A conversation with Ed Niehaus, new CEO of Cooper

A few weeks ago, Cooper appointed Ed Niehaus as President & CEO. Ed is a Valley veteran, with a rich background is in public relations, branding and business-building. He met Alan when Visual Basic was merely a twinkle in Alan's eye, and since then, Ed has worked with a long list of the Valley's top companies, and has been on the board of half a dozen, both public and private. Yahoo!'s founders hired Ed when they wanted to grow their business beyond a server in a trailer on the Stanford campus. Steve Jobs hired Ed's PR firm - already the agency for Pixar and NeXT - when Jobs returned to revive Apple and launch the iMac.

In the brief time that he's been with Cooper, he's told us some great some stories that we've wanted to share, so we sat down with Ed to pick his brain about his background, the Steve experience, and where digital technology is going.

Tell us how you got involved with interactive products.

I got on The Well in the late 80s, and it was a real community, one in which over 1000 people shared every aspect of their lives. It was a microcosm of what the blogsphere is today: communities of shared interest, each one with what amounted to a bartender, serving up domain expertise, keeping the conversation going and stopping fights before they got out of hand.

The quality of the content was actually very high despite having no formalized process for reputation-building; the Well's secret was its profound lack of ease-of-use. We called it the ‘bozo filter’ because you had to be smart and determined to even begin to use the dreadful text-based software. The intellectual equivalent of fraternity hazing. Today I guess you could say that a lot of products have a bozo filter, only in reverse: you feel like a bozo if you bought one.

After a while I noticed that a 'company' was doing business through a community over which they had no control, right there on The Well: that company was the Grateful Dead! They got huge promotional value, a lively market for show tickets, T-shirts etc. Of course there also was an outlaw market for bootleg show tapes. Even so, think of the possibilities! Companies could turn their information outward to face their customers and, if they were willing to - gasp! - forgo controlling and spinning what the customer said, they could build trust, and build business through online communities. If only the bozo filter of dial-up online services would get out of the way!

Companies already were building user groups around their products. Programmers banded together because software was so hard to make, and found that being a community gave them the clout they needed to squeeze the information out of the hardware vendors. For instance, developer groups famously got Steve Wozniak to share the ‘secret’ schematics for the early Apple computers. But, the relationships between vendors and user groups were often dicey. One CEO I knew called his company’s users' group ‘The Bedwetters Club,’ because they had the gall to complain when things didn't work. It was that thinking, not 'content' like brochure websites, that interested me when I first saw the NCSA Mosaic web browser.

You got involved in The Well to help them with PR and branding; what does ‘brand’ mean in the interactive space?

You could think of a brand as a piece of real estate in someone's head, a little patch of ground that is the sum total of the experiences that they've had with a particular product or service. Things changed in the 90s: a million new brands put most of that real estate underwater. Wired magazine got to be an inch thick, and half the companies advertising in it had logos that looked like the rings of Saturn.

And, suddenly, consumers had clout! As a PR agency, we started evangelizing, ‘Branding is Dead!’ A bit ironic because Yahoo was just three people when we started, and grew on our watch to be - among people under 21 - the most widely recognized brand in the world.

Now, in some ways, branding really is dead. Today it's about the experience.

Today branding often is about love. So, on one hand you have Dell and Microsoft, ‘needed’ brands. On the other hand you have Apple, a ‘loved’ brand. Dell has a P/E of 12; Microsoft's is 13. Apple has a P/E of 120. Companies do the math, and come to Cooper saying , ‘We want to be the iPhone of (our product category)!’

Speaking of Apple, is there any part of your ‘Steve experience’ that seems particularly relevant to the work we do?

Working with Steve can be brutal, but you get a chance to see firsthand his tremendous eye for detail and the clarity of his vision. Nobody can judge work like Steve can -- design, advertising, engineering -- you name it, Steve knows, and look out because he'll tell you. He has got a hierarchy of judgment that's really pretty simple: at the top is ‘Insanely great,’ which is the best in category that you'll see in your lifetime. Then there's ‘really, really, really great,’ - and he says it packed with emotion - that's the best that you'll see this year or maybe this decade.. And, there's ‘shit,’ and that's the entire hierarchy.

I wish you could have seen Steve in action with Lee Clow of Chiat/Day, working on Apple's ‘Think Different’ campaign. Lee, the living legend whose creations ranged from the ‘1984’ Apple commercial to ‘Yo Quiero Taco Bell,’ showed an early version of ‘Here's to the crazy ones’ from the ‘Think Different’ campaign. A full minute of black-and-white pictures of Picasso, Einstein, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Bucky Fuller, amazing music and Richard Dreyfus reading this poem, seeing it for the first time brought the hair up on the back of my neck. So here I am, practically with tears rolling down my face, and Steve just looks at Lee, shakes his head, and says, ‘You've lost it.’

I thought, ‘What?! That's one of the greatest ads I've ever seen!’ And here's Steve going, ‘No. The music isn't right. It was right before. And you've changed the pace of the pictures, and you've got them in the wrong order.’ He sends them packing, back to LA. They came back after probably 30 hours with no bodily functions, and I was stunned. It was a lot better. Steve has a vision of what great is, and he's never going to settle for anybody else's standard of great.

That's great for Steve. What does that mean for the rest of us?

For the rest of us, it's about the experience. We might not have Steve's vision of what's going to be great, but each of us knows what ‘insanely great’ is when we see it and use it.

It's easy for product companies to fool themselves that what they're doing will get them there. They convince themselves that they know their technology, that they know their domain, and that compromises and half-measures will get them there. But what I’ve learned is that true impact in the market only comes from maintaining an undying commitment to creating something that is truly “insanely great.”

Are there any lessons to learn from tough economic times?

In hard times, executives focus on cost and time-to-market. The impact of controlling these two factors to the exclusion of everything else is two things go out the window: adherence to the company's vision and attention to the customer's experience. Engineering is motivated to find shortcuts to meet timelines, figuring they can always come back later and ‘Fix the UI.’ Product marketing is motivated to get something out quickly and let the users sort it out. Suddenly, user research is too time consuming and, ‘Besides, aren't the users’ needs always changing?’

The fact is, if you really study your users, their needs actually are knowable and don't change very quickly. If you want to thrive in tough times, you have to craft a vision that meets those needs in a way that exceeds expectations, and nail the delivery.

 

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Personas used to explain the pain of ERP systems on Forbes.com

Enterprise resource planning systems must, by their very nature, serve the needs of a wide variety of people, and the implementation of these systems can result in the needs of one person being sacrificed in order to meet the needs of another. In an article on Forbes.com, Dan Woods does a nice job of laying out the pitfalls and frustrations attending ERP and other monolithic business software.

We particularly like the article because he mentions Alan and credits him for formalizing the use of personas, but it's also a sophisticated look at how system design is begging for effective tools to understand the network of human needs that must be balanced in order to create effective solutions:

...[S]ome users get more value from software applications than others. This is because software is written from a certain user perspective. In many cases, the problems and challenges faced in making software work can be explained by the tension created when the design of software is dominated by one perspective over another. In CRM systems, for example, the sales reps who must do the work of entering data about contacts and meetings often must be bludgeoned or bribed to do so. They get little benefit from such tracking, as opposed to the VP of sales, for whom the data is a vital way to understand what is happening.

Check it out "One Software Doesn't Fit All" on Forbes.com.

 

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Designing for The Digital Age book release party

Join us for a beer at the spectacular Autodesk Design Gallery to celebrate the release of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, the definitive field guide of Cooper's design tools and techniques written by our own Kim Goodwin.

Weds, February 18
6:00 - 8:00

One Market Street
Suite 200
San Francisco
(here's a map)

Please feel free to bring your colleagues, friends and anyone else who's as excited about the practice of design as we are.

Building security requires that all attendees be on the guest list. Please let us know if you'll be able to join us by RSVPing here:

http://crush3r.com/page/pcgsgmmtum
(Anyone can RSVP — just send this along to your friends)

For more about the book, Kim posted a sneak peek at the contents a couple weeks back. And of course, you can pre-order on Amazon.

 

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Sneak peek: Designing for the Digital Age

Today is a big day for me. At long last, my book is going to press. It’s a soup-to-nuts how-to with tons of detail on every aspect of the method as it applies to a wide range of design problems and business situations. Visual, industrial, and interaction design are all integrated in the discussion, as are communication and project management. People have been asking for this book for years, so hopefully it will deliver what you’ve been looking for.

The writing is done. The 300 or so examples, exercises, and illustrations are finished. 750 pages of editing and proofreading and layout and color tweaking…all done. Now, whatever typos exist are going to be there for all time. Of course, there’s plenty still to do between now and when the book lands on shelves around the end of February: a Web site to assemble, a launch party to plan, and a sample chapter or two to select and share with all of you who read the Journal. For now, though, I thought I’d share a peek at the table of contents.

[You can pre-order the book on Amazon; they aren't listing a date yet, but it should be coming out in mid-late February.]

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Cross Country featured in Google Maps case study

Cross Country, a longtime Cooper client, was recently featured in a Google Maps Success Story. Cross Country Healthcare (CCH) is one of the largest providers of healthcare staffing services in the United States.

In the article, Google reports that “Using the Google Maps for Enterprise API, Cooper collaborated with developers at Cross Country to devise a powerful, visually enriched application that meshed seamlessly with Cross Country’s CRM system. The resulting web portal supplies nurses, allied health professionals, and recruiters with graphically rich location, facility, and housing data. For example, a nurse seeking a position in the Chicago area can specify a 10-mile radius, drill down into the map’s data points for street and vicinity information, and identify nearby assignments.”

CCTC's Job Search for travelers was one of the first enterprise-level Google Maps mash-ups. It has powerful yet simple searching, filtering and flagging capabilities. With the new traveler web portal, customers have:

• Immediate access to rich job information and job application services unlike any other staffing company
• Anytime/anyplace access to the system's web-based tools for seeking jobs and maintaining credentials, which provide ease-of-use and control to travelers while reducing recruiter workload
• Ability to envision the realities of each new locale (such as housing and transportation), thus improving travelers' self-service capabilities
• Personalization based on the traveler's past searches, nursing specialties, and lifestyle preferences

This project resulted in tangible benefits for Cross Country. According to Google, “After its first eight months, the nursing web portal realized a 77 percent increase in job-search activity. Job seekers are networking to make more informed decisions about upcoming assignments, resulting in greater job satisfaction. Additionally, a recruiter looking to place a candidate in a hospital now has sophisticated mapping technology to better match applicants with lifestyle preferences. From an administrative perspective, users can access updated payroll, insurance, and job-certification information - saving countless hours of paperwork, telephone time, and overhead expenses for everyone concerned.”

For more information about this project, please also see Cooper’s case study.

 

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Happy Halloween from Cooper!

This year, we continued our Halloween dress-up tradition with the theme of "monster mash-up." We did the ordinary challenge of coming up with a clever costume one better by mixing it with our love of puns. Everyone came dressed as a monster mixed with another costume idea.

The final set of realized costumes included The Creature From The Barack Lagoon, a skeleton out of the closet, a flying purple people greeter, a fairy goth mother, Robert Ghoul-et, a M(ummy)ILF, and some monsters of rock. We planned to crawl down to the Embarcadero for lunch, but with the possibility of rain, we lurched and lumbered across the street to dig up some pizza. Returning to our lair, we fired up the Wii for a monsters-of-mash-up-rock, Guitar Hero play-off.

 

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The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator on Vimeo.

 

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Playing well with others: How to create effective design teams

Tolstoy said it about families, but it's true of teams as well: Every happy team is alike, but each unhappy team is unhappy in its own way. Where Tolstoy and I differ is that I think that there is much to be said for happiness.

In the design world, the idea of working in a "team" often provokes dread. Teams introduce overhead; they require communication; members often battle to see their ideas implemented. The end result of teamwork is often seen as compromise, i.e. as a "taco pizza," i.e. a situation in which everyone (including the customer) loses.

On the other hand, there are many examples of highly functioning creative teams, and my own experience tells me that a team approach can be vastly more efficient and effective than working solo. Who doesn't want a well-matched partner to ensure that the ideas flow, the problem is considered from all angles, and dead-ends are avoided? And lets face it — some of the most interesting and important problems are too big to solve alone.

At Cooper, we've spent a lot of time noodling on this problem, and we've got some ideas.

Continue reading...

Alan on the radio

By day, Brad Brooks is a technology executive in Vancouver, BC. By night, he is a popular local talk radio host. Brad recently read my book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum and became a convert to the concepts I wrote about a decade ago.

He quickly asked to interview me on his show. Brad clearly sees the problem and its solution, and the interview neatly recaps the basic ideas in the book. The sad thing is that so little has changed. It all just means that we have to continually beat the drum for design otherwise we will drown in hard-to-use high-tech products.

You can listen to the interview on the Brad Brooks Show Web site.

 

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Digregiousness

One of the nice things about working with smart people is the conversation. It soars to heights, teleports across topics serendipitously, and can suddenly dive back towards its original target like a bird of prey. As an illustration, one day I slyly documented these topic shifts over a long lunch between myself and two other designers at the company. The results of this exercise are below.

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Why I read my speech at Agile08

Some attendees at the recent Agile08 conference were put off when it appeared that I was reading my speech rather than delivering it offhand. (If you're interested, you can find my slides and speakers notes here.)

It’s true; I was reading my speech.

When I speak to groups of interaction designers or business people I often address them extemporaneously. It’s a style I enjoy very much and feel that I can do well.

However, the Agile08 audience demanded special treatment. Not only was it large, but it consisted primarily of programmers, agile coaches, and product managers. These professionals are bright, knowledgeable, critical, and opinionated. They do not suffer fools lightly. I was coming to them as something of an outsider; not having programmed for a living for years, and never having programmed in a canonically agile shop.

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Faces in the crowd: Early persona history

A few days ago, Liz Bacon and Steve Calde presented their talk "Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!" to the Catalyze community. During the webinar, which addressed some common misconceptions about personas, Liz shared some early persona history from her time at Cooper. This got me thinking about how personas have evolved at Cooper during the time I've been here.

In his article "The Origin of Personas" Alan Cooper reviews his early use of personas back in 1995. By the time I joined Cooper in 1997, personas were in regular use as a design tool, but the way we presented them to our clients continued to evolve.

I recently had an e-mail conversation with Nate Myers, a former Cooperista, about his memory of the Sony Trans Com's P@ssport project. Here are Nate's recollections.

To my knowledge, Sony P@ssport was the first project to use pictures. There were no conversations about using photos; I just made the decision to include them in my draft document for several reasons:

During the first meetings I attended as a new employee, I noticed communication issues between Cooper and its clients, many of which revolved around the 'elastic user' problem. By using pictures of real people, who in some cases were dramatically different from the tech-savvy users imagined by clients, I hoped to curtail (or even eliminate) the frequent raucous arguments about 'the user.' We could all look at the same photo and quickly build up a set of shared assumptions that fit the face looking back at us.

In projects prior to Cooper, I noticed that sample users were often given whimsical names, usually based on Looney Tunes, Star Wars or Star Trek characters. However, I saw real business value in identifying user goals by personas, so why undermine that value with a silly name? This didn't mean some of our names couldn't have subtle humor: Clevis McCloud and Mel "Hoppy" Hopper had a touch of fun built in. But even this humor was by design; both names sounded earthy and pragmatic, helping us keep far away from conceptual power users who could easily negotiate software complexity. Since Cooper was already avoiding the silly name trap, matching a realistic photo with a realistic name would only help to enhance the business value of personas.

In our initial conversations with Sony, we had a lot of discussions about idioms and user expectations. Looking at the process of airline travel as a single experience, I asked myself what would happen if users came to P@ssport after interacting with several different procedures and systems during their total airport and flight time. Wanting to help communicate the idea that simpler is better, I included visual flight maps as part of our design document, showing travelers with direct and connecting flights. On paper it seemed just as important to show the passengers as it did the routes.

From previous freelance work, I had two Photodisc CDs filled with pictures of travel, leisure and industry. The pictures on the CDs lent themselves very well to our needs for Sony P@ssport. The most challenging picture was for a child traveling alone; we had specified a pre-teen boy, but the only picture close to it was of a 3-5 year-old girl with a pony tail. As I Photoshopped the pony tail out of the picture I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be interesting if this picture ended up in a book someday?"

The project team liked the draft with the photos included, so we went with it. I'm glad. It was a good idea.

If you'd like to read more about the Sony Trans Com P@ssport project, there's a case study in Alan Cooper's Book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum."

 

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Welcome to Michael Voege, Director of Industrial Design!

Some of the most exciting and challenging products we’ve designed here at Cooper have involved a physical component. We admit it, we’re greedy: we want to do more fun projects like that. So without further ado, we’re excited to announce that Michael Voege has joined Cooper as the Director of Industrial Design. We fundamentally believe that interaction, industrial and visual design must be closely coordinated to create user experiences that delight and engage. Bringing in Michael, with his experience, creativity and crazy design mojo, will help us interweave these disciplines even more tightly as we grow our own in-house industrial design department.

Michael comes to Cooper from frog design, where he was an Associate Creative Director. During his 10+ year career he has worked on consumer products, software user interfaces, automotive interiors, furniture, and medical and industrial equipment, among others. Michael was educated at ArtCenter College of Design in Switzerland, and in Pasadena where he studied Transportation and Industrial Design.

 

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