After years of mumbling excuses about the cobbler's children and how busy we've been, we're thrilled to announce the launch of our new site. It's taken almost a year from our initial design explorations, but we're really happy with where we've ended up.

While its been a very collaborative effort, it's also been refreshing to design without the usual cast of stakeholders. (In order to overcome the well-known nightmare that is a firm designing its own site, we almost completely eliminated creative reviews by anyone not directly involved in the project.)

We think the new site much better reflects our design sensibilities and the direction of the firm. It's still a bit of a work-in-progress. (For one, we plan on adding social bookmarking features in the Journal when we have a moment.) But we're interested to hear your feedback—let us know what you think in the comments section.

Credits

Design by Nick Myers and Dave Cronin, with help from Jayson McCaulliff, Doug LeMoine, Imon Deshmukh, Martina Maleike, and Daniel Kuo. Copy by Dave and Doug, with editorial assistance from Steve Calde and Suzy Thompson. Code by the amazing Elisha Cook and Andrew Hoag at blackdrumm, and photography by the very talented Emily Nathan.

Congratulations to the litl team for a great showing at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), taking home awards in packaging, hardware and software, the latter of which we're proud to have contributed to. We're thrilled to have been part of such an amazing team and grateful for the recognition from the IDEA panel and litl.

Here's what the judges had to say about the litl user interface:

Designed to remove the barriers between you and web content, it is extremely simple to use and eliminates the clutter and distractions of traditional computer interfaces.

Credits from the litl blog:

Thank you and credit to John Chuang, Aaron Tang, Chris Bambacus, Chris Moody, Havoc Pennington, Eben Eliason and Ron Frank of litl; Daniel Kuo, David Fore, Jenea Hayes and Noah Guyot of Cooper; and Christian Marc Schmidt and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram.

At Cooper, we hire stars. There, I said it. No apologies.

Not divas, not egomaniacs. Just the brightest designers we can find. You’ve got to be that good in order to leave your ego at the door, which is exactly what our methods demand.

Cooper is a highly collaborative environment: our paired design approach challenges designers to work together to deliver synthesis, ideation and exploration, design, and communication that stands up to skepticism and scrutiny. If you’re sketching design ideas, there’s someone right there with you, pointing out weak spots and pushing you to evolve the designs in ways that better serve your users’ and your client’s goals. You’d better have a deep bullpen of great ideas, because you’re going to need them. And when you’re poking holes in your partner’s design ideas, you’re going to need a stronger reason than “I like my idea better.”

Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very pleased with how things went.

Here you will find the complete text of my talk, entitled “An Insurgency of Quality”, along with all of the slides I showed. I made a few ad libs, but mostly stayed with the script in order to assure that my message not be misunderstood.

The conference, called “Code Freeze” (due to it being January in Dave’s home town of Minneapolis), was sold out and the audience was razor sharp. The attendees were developers; that is, mostly programmers, but with lots of designers, coaches, testers, and managers, and not a few who wore several of those hats.

This talk is a complement to one with the same title I delivered at the IxDA's Interaction08. That one was directed at designers; this one is for developers.

As you may know, Alan Cooper, our fearless leader and co-founder, is the creator of Visual Basic (or at least the visual part-- Bill Gates is the one who decided to marry it to Basic). MSDN has recently put together an interesting series of interviews around the history of Visual Studio, including this one with Alan.

Regardless of the countless poorly designed applications that have been brought into the world by Visual Basic, it's hard not to see the monumental impact Visual Studio has had on the way software is created. Hear from the godfather himself about the making-of and implications of his game-changing work.

If you're having issues (or have issues) with Silverlight, you can find other formats of the video here on the MSDN site.

Here's a video featuring Eoin Woods, a software architect at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), talking about Apex, the new equities portfolio management system being built for the company's well known active management group:

Cooper worked with closely with BGI users and developers for almost 2 years going from from concept to detailed design and well into construction.

Much of the talk is focused on the technical architecture of the system, but you get the first glimpse of the user interface at 23 minutes in. Around the hour mark he takes questions, the first of which is about interaction design.

We're really excited about how it turned out, and a lot of credit and congratulations are due to the incredibly smart and talented folks at BGI.

We're excited to announce the release of the litl, a simple, and quite frankly, very cool, computer for the home.

We're proud to say that we helped design the litl. We worked for a year alongside the amazing folks at litl, as well as a number of other partners including fuseproject, Fort Franklin and Pentagram to make the vision a reality.

The litl can be used in both laptop and easel modes (to support lean-forward and lean-back interactions), and does away with a lot of the unseemly artifacts of more traditional desktop idioms like folders and menus. It's closely integrated with the social Web and designed around family life.

We'll get a case study about our efforts up on our site as soon as we can. In the interim, check out the litl site for more about the computer and the company.

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.