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Interaction Designer

Wanted: Compulsive problem-solvers with excellent visualization, collaboration, and communication skills.

At Cooper, interaction designers work in pairs, forming a partnership that supports and encourages leaps of imagination while maintaining cohesion. Team pairings represent two distinct roles reflecting natural divergences in personality and strengths, and we refer to the roles according to the core skills each must bring: Generation and Synthesis.

What Cooper interaction designers do

For either interaction design role, you must be quick-witted and passionate about designing products the right way for the people who use them. This means you’re also good at:

Understanding the complex systems, processes, and relationships of people and products.
Creatively solving problems at all levels of detail: from the big picture to the nuts and bolts
Presenting your work before a room of curious and sometimes skeptical developers, interested and sometimes demanding marketers, and time-challenged and sometimes impatient executives.
Learning new things. You’re as interested in what worries stakeholders as you are in understanding what delights surgeons, commodities traders, teenagers, and purchasing agents.
Being decisive. You value feedback but don’t require it to make a judgment call.
Working collaboratively. We believe the exchange of ideas among the members of small, nimble teams is the fastest route to the best solutions.
Empathizing. Our design method is built around satisfying the needs and motivations of people. If you want to make things better, we want you.

Two flavors of interaction designer

Both roles are fundamentally concerned with creating compelling interactive experiences, each bringing a distinct perspective, disposition, and responsibility to the partnership.

Here’s a summary of the big differences between the roles:

	Generation	Synthesis
Focuses on	Establishing the interactive structure and flow between a person and a product, service, or environment.	Articulating and synthesizing the overall experience people have with a product, service, or environment.
Takes responsibility for	Driving the concept direction	Ensuring that concepts are coherent and satisfy user needs and goals
Leads during design meetings	Generating ideas toward a solution	Synthesis of ideas, defining the problem, clarifying the solution, explicating rationale
Expertise	Concept, visualization	Analysis, communication
Disposition toward creativity	Generative	Methodical, integrating
Comfort zone	Invention	Evaluation, clarification
Approach to problems	Draw a picture	Tell a story
Advocates	Structure, flow	Cohesiveness, context
Thinks in terms of	Concepts, models, experience	Anatomy, relationships, experience

Read on for more detail about each role. If you’re interested in being an interaction designer at Cooper, but you’re not sure which flavor you are, take a look at the design challenges. If one jumps out as particularly fun, that’s a good sign!

IxD: Generation

The IxD: Generation role is primarily responsible for invention, defining the concept direction, and generating ideas toward fruition.

In design meetings, you’ll come armed with a seemingly endless supply of solution ideas for the problems at hand, ready to refine and evolve the design through discussions with your partner. Later, you’ll bring the design to life with pixels, while your partner crafts the commentary to help our clients understand important ideas. “Gens” excel at visualizing solutions with digital tools, whiteboard markers, napkins and ballpoint pens, even sticks and patches of dirt. If you’re compelled to express your ideas visually anywhere, anytime, in whatever medium happens to be at your disposal, you might be right for the IxD: Generation role.

What it takes to be one

We’re looking for candidates with 4+ years of professional experience designing digital products and services (but we’re open-minded—by all means please do get in touch if you have less experience but are ready to rock our world).

Right now, your job title may be interaction, interface, or user experience designer; information architect; or even GUI developer.

You also:

Think more clearly when you have a whiteboard marker in hand
Can rapidly crank out screens in Adobe Fireworks
Believe critique and collaboration can bring out the best ideas

If this sounds like the kind of work you want to do, check out our Interaction Design Generation Challengeor emailwith your portfolio and resume.

IxD: Synthesis

The IxD: Synthesis role is responsible for ensuring that the design is coherent, cohesive, and satisfies user needs and goals.

Those in the IxD: Synthesis role excel at evaluation, clarification, analysis, and communication. If you’re compelled to ask questions that expose gaps and flaws, draw connections between concepts and ideas, hone designs, and reveal opportunities for additional exploration, all while keeping an eye on the broader context to ensure cohesion within the design and its broader environment, you might be right for the IxD: Synthesis role.

What it takes to be one

We’re looking for candidates with 4+ years of professional experience related to products and services (but we’re open- minded—by all means please do get in touch if you have less experience but are ready to rock our world).

Right now, you may be an interaction, interface, or user experience designer; information architect; GUI developer; product or project manager; technical writer; user researcher; usability engineer. Or, you may be a curious person with a wide range of interests who knows there must be a better way to design and develop products.

You also:

Help people around you think more clearly
Know good design when you see it
Salivate at the thought of crafting compelling explanations that give life to your research and detailed designs
Have strong writing skills, along with a strong desire to write
Are an organized thinker and project planner who helps others be effective and efficient

If this sounds like the kind of work you want to do, check out our Interaction Design Synthesis Challengeor emailwith your portfolio and resume.

Interaction Design Generation Challenge

We are looking for your ability to:

The aim of these exercises is to help us see how well you might fit the Interaction Designer Generation role.

Identify and solve design problems at both the conceptual and detailed level
Describe your design and tell us why it’s good
Understand the people for whom you are designing

Feel free to use whatever tools you feel you need, but make sure the response is your own. Provide enough illustration and written description of your designs, in whatever medium you are comfortable, to get your point across. Finished art is not necessary. Spend as much or as little time as you wish, but an hour on Part One and no more than a couple of hours on Part Two should be plenty. Above all: Have fun! If this isn't fun, this job probably isn't for you.

Part One

1	Microsoft Word has a feature that allows you to create tables. When you click on the Insert tab in the ribbon, and select the Table option, you gets this:
2	You can then use the Design and Layout tabs in the ribbon to format and adjust the table.

Your mission: Improve the user experience of this feature by redesigning the interaction and interface for creating and formatting tables. Think big, but make things easy and straightforward, and please don’t feel constrained to stay within the ribbon paradigm. You’ll find this design problem in the book Design for a Digital Age by Kim Goodwin. LocalGuide is introduced on page 98, and is used as a basis for many exercises throughout the book. For this exercise, there are example interviews on page 155 of the book or you can download the user research. Don’t necessarily feel compelled to deeply analyze all of these interviews; they’re there to help spark your best thinking.

Part Two

Imagine a service called LocalGuide, a small touchscreen device available in cities and other popular tourist destinations that provides information about where to go and what to see. It could offer maps, audio, video, photographic and textual content for tours, directions, restaurants, and other topics.

The touchscreen travel guide could include advertising and might rented from kiosks or be provided by hotels, car rental agencies and convention sponsors for use by people visiting the area. Your mission: Figure out what exactly this service should provide and how it should work and feel, and design some of the most common and important screens and interactions.

Interaction Design Synthesis Challenge

We are looking for your ability to:

The purpose of this two-part exercise is to demonstrate the strength of your synthesis and communication skills, and give us a good idea of how you think about design problems.

Clear, concise explanations
An understanding of your audience
An ability to synthesize and prioritize information
Effective combination of words, images, diagrams, and whatever else you need to convey information. We’re not assessing your drawing skills — just the clarity of your communication.

Part One

AT&T has sent you back in time to the year 1850 to help the company create a telephone service in the United States. Marketers are already at work selling the virtues of telephone communication; your job is to explain to ordinary citizens of 1850 how to use this revolutionary technology by developing the printed materials to be delivered with each telephone.

You can assume AT&T has issued the customer a phone number and installed a telephone. As is true today, dialing “0” will connect the customer to an operator. Keep in mind telegraphs have been in common use for about five years, but people have never before seen or heard of a telephone. What do they need to know to be able to understand, use, and desire this strange new device?

Part Two

Imagine your team is designing an application for managing digital photos. Based on the following set of raw user interview notes, your task is to write a summary to help the product manager and executive team understand the major behavioral patterns from the research.

Understanding user behaviors and frustrations will help the stakeholders assess what the new product should do to be successful. Your challenge: clearly, compellingly, and succinctly lay out the most critical commonalities, differences, and issues among the people interviewed. (Note: We are not looking for a persona set, but simply for an understanding of the interview observations.)

User Interview Notes: Teri

Late 40’s, single, office manager
Describes herself as a photography enthusiast who has sold a few images
Uses a 6 megapixel “prosumer” digital SLR with multiple lenses. Wishes the resolution were higher, but since the lenses lock her into a single manufacturer, she can’t upgrade without going to a $2500 “pro” digital camera.

Puts her “serious photographs” in folders based on content (mountains, ocean, desert), but is frustrated she has to pick just one way to categorize an image—it would take too much hard drive space to save each image in multiple places. This makes it hard to find a particular image later.
Lives in a tiny place, so there’s minimal room for display—displays only select “art” photographs in frames.
Chooses minimalist frames for the most part. May choose more elaborate frames if they “speak to the picture.”
Takes photos 12 times/month (sporadic), but when she does, she may shoot 300,500+ at a time.
May sign a photo on the front if it’s a gift.
Includes subject and date in file names (specific names of plants, views, people, if known).

Half the photos get deleted because they don’t live up to her quality standards for composition, lighting, exposure, depth of field, etc.
Takes some photos at family events such as birthdays—these are saved in folders labeled by event (so-and-so’s birthday) and date. Individual photos are not renamed.
Organizing a day’s shooting takes 23 hours— annoyingly time-consuming.
Often looks through to find a specific photo (usually by subject) for her own reference or for a gift.
May give gifts of color prints of “serious” photos a few times a year, but doesn’t otherwise share them the way she shares birthday party photos and so on.
Never manipulates raw photos—the photo is either good enough, or it gets thrown out.

User Interview Notes: Pete

50ish accountant.

Describes himself as a “classic sightseer” and “museum buff.” Travels by himself a lot for business and pleasure.
May take 50 photos/day when traveling, especially in a new city. Seldom takes photos when not traveling.
Most of his photos are stored electronically on his work laptop’s hard drive. (Why the laptop? It’s portable, so his photo collection can travel with him.)
Looks at photos when he’s cleaning up his hard drive— gets distracted for an hour by his photo directory.
Likes to share his photos when he comes back from a trip. Shares photos the other person would be most interested in.
Since he’s gone digital, has not added to the photo collection he displays in frames at home.
Hates the default numbering system for file names (image 001, image 002...)
Hard to look through a bunch of photos at once and tell if they’re any good—tiny thumbnails are too hard to see. Would like something that let him look at new photos one by one and easily edit name, attributes, description, or decide to toss them. Would minimize the back and forth between Windows and various editing programs.
Takes pictures of art and displays in museums, airplanes, cars, things that amuse him (e.g., shag carpet walls at Graceland), architectural details.
Mostly uses a fairly inexpensive digital camera. The beauty of digital photography is he doesn’t “worry about the expense of burning through film.” He can take photos of placards and things to document a journey, and can take more chances with a photo. The disadvantage is there are lots of photos he has to sort out later.
His best photos are in albums on Shutterfly.com; this makes them easier for him to see and share them with family. Also easier to add descriptive text.
Photos given to him by others are in one large directory with no organization.
Does “slide shows” for people on his laptop using Shut- terfly—you can use the upload software offline.

Storage space is not a big issue because he takes fairly low resolution photos.
Quality of digital isn’t that great, especially in museums with poor lighting, but at least it helps him remember a trip and how he felt on that trip. Misses the quality of film, but the convenience of digital is usually worth the trade-off.
Plugs in camera and uploads images (often on the road or when he’s about to run out of camera memory). Later he’ll label directories, toss a few truly bad pho- tos, tweak and name the good ones (especially if he’ll have a hard time recalling what they are), then goes through them in another session to decide which ones to upload to Shutterfly and share. Uploads photos to Shutterfly from work—faster Internet connection.
Looking at photos on laptop screen seems subopti- mal—peculiar glare at some angles, etc.—screen qual- ity not good enough.
Has one top-level photo directory with subdirectories. Directories are usually named by city name and date he was there. Within each city, there may be multiple days in subdirectories.
Not a pro, but willing to tweak photos a little in Photo- shop (such as to reduce glare off someone’s glasses or improve contrast in the photo).
Corrects brightness a lot—with his camera, photos seem to come out too dark (much darker than on little camera screen).
Rotates photos in default Microsoft editor.
Frustration—can’t easily label and archive digital photos. He doesn’t want to do a bunch of work on Shutterfly and not get the benefit of that on his hard drive. Also, it’s a dotcom and could disappear any day. Response time is slow too.
Can capture some basic info in file name, but can’t capture other info like location, date, description.
In museums, takes a photo of a painting, then takes a photo of the placard by the painting—would like to as- sociate them somehow.
Would like to retain chronological order in which he took photos, but also track info about them.