According to popular belief, radio is dead.

It’s not; it’s just taking a different form. Instead of families gathering around a radio to hear the nightly news, people are staying informed by listening to the “All Things Considered” podcast or following Fareed Zakaria on Twitter.

So how does a radio program make the transition from on-air to online and define their role as journalists in the digital age? And how can designers influence how radio content is generated, shared, and consumed?

In the June UX Boot Camp, through experimentation and exploration, participants will redesign how listeners interact with radio content. They’ll conduct this examination through a radio program you may have heard on your local public radio station: Marketplace Money.

American Public Media’s Marketplace Money is a weekly public radio program airing locally on KQED that looks at matters of personal finance with wit and wisdom. UX Boot Camp participants will use this show as a case study to transform the experience of radio by giving listeners and broadcasters new tools and interactive roles to explore a topic that touches everyone – money.

Sound like a challenge you want to solve? Save your spot now.
Read More

At Cooper’s UX Boot Camp, held between March 25th and March 28th at Monkey Ranch in Petaluma, CA, Fair Trade USA looked to participants for ideas around how to raise awareness of their mission and inspire consumers to purchase Fair Trade products.

Fair Trade USA enables sustainable development and community empowerment by cultivating a more equitable global trade model through certifying and promoting Fair Trade products. Their work benefits everyone from farmers and workers to consumers, industry and the environment, and yet only 20-30 percent of Americans even know what Fair Trade means. Why? The issues are complex, but as students dug into this problem they identified key factors behind this disconnect, including a lack of brand awareness of the business case for Fair Trade, low brand adoption, and limited Fair Trade product presence in stores.

From those explorations, the following goals emerged:

• Motivate and inspire brands to adopt and evangelize Fair Trade practices.
• Put more Fair Trade products in front of consumers.
• Build “pop culture” awareness of Fair Trade to get more brands to buy into the movement.

To get there, student teams went beyond the initial concept of a website redesign and took on the bigger questions that lead to business transformation. For a look behind the scenes as the teams approached this challenge, check out the following video filmed during the Fair Trade USA Boot Camp, and read more to take a look at the Fair Trade USA ecosystem model and what the students came up with in the pitch decks that follow.

Read More

Are designers responsible for the impact of their work upon human behavior?
Is it actually possible to create "connected" experiences across devices?
Do designers need to speed up, or do stakeholders need to slow down?

In January, Angel Anderson, Mikkel Michelsen, Robb Stevenson, Lou Lenzi, Donald Chestnut, and I poked and prodded at these topics during the Interaction 13 conference. About 500 people attended the debate, and they threw their own perspectives into the mix in the latter part of the conversation. Have a listen in the video below.

(And thanks to SapientNitro for the opportunity to meet such interesting people, expand my own perspective, and make use of what I learned on my high school debate team. Ha!)

I love teaching our Interaction Design fundamentals class. I meet designers from all over, and for 8 hours a day, we talk about design, problem-solving, planning, strategy, big ideas. Then, at the end of class, we tackle a real-world problem near and dear to all Bay Area residents -- redesigning the ticket vending machines for our regional rail transit system (called "BART"). And oh boy, do these BART kiosks need to be redesigned.

When I started teaching Cooper's Interaction Design class in 2007, the most common conversation was, "How do I get people in my company to recognize design as something more than icons and wireframes?" Our materials focused on how to get beyond the notion that design is a rearranged set of tabs, and how to establish UX design as a key partner in the product development process. These conversations often felt existential: Who are we, really? How do we demonstrate our value? What do we do if we're socked away in the IT (or marketing) department? I always felt a little like I was giving a pep talk to troops who would soon go back to the battlefield. "Have fun storming the castle!"

In the past few years, this conversation has changed, and the Interaction Design course materials have changed with it. The pep talk has turned into a more strategic discussion about what to do with the recognition and responsibility that UX has been given. The conversation has also become more practical: What are the best ways to partner up with a development team that has gone agile? How do I scope a user research project? How do I make the case for user research? How do I sell my ideas to all the different audiences in the product development process? ... And the million dollar question: How do designers best contribute to getting the best possible thing built?

So we spend the first couple of days in step-by-step instruction on tools and techniques, and then we spend an entire day applying them to the BART problem and presenting the work. Our students come from all parts of the organization -- design, product management, development, marketing -- and their solutions for the BART kiosk are all over the map. In a good way! Many contain interesting notions and ideas; some are totally wacky; a few are actually pretty awesome. It's a wild four days, and everyone (including me) always learns a lot.

Interested in taking the class? More details and registration here.

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

After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama's reelection campaign, we asked Scout Addis, a former Cooperista, now the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign. Scout sat down with Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine to tell us what he learned and to discuss how design and technology worked together to help win the election and change the future of politics.

Doug LeMoine : I'll start with a design cliché, but it really applies here. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Technology has really changed the way that people get information, form opinions, share those opinions, and so on. This seems like it has a special bearing on the nitty-gritty of a campaign, which is all about getting people involved, promoting a point of view, changing minds. So let's start with this: How did Obama for America use technology to win?

Scout Addis: Campaigns have traditionally relied on paper, phones, and volunteers to contact voters. Even in 2012 we still printed out a list of names, and then handed that to a person to make calls or knock on doors. They then recorded their notes on paper, and handed it off to someone else to do data entry to get that information back into our analytics systems. That is how phone banking and canvassing is still done.

But all of that’s changing. For example, the Call Tool allowed anyone to volunteer for a phonebank anywhere they had an internet connection. Someone would go to call.barackobama.com, and it would provide them with a script and a number to call. They would call that person, follow the script, and enter the results of the call on the same web page. That information would then be fed into our database and the results of those calls added to what we already knew about that voter. Once we knew what was going on with that voter, we could better determine where to make our next calls.

On election day alone one million calls were made using the Call Tool. That’s a lot of paper and data entry time that we eliminated, and our records were always up-to-date in real-time.

Read More

Last week, a handful of Cooperistas attended the Interaction 13 conference and wrote daily recaps of what they heard for our blog readers (Catch up with a quick read about day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4). The Education Summit, a full day workshop that explored the global problem space of interaction design education, merited the lengthier share-out below.

The Interaction 13 conference in Toronto was a five-day whirlwind of speakers, workshops and networking. Threaded through all this information was a tasty glimpse into the future: a world where technologies play nicely with one another, don’t demand our undivided attention, and are great at helping people do what they do best: be people. My sense (and hope) is that this utopian vision just might be possible (rather than the “Terminator-style” future Angel Anderson warned us of in the Great UX Debate. Scary! Let’s not do that, pretty please.).

While visions are great for building hope, the education of emerging designers is a key factor in helping us get us to that future. In an effort to learn more about the issues facing educators (that could potentially sabotage utopia), I attended the Interaction Design Education Summit. Here is a snapshot of the conversations and ideas that emerged:

How did you become an interaction designer?

Most of the attendees’ responses to this question fell under one (or more) of these themes:

• Serendipity
• Iterative wandering
• I built my own journey (through books and mentors)

Takeaway: There are many paths, they aren’t always structured or intentional, and we need to take this into account in our approach to education.

Read More

Ah, the final day of IxD13 has come to an end. Day 4 was comprised of panels, debates, and rapid ingenuity cycles. It was a blast to cover this conference. If you missed any of the other days, check out our recaps from Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. Can't wait to meet up again next year in Amsterdam!

Interaction Design Education Panel: Report Back

Dave Malouf, Haig Armen, Kristian Simsarian, Dianna Miller

Demand for Interaction Designers has grown, but because IxD is so new, education programs are being developed independently. With no single organization curating a design education program, there is little chance for design educators to share information and techniques. This panel was brought together to discuss patterns in design education, and as a platform for designer educators to connect with each other.

How do we make IxD training more widely available?

Lots of small design shops don’t have budgets to send people to conference or for extra training. And a lack of guidance can lead to people to seek other employment. At the IxD13 Education panel, these were some of the ideas discussed to build skills without breaking the bank.

Apprenticeship programs: (younger person paired with a senior designer) The junior designer would do smaller tasks and begin learn through doing.

Partner with universities: Students gain real-world experience by working on client projects.. Design studios get fresh ideas and build relationships with future recruits.

In-house training: How do you evaluate people’s aptitudes when they apply to an organization? Studios need better evaluation of applicants because people come with such mixed backgrounds.

There is a disconnect amongst what students think they are prepared to do, what they can actually do, and what employers want. Grads are not prepared to do high-level strategy. Many think they are, but it takes time to build that skill set.

Design fundamentals should be taught in middle and high schools, but if we can’t teach design curriculum in schools, we can host junior conference or 1 day UX Camps. Design principles are valuable to students of all ages. Design can teach people how to fail and how to take risks early in their development

How do we start to informally formalize where and how to find good teachers, mentors, programs, and studios?

We can spread good design education through our current network. Go to schools and give talks. As your relationship develops, schools will start to see you as a resource, and you can spread your design philosophy to new generations of movers and shakers.

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