Cooper’s new Design the Future series of posts opens the door to how we think about and create the future of design, and how design can influence changing technologies. Join us in this new series as we explore the ideas behind agentive technology, and summon a metaphor to help guide us to the next interface.

Part 1: Toward a New UX

If we consider the evolution of technology—from thigh-bones-as-clubs to the coming singularity (when artificial intelligence leaves us biological things behind)—there are four supercategories of tools that influence the nature of what’s to come:

1. Manual tools are things like rocks, plows, and hammers; well-formed masses of atoms that shape the forces we apply to them. Manual tools were the earliest tools.
2. Powered tools are systems—like windmills and electrical machines—that set things in motion and let us manipulate the forces present in the system. Powered tools came after manual tools, and took a quantum leap with the age of electricity. They kept becoming more and more complex until World War II, when the most advanced technology of the time, military aircraft, were so complex that even well trained people couldn’t manage them, and the entire field of interaction design was invented in response, as “human factors engineering.”
3. Assistive tools do some of the low-level information work for us—like spell check in word processing software and proximity alerts in cars—harnessing algorithms, ubiquitous sensor networks, smart defaults, and machine learning. These tools came about decades after the silicon revolution.
4. The fourth category is the emerging category, the new thing that bears some consideration and preparation. I have been thinking and presenting about this last category across the world:
   Agentive tools, which do more and more stuff on their own accord, like learning about their users, and are approaching the artificial intelligence that will ultimately, if you believe Vernor Vinge, eventually begin evolving beyond our ken.

Read More

OneNote is, as you've seen in the prior posts (OneNote for Interaction Designers and OneNote for Interaction Designers: the Nuts and Bolts, awesome for design meetings. But it's also useful in research and client presentations, too.

How we use it in research

[From the video, slightly edited:] Having a laptop open in a research interview puts a barrier between you and the person you're interviewing, and the typing can be quite distracting and intimidating for the interviewee. But typed notes are searchable, making for very useful reference when you’re synthesizing your notes. OneNote is a nice compromise. With a Tablet in slate mode, we remove the physical barrier of the laptop, and as long as you have the pen in a “Create Handwriting” mode, you can later go back and search your notes as if they were typed. (The handwriting recognition is pretty amazing.)
Read More

In a prior post I explained how Cooper uses OneNote as a tool for Design Meetings. In this post I'm going to presume you're a designer and eager to get a quick primer to the tool. Then I'll share some best practices we've developed at Cooper.

A quick primer: Five tools

OneNote is a rich program, meant for a number of different scenarios. Here I’m only going to introduce the most basic concepts you need to get going on using OneNote as a quick design sketching tool.

1. The infinite canvas

You write on a canvas that is for all practical purposes, infinite. You can simply use the touch screen to slide to empty paper. That canvas can have a grid-paper like background, or it can be white. For most of the time I leave that grid on, to help keep lines straight and aesthetically pleasing.
Read More

Whiteboards are cool, I guess. Fast, easy, familiar. But really, they're nothing compared to digital sketching. At Cooper, we use digital sketching in almost all of our projects, and almost always in OneNote. In the next few posts I'll share how we use it and why we think it's awesome, see what you think. But first, to whet your appetite, some example drawings from Cooper designers straight out of the program.

These aren't meant to be finished designs, of course, but examples of how communicative and illustrative designers can be with their earliest ideas using the tool, and doing so very quickly. Each of our designers has their particular way of working, but in general we share the same setup.

Read More

In classes and cocktail hours, lots of people ask me either how they can switch careers into interaction design, or how they can improve their self-trained “IxD” chops.

Of course Cooper offers a number of awesome training courses to help folks do just that (but we can’t be everywhere in the world at once) and there are great university courses here in San Francisco Bay Area and around the world (but not everyone can take that kind of time off).

So if you’re a self-starter, unable to attend a training session and can’t take time off for school, or want to be able to speak the language of interaction design, what can you do? How can you make those first steps to getting more familiar with the field?

I recommend reading up on some of the fundamentals, join up with practitioners online, and actually start designing. More on each follows.

Read up on the fundamentals

Get your hands on copies of the following three books and give them a good read. Not a flip through, and not a skim. These are the basic things you need to know. Please note that I'm aware of the conflict of interest of a Practice Lead at Cooper saying that two of three fundamental books are ones published by Cooper, but even after much handwringing and gnashing of teeth over the seeming conflict of interests, these are still my recommendations. They would be if I didn't work here.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by our own Alan Cooper

"Inmates" details the reasons why designers should lead the charge of software design, and why personas are the primary tool we use to do it.

The Design of Everyday Things
by Donald Norman

Norman plainly lays out the fundamentals of design thinking from cognitive psychology, industrial design, and interaction design standpoints.

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, & David Cronin

AF3 contains best practices for the medium of the human-computer interface.

(If you happen to be a sci-fi fan, I’ll certainly also recommend my own book and blog as a way of applying design thinking to interfaces that appear in that perennially-favorite genre, but it’s hardly considered a fundamental.)

Read More

Shouts out to all the newly minted Cooper U alumni in the South Pacific! We had students from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia, representing a wide array of specialties: Marketing, development, visual design, company ownership, user research, and yes, interaction design as well.

Some travel snafus had some students arriving later, but we forged ahead with Day 1.

Following are some images and video from the fun and intense learning week we spent together.

When it was all said and done, students told me that they loved the pace and the content of the course, specifically appreciating learning...

• The power of pair design, and what to do if your company doesn't do it formally
• Why personas work
• How we make personas so they're useful design and communication tools
• That building anti-personas are sometimes necessary
• The principle of iterating in the cheapest medium possible
• How we align Agile methodologies and Goal-Directed Interaction Design

In a personal email, one student even told me it gave him fresh new eyes for understanding how to think about and critique his freshly-downloaded iTunes 11. He said he felt more equipped to have rational design conversations about things now, which is as much as any teacher could ask for.

Congratulations, again, to a vibrant class for crossing the...

(and thanks to April Hague-Smith for the lovely horse sketch. :)

Want a Cooper U in your part of the world?

Cooper loves the opportunity to travel to new places and teach how it is we do what we do: we learn a lot in the process. If you're around the world and think there's a classroom's worth of people eager to attend, let us know and we'll try and get there as soon as we can.

On a recent flight from Amsterdam to Houston, I turned on the “moving-map system” in the in-seat entertainment system and was surprised to see that though we were halfway through the 10-hour flight, the map made it look like we were minutes from landing in Texas. Sure, I had dozed the delightful doze of the jet lagged international flight, but had I actually passed out? Or had time slipped by that quickly? Shouldn’t we be somewhere over Greenland? That looks about halfway.

Then I realized that it was the map itself that was to blame. The arc was being true to the plane’s path across the map, but with a map as distorted as this one, it was bound to be confusing.

Like most cool things, this gets nerdy quick. See, when you try and take something that’s pretty much a sphere (the Earth) and fit it to a rectangle (the in-flight entertainment screen) you’re going to run into some deformation. There are many, many ways to crack this mathematical nut (the awesome site Radical Cartography lists 30) and each optimizes some things at the costs of others.

The designer of this system had chosen to use the familiar Plate Carrée projection of the Earth. It’s ancient, and quite familiar to travelers. It’s used everywhere. So certainly, it optimizes for initial use. At a simple glance, the traveler knows what he’s looking at.

But this projection, in forcing the longitude and latitude lines into tidy squares, severely squashes areas that are closer to the poles. The result is that—unless you’re traveling from one point on the equator to another—an actual straight line across the surface of the planet will appear on this map as oddly arced. What’s worse is that the arc won’t mean the same thing across its length. Nearer the poles it will be stretched and closer to the equator it will be squished, resulting in the weird, jarring experience of watching the plane zip to Ontario, and then crawl to the Gulf Coast.

Read More

Whew. That was close. As every year, there’s a risk that we’ll be overrun with with zombies, werewolves, vampires, sasquatch(es), and mummies before the veil that separates the world seals tight for another year. But a quick tally around the Cooper offices shows that here, at least, we all made it. Hope all our readers are yet un-undead as well. While we’re taking this breather, we’re called to reflect a bit on this year’s interaction design for monsters.

Monsters are extreme personas

One of the power of personas is that they encourage designers to be more extrospective, to stop designing for themselves. Monsters as personas push this to an extreme. It’s rare that you’ll ever be designing technology for humans who can’t perceive anything, can’t speak any modern language, live nearly eternally, shape shift, etc. But each of these outrageous constraints challenges designers to create a design that could accommodate it, and often ends up driving what’s new or special about the design.

But then again...

Some of the constraints of the monsters are human constraints writ large (or writ strangely).

• Juan wasn’t a useful person in and of himself, but his users exercised flash mob requirements of real-time activation and coordination. Are there flash mob lessons to learn?
• Emily was fighting a zombie infection, but real-world humans are fighting infections all the time. Is there something we can use for medical interfaces?
• Metanipsah has no modern language and a mechanical mental model, but most of us have mobile wayfinding needs at one time or another.
• The Vampire Capitalists behind Genotone took the long view, reminding us of burgeoning post-growth business models.

So maybe they’re great personas after all, guiding us to great design because they’re extreme, just like the canonical OXO Good Grips story, where designing for people with arthritis led the design teams to create products with universal appeal.

Read More

Poor Alexi Devers: Bitten by a "dog," then finding himself naked in a park on the morning after the next full moon, a pulpy mess of unidentifiable victim, dewey and glistening on the ground around him. News stories that day confirm that a terrible murder has taken place by a rabid "dog," and Alexi looks up from the paper with the wide-eyed stare of the recently diagnosed. What will he tell Debbi, his girlfriend? How will he keep her safe? Fortunately for him, after a Google search and a few false leads, he discovers WereSafe, a service for people with "dog" problems just like him. It's expensive, sure, but what choice has he got? One web form and credit card number later, he's joined the service and a special package is on the way.

The WereSafe service has two main service aspects. One to keep the monster contained, and the other to hide the problem from the innocent.

Read More

As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we return to Metanipsah, Vengeful Mummy.

Ordinarily, we’d have qualms about helping someone with such a violent agenda. But his heart scarab was stolen by grave robbers (OK, fine, “archaeologists,” whatever) so really, they’ve got what’s coming to them.

Metanipsah is our oldest persona. His mental model can’t account for technology beyond simple machines, and is built around a paradigm of myth and magic. Fortunately, there are a lot of cutting-edge technology options that might be indistinguishable to him from myth, according to Mummyologist Chris Noessel. With that in mind, we're pleased to share the Vengeance Buddy.

Read More