Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper
Alan Cooperis an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth3 June 1952
CountryUnited States of America
E-mail is the most influential application ever to appear on a personal computer, and it remains sadly deficient.
If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likeable person.
A lot of people think, and Microsoft is happy to let them think, that all great things are invented by Microsoft. In fact, very, very little has been invented by Microsoft.
I have a cell phone that doesn't behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don't start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.
Reducing a product's definition to a list of features and functions ignores the real opportunity - orchestrating technological capability to serve human needs and goals.
There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.
What Microsoft is really good at is endlessly iterating and revving - incrementally improving things that already exist - and those things that already exist are generally acquired from the outside.
No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.
Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.
If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.
Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.
There's only one thing you can use against pure logic, and that's common sense.
A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is magic. If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.
It's harder than you might think to squander millions of dollars, but a flawed software development process is a tool well suited to the job.