There’s no substitute
for an inventive spark*
Clever ideas are the heart and soul of a great design, but craft is essential, too. Delivering a delightful product or service requires commitment to a vision, considered decisions, attention to the details, and careful coordination of all the moving parts.
Our structured approach focuses our creativity on the right opportunities and provides a robust context for collaboration. We sequence decisions in a meaningful way, so that you're closely involved, well informed and are able to plan with confidence. And, we help you communicate the vision as it emerges, so you can build momentum towards delivering a successful product.
We start by understanding people & context
How to get started
We take project planning very seriously around here. During the engagement planning process, one of our engagement leads (a senior Cooper designer, not a sales person) works with you to shape a project that balances your goals with your schedule and budget. Give us a call or drop us a line and we can walk you through the process.
We start by working with key stakeholders from your organization to get a clear understanding of your vision, business goals, and constraints.
Then we interview and observe your users, digging deep to understand how they think and behave, what motivates them, and where the pain is. User research not only gives us a concrete understanding of environment, tastes and workflow, but it also fuels our intuition and inspires our empathy. We don't just want to design things that look cool—we also care about making people's lives better.
We bring the research to life
We make the research actionable by creating a set of communication materials to facilitate conversations about the user audience and their needs and desires. We model key behavior patterns observed during research with a set of personas (descriptions of archetypal users) and examine usage contexts and the opportunities they present.
These personas provide a consistent conceptual thread throughout the project. We use personas to focus our attention when we're establishing a direction and generating design ideas, and to test our ideas before they're evolved enough to share with real users. We can move the design forward with confidence, knowing we can trace every decision back to a disciplined understanding of real people.
We begin designing
by telling stories
Once we have a solid sense of who we're designing for and clearly see the shape of the opportunity space, we shift into imagination mode. We start by telling stories. We imagine each persona's ideal experience with your product or service, and describe these experiences in a narrative format that we call a scenario.
Scenarios form the backbone of our creative process. They highlight what it will take to delight your users, and they help us express the requirements of the experience from functional and emotional perspectives. The real power of storytelling is that it's highly collaborative; it's easy for all kinds of stakeholders to meaningfully contribute their ideas.
Storytelling is also flexible; we can iterate through many different ideas in a very short amount of time. You could say that a good story is the earliest stage of prototyping: We use scenarios to establish a vision in a way that allows for communication, evaluation and evolution. This helps us work with you to prioritize capabilities, and to establish a strategy for how your product or service will reflect and extend your brand in order to appeal to your target market.
We set a clear design direction
Once everyone agrees we've got the plot right, we start sketching. We explore a number of approaches to key interactions and to the visual and physical expressions of your product. We go broad before we go deep, generating piles of ideas to find elegant answers to the big questions.
Then we build from these ideas, storyboarding the scenarios with rough sketches, while establishing a high-level design language. We make the vision concrete by focusing on critical interactions, anatomy, and how it all fits together. The whole time, we work with you to make sure we staying true to your objectives, and with engineers to start prototyping in order to assess feasibility and begin the implementation process.
How long does it take?
Carefully crafting a world-class user experience takes time. Grounding our ideas in a solid understanding of users and getting to a fair degree of depth and breadth with some iteration often takes between two and six months.
If you're short on time or money, we can accelerate our approach to help you move forward in as little as two or three weeks.
We craft the details
We create powerful communication tools
We collaborate with developers as we go to clearly communicate the designs for construction. With pixel-perfect screen drawings and detailed explanations of behaviors, controls, visual style, and guidance for extending the design, developers know exactly what to build. We're equally as comfortable creating lightweight design notes and complete detailed specifications; we'll help you
figure out exactly what you need. Once things start looking and feeling real, we can create prototypes, videos, storyboards, and presentations to clearly and powerfully communicate the product vision to executives, investors, customers and other team-members, helping you build momentum towards a successful product.
We work closely with you along the way
We can teach you and your team how to do all of this
We're transparent about our methods and thinking so that you can understand where we're coming from and learn how to pick up where we leave off. We also facilitate workshops and teach courses to provide more formal instruction and practice in how we think about design and strategy.
Our project teams include a combination of interaction designers, visual designers, and industrial designers. Our people are very experienced and entirely accessible to their clients. Our teams are almost always dedicated to only one project at a time and are assigned for the duration of the engagement, so you don't have to worry about an ever-changing cast of characters. Our process and team models are intended to
keep our clients in the driver's seat, allowing ample opportunities for input and feedback at all levels of design. Our process and practices also help us stick to the plan without any unpleasant surprises. Our approach also enables us to closely integrate interaction, visual, and industrial design, as well as implementation, ensuring that all aspects of the product or service work together in concert to create a simple, compelling user experience.
