Cooper is honored and delighted to receive the award for “Best in Category, Optimizing”. We are proud to be in the company of some of the most creative and innovative designers and grateful to the Interaction Awards Jury for their consideration.

Over a year ago, Cooper teamed up with Practice Fusion to design an app that revolved around how medical professionals think. Instead of asking them to learn a new way of organizing information, this EMR for iPad app leveraged their natural mental model of treating and working with people. This app significantly simplified and reduced the work of using an EMR by eliminating complex navigation and abstract categories. Now doctors can clearly view and capture details about their patients, without being chained behind a desktop.

Related Reading

• UX designers Stefan Klocek and Kramer Weydt take us through their design process
• Get your own copy of the beta app from Practice Fusion

We are proud to announce that our work with Practice Fusion’s EMR iPad app has been announced as 2013 Interaction Award winner in optimizing from the Interaction Design Association. The app was selected by an international jury and recognized for it's ability to make daily activities more efficient. Here's a look at what this app can do.

Congratulations to the Practice Fusion team and the Cooper team of Stefan, Andreas, Jayson, Elisha, Jenea, Doug, and Nick, and a big thank you to Jim.

Update:If you like this app, than let your voice be heard! Vote for this app to win the Interaction13 People's Choice Award

Related Reading

• UX designers Stefan Klocek and Kramer Weydt take us through their design process
• Get your own copy of the beta app from Practice Fusion

Who do you trust for food advice? Review sites like Yelp are bloated and contain a cacophony of opinions. Others just aggregate shallow star ratings. Reviewers often have tastes and preferences that might not match your own. And even if you find a good restaurant, how do you know what is the best thing on the menu?

The idea behind Chefs Feed is that the best food advice comes from experts - professional chefs, and friends with discerning taste.

Currently available in nine US cities, the app doesn’t just tell you where to go, but also what to order, providing an insider’s look at each city’s eateries.

When Chefs Feed approached Cooper, the startup was about to make a big leap. Lots of people were downloading the app, but its functionality was limited to a few features like reading and bookmarking chefs’ reviews. With the user base expanding quickly, Chefs Feed needed a blueprint for making the app a platform for interaction between chefs and foodies. The app also needed features to help friends trade dish recommendations and share their passion for food. In short, the app was to get social.

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At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run.

The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that call, though. Our initial impression? It's an accessible tool aimed at a user population that, up to this point, hasn't been equipped to produce engaging and usable interactive educational content.

In our trial run, we produced a look book with some of recent work, including slideshows, imagery and video. It's a little rough in some areas, but we'd love to see what you think. You can download it via the link below and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Download the Cooper iBook.

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Last summer, Cooper partnered with TaskRabbit and Pivotal Labs to design their new iPhone app. The app works with their service to help people who need help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with "Rabbits," a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

The TaskRabbit iPhone app has been nominated for the 2011 Crunchies and the 2012 IxDA awards. This week, you can vote for the app in both awards and check out the other nominations.

• Vote for TaskRabbit in the Crunchies
• Vote for TaskRabbit in the IxDA Awards

The TaskRabbit project

Posting a Task is super easy

The TaskRabbit service is continuing to expand in new cities, including Austin, and we're excited to see their service evolve and grow. Congratulations to Leah Busque for her nomination as Founder of the Year in the Crunchies also.

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Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

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Kendra Shimmell, Tamara Wayland and I recently enjoyed some Spring weather in beautiful Rio de Janeiro while sharing methods for interaction design, collaboration, and communication in an agile environment with forty employees of Globo.com, the Internet branch for Latin America's largest media conglomerate.

The team knew that Rio would be warm this time of year, but what really amazed us was the warmth and hospitality of the people we met. Andrë Braz, Globo.com's User Experience Design Manager and Art Director, and his team were engaged and inquisitive, and really hungry for ways to take their already successful site to the next level of efficiency and innovation.

During the course we talked about how to effectively integrate user experience design into an agile environment, and shared techniques for collaboration and communication that are lightweight to create but provide big impact. The Cooper team showed Globo.com a blueprint for defining and designing digital products and services that centers on users, but within the context of business needs and implementation realities.

Here are a few snapshots from class:

Participants quickly grasped the value of focusing on goals and behavior patterns when developing personas.

A cross-functional team works together to storyboard the key contexts and moments in time that their primary persona will interact with the product they are designing.

A student sketches design concepts for the mobile experience.

The enthusiasm carried over into the final day of the week, during which we were joined by close to 80 Globo designers, developers, product managers, and executives. We can't wait to go back (and I am still dreaming of the feijoada we had on Friday afternoon).

Thank you Globo, and thank you Rio!

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Platfora, a new startup in the Hadoop business intelligence space, is working with Cooper to design an elegant, intuitive interface to bring clarity to the chaos of big data.

After Platfora received 5.7 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz; Cooper worked on a rapid, collaborative two-week timeline with a team of five designers to create their website, www.platfora.com. Platfora CEO Ben Werther said, "we wanted to convey the clarity and simplicity that we are striving for in our product experience — without showing actual screenshots. Cooper's design work on our website conveyed this message perfectly."

Credits: Jim Dibble, Golden Krishna, Martina Maleike, Doug LeMoine, Nick Myers

A clean sans-serif designed by Minneapolis type foundry Process combined with rich, vibrant visualizations designed by the Cooper team combine for a unique and beautiful site we're proud to have been linked to in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and New York Times.

Immediately after launch, the site received rave reviews on Twitter:

See the site at www.platfora.com.

Related Reading

• Cooper helps TaskRabbit design new iPhone app for help with chores
• The litl: a design miracle!
• Mental Models for product and service strategy
• Take the visual interface design class

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Credits: Faith Bolliger, Golden Krishna, Peter Duyan, Jayson McCauliff, Suzy Thompson, Nick Myers

If you own a car in a city like San Francisco, you've probably experienced that particular mix of rage and despair as you drive around your block for the umpteenth time, looking for a parking space. Maybe you've even thought to yourself, "There has got to be a better way!" as you finally bumper car park along the curb blocks from home. Thanks to the folks at Streetline, there is a better way.

Streetline worked with Cooper to create Parker, an app for iPhone and Android that helps drivers easily locate and pay for available parking. When we began, Streetline was an early-stage start-up operating under intense pressure to deliver to market. We worked closely with their developers to bring predictability and order to a process that is wasteful (of resources and time) in addition to being stressful.

Big congratulations to the Parker team for shipping an amazing product &emdash; and securing an additional round of funding!

Get Parker in the App Store, and learn more about our work with Streetline in our case study. Speaking of parking, you can even auction off your spot with Parking Auction. Read More

TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.

TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.

Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.

Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done! Read More