of the talk is focused on the technical architecture of the system, but you get the first glimpse of the user interface at 23 minutes in. Around the hour mark he takes questions, the first of which is about interaction design.

We're really excited about how it turned out, and a lot of credit and congratulations are due to the incredibly smart and talented folks at BGI.

We're excited to announce the release of the litl, a simple, and quite frankly, very cool, computer for the home.

We're proud to say that we helped design the litl. We worked for a year alongside the amazing folks at litl, as well as a number of other partners including fuseproject, Fort Franklin and Pentagram to make the vision a reality.

The litl can be used in both laptop and easel modes (to support lean-forward and lean-back interactions), and does away with a lot of the unseemly artifacts of more traditional desktop idioms like folders and menus. It's closely integrated with the social Web and designed around family life.

We'll get a case study about our efforts up on our site as soon as we can. In the interim, check out the litl site for more about the computer and the company.

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

Credits: Emma van Niekerk and Suzy Thompson.

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

Last night, our own Kim Goodwin presented her talk "Designing a Unified Experience" at the IxDA NYC, generously hosted by our friends at LiquidNet.

(Click the button on the bottom right of the "screen" for a fullscreen view.)

About the talk

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

The Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosts Lane Halley and Jeff Patton in Portland for a talk and workshop on blending agile and user-centered design. On Wednesday night, May 6th, Lane and Jeff present a talk titled “Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile.” On Thursday, May 7th, they'll teach a full-day workshop titled “All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques.” Here's more information about the course and registration details. We hope to see you there!

Enterprise resource planning systems must, by their very nature, serve the needs of a wide variety of people, and the implementation of these systems can result in the needs of one person being sacrificed in order to meet the needs of another. In an article on Forbes.com, Dan Woods does a nice job of laying out the pitfalls and frustrations attending ERP and other monolithic business software.

We particularly like the article because he mentions Alan and credits him for formalizing the use of personas, but it's also a sophisticated look at how system design is begging for effective tools to understand the network of human needs that must be balanced in order to create effective solutions:

...[S]ome users get more value from software applications than others. This is because software is written from a certain user perspective. In many cases, the problems and challenges faced in making software work can be explained by the tension created when the design of software is dominated by one perspective over another. In CRM systems, for example, the sales reps who must do the work of entering data about contacts and meetings often must be bludgeoned or bribed to do so. They get little benefit from such tracking, as opposed to the VP of sales, for whom the data is a vital way to understand what is happening.

Check it out "One Software Doesn't Fit All" on Forbes.com.

Join us for a beer at the spectacular Autodesk Design Gallery to celebrate the release of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, the definitive field guide of Cooper's design tools and techniques written by our own Kim Goodwin.

Weds, February 18
6:00 - 8:00

One Market Street
Suite 200
San Francisco
(here's a map)

Please feel free to bring your colleagues, friends and anyone else who's as excited about the practice of design as we are.

Building security requires that all attendees be on the guest list. Please let us know if you'll be able to join us by RSVPing here:

http://crush3r.com/page/pcgsgmmtum
(Anyone can RSVP — just send this along to your friends)

For more about the book, Kim posted a sneak peek at the contents a couple weeks back. And of course, you can pre-order on Amazon.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion.

In this edition, we thought a bit about public transit. It's great for the environment and pocketbook, but it isn’t without its own headaches. Managing departure delays and worrying about getting off at the right stop make commuting less carefree than it could be. So how can we make the experience better? Meet Commuter Buddy, a concept application that lets commuters sit back and enjoy the ride. So…enjoy.

Credits: Suzy Thompson, Emma van Niekerk and Alex Long.

Tim sparked an interesting discussion around the office last week when he circulated a post from Derek Powazek's blog called "Programmers are tiny gods." It offers a provocative analogy for the designer/programmer relationship:

Programmers are the Gods of their tiny worlds. They create something out of nothing. In their command-line universe, they say when it’s sunny and when it rains. And the tiny universe complies ... So if you’re working with a programmer, you have to treat him or her like a God. You have to pray. You cannot issue edicts. You have to come on bended knee. “Here’s the problem I have. I need a solution. Please help.”

It's from a series called “Things I learned the Hard Way.”

Tim McCoy: It's a nice insight into the psyche of many development organizations. This is meshing with a sentiment I’ve heard a lot lately: “Don’t tell me what to build. Tell me what you need built.” It’s a subtle distinction that replaces the feeling of micromanagement with one of empowerment.

David Fore: Right. But this sentiment begs a fundamental question. When a programmer objects to being told what to build, how can biz decision makers ensure they aren't wandering into the weeds, building a taco stand rather than a playground, let's say. In other words, taken to the extreme, this sentiment means the inmates shall run the asylum. Alan, do you want to rewrite your book?

Tim McCoy: For me, it doesn’t challenge the notion that design has the responsibility of describing the product and development the responsibility of creating it.

I recently had a conversation with a developer who said “I want the definition of behavior as soon as possible, and I want to delay the definition of implementation for as long as possible.”

The issue is that being told what to build is a command, not a dialogue. Being told instead what needs building is an invitation to collaborate. That acknowledges programmers as professionals with expertise designers don’t generally have. (In turn, it assumes programmers acknowledge designers as professionals with expertise they don’t generally have.)

Programmers then have the flexibility to assess what building that thing would entail, express concerns over feasibility, timeline, motive, etc., and offer alternatives or adjustments that impact their ability to be successful.

So it’s about removing the friction to object to in the first place. Derek is being sensational with the bended knee bit, but the sentiment is sound. The payoff of his post is this:

The good news is, programmers want their work to be used, and the good ones know that the design matters. So programmers and designers actually have the same goal: getting the stuff used. If each can honor the talents of the other, great things can happen.

It’s about approaching developers as co-conspirators in producing great work: designers know what needs to happen and developers know how it can.

Lane Halley: I think you’re right on when you say “being told what needs building is an invitation to collaborate” and that designers and developers can be “co-conspirators in producing great work.” However, there are some nuances to the situation.

I think that when SW developers are removed from business decisions about what they are building (e.g. work for a salary, or code for hire), there’s a sense of relief when someone, anyone, steps up and takes ownership for the “what” of the product. However, at many companies, this responsibility for the “what” isn’t totally owned by Designers, it’s a space shared with Business Analysts, Product Managers and other folks.

I’ve also seen small teams of collaborative generalists at Web 2.0 companies and startups who have a different attitude. Those folks don’t think of “design” as a separate role, it’s more like an activity, or a skill set that has to exist within the team, somewhere. SW developers who work in this environment feel a greater sense of ownership of the product, and expect to be involved in defining the “what” too.

Tim McCoy: That’s a great point. The dynamic in a small team, startup, or indie development shop is usually much different from the situation Derek describes. I think it’s a side effect of the traditionally down-stream role developers have in larger established organizations that leads to this outlook, and why it’s design’s responsibility to say “hey, I’m not coming down here to drop a spec on your desk, I want to talk about how we can solve this thing.”

People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.

This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.

Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)

A while back, several of us in the studio had a little spontaneous discussion about voice user interfaces over email. We thought we'd share some highlights. Please pile on in the comments section.

Steve Calde: What are people’s experiences with voice user interfaces? [A client] is interested in learning more about how to document voice-activated systems, and wondered if we had any experience to share.

Alan Cooper: You could also suggest to them that voice interfaces are inherently bad and will never work very well.

Dave Cronin: Why are they inherently bad?

I agree that they often are bad, but it seems to be more an implementation issue than something intrinsic about voice commands.

Stefan Klocek: The reason they are inherently flawed is that we use our voice for other more important things in addition to the system level input we would like to give to our DVD player. There is no way for the voice interface to understand that the context has changed and that I am no longer giving it a command, rather I am now giving my child a command or am simply muttering to myself. Of course we could imagine a system in which we indicate context by saying “DVD player - pause”, but this is adjusting my input to the deficiencies of the system.

This year, we continued our Halloween dress-up tradition with the theme of "monster mash-up." We did the ordinary challenge of coming up with a clever costume one better by mixing it with our love of puns. Everyone came dressed as a monster mixed with another costume idea.

The final set of realized costumes included The Creature From The Barack Lagoon, a skeleton out of the closet, a flying purple people greeter, a fairy goth mother, Robert Ghoul-et, a M(ummy)ILF, and some monsters of rock. We planned to crawl down to the Embarcadero for lunch, but with the possibility of rain, we lurched and lumbered across the street to dig up some pizza. Returning to our lair, we fired up the Wii for a monsters-of-mash-up-rock, Guitar Hero play-off.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator on Vimeo.
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

Taking the Call on Vimeo
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

If you're a big city driver, you know the story: You spend 15 minutes hunting for a parking spot and another 5 hunting for enough change to put in the meter. You leave the restaurant only to find that you have a ticket because the spot you parked in is illegal every third Tuesday when the moon is full. Had enough? We have, so we decided to do something about it.