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
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.
Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.
Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information. Typography should not vary widely in an interface.
To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.
Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is 'on paper.'
Usability methods are like sandpapering a chair. If you are making a chair, the sandpaper can make it smoother. But no amount of sandpaper will turn a chair into a table.
You Don't Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted!
Form follows function straight to hell.
Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again, To scenes by memory's silver chain Close-linked, and ever yet apart, That like the vine, whose tendrils young Around some fostering branch have clung, Grown with its growth, as tho' it sprung From one united heart.
Computers no longer interface with humans--they interact, and the interaction will become steadily deeper, more subtle, and more crucial to our collective sanity and ultimate survival.
One of the most heinous, insidious lies is the notion that you have to be an asshole to be a successful business person.
Men do not greet one another like this ... except perhaps at rugby club dinners.