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
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.
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.
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.
If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.
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.
No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.
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.
We're building what I call 'software apartheid.' We're in the process of creating a divided society: those who can use technology on one side, and those who can't on the other. And it happens to divide neatly along economic lines.
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.
The payoff of a customer-centric approach to software and digital product design is substantial and long-lasting for both companies and their customers.
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.
I think the phrase 'computer-literate' is an evil phrase. You don't have to be 'automobile-literate' to get along in this world. You don't have to be 'telephone-literate.' Why should you have to be 'computer-literate'?