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.

We are always on the look out for posts, articles, and other pieces authored by Cooper U Alumni. The stories that they tell are often an insightful glimpse into what lessons stood out to participants. We were delighted to find this blog post by Meg Davis (Extractable) that calls out so many of the tips and meaningful moments from Design Leadership's curriculum. Take a look...

I recently had the pleasure of attending a two-day event hosted by San Francisco agency Cooper about design leadership. This discussion-based event covered great material about techniques for leadership and communication in the design industry. I would highly recommend this event to other design professionals who want to improve the effectiveness of their work.

Five insights stuck with me, and I’ve included concrete tips about how to live out these insights practically.

Be as intentional with people as you are with your work.

As user experience designers, we love researching people to find out their motivations for using web and digital products. We spend hours of primary research during each project, watching people use products in context of their work. However, we don’t put this level of attention towards our co-workers who we work alongside. If we took time to really understand and build empathy for the people we work with every day, we would understand what kind of pressures they face, what rewards them, what they need to make a decision, and what they need from us in order to trust us. If we can understand each team member’s skills and motivations, then we can leverage them to work better together. As the Cooper U team so beautifully put it, “Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.”

Tip: At the start of each project, talk to each team member about his or her intentions for the project and figure out ways to support them, even in small ways.


Tip: Before going into meetings with your peers, understand and anticipate what they will need to feel engaged during the meeting and feel buy-in with respect to the work.

Read more about Meg's experience on the Extractable blog

Meg Davis attended Design Leadership training in February. This course was created and taught by Kendra Shimmell and Teresa Brazen. Learn more about this class or sign up for the next one here.

Want to share your Cooper U experience? We would love to hear about it. Send us a note.

OneNote is, as you've seen in the prior posts (OneNote for Interaction Designers and OneNote for Interaction Designers: the Nuts and Bolts, awesome for design meetings. But it's also useful in research and client presentations, too.

How we use it in research

[From the video, slightly edited:] Having a laptop open in a research interview puts a barrier between you and the person you're interviewing, and the typing can be quite distracting and intimidating for the interviewee. But typed notes are searchable, making for very useful reference when you’re synthesizing your notes. OneNote is a nice compromise. With a Tablet in slate mode, we remove the physical barrier of the laptop, and as long as you have the pen in a “Create Handwriting” mode, you can later go back and search your notes as if they were typed. (The handwriting recognition is pretty amazing.)
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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.
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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.

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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.)

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Announcing our 2013 Cooper U class schedule!

It’s that time again: New Years resolutions scribbled in notebooks, jammed packed yoga classes, fridges suddenly full of healthy grub to make up for creeping holiday waistlines. For most of us, those resolutions start out with a roar and end, well, with a wimpy fizzle. That’s why it’s critical to commit to specific plans now while you’ve got that New-Years-I’m-gonna-conquer-the-world hutzpah. Even if you don’t conquer your whole list by December, at least you can check a few things off with pride. The most important thing about resolutions is simply that they get us moving forward.

Enter Cooper U. We can help you with that momentum problem. We’ve got a fantastic line up of classes this year that can help you hone your design leadership, interaction design, and visual interface design chops. And, if you need practice on a real-world problem, we have an incredible lineup up of UX Boot Camps coming.

So, let us make actualizing resolutions easy for you. Try these on for size, and see which one(s) sparks your New Year’s fire most:

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In our March Boot Camp, you'll have a chance to work with Fair Trade USA, North America’s leading third party certifier of Fair Trade goods. You'll be challenged to conceive of digital tools to enable advocates and influencers to ignite consumer demand for Fair Trade products to create a fundamental shift in the way goods are traded and purchased. And you'll do all that in a creative classroom setting on the 50-acre organic farm of Cooper founders, Alan and Sue Cooper!

Design is a messy process, full of ambiguity and competing choices. This makes learning how to design hard. Learning tools and methods can only take you so far; to be a great designer, you have to practice thinking critically and applying those tools.

That’s the philosophy behind UX Boot Camp, our four-day crash-course in user experience design that gives you a real-world problem to solve along with a toolkit to tackle it. You’ll take your ideas from inception to design with the mentorship of our best teachers and active feedback from a real non-profit client.

The best part is that the impact of this course goes well beyond the classroom.

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This three-part series of posts and the subsequent Cooper PUB talk on October 25th are meant to get designers thinking about new approaches to their everyday workflow. The PUB is sold out, but we invite remote participation through Branch on the same evening. To be invited to Branch, add your name to the waitlist here and we’ll send you an invitation.

Part 1: Creativity Boosters
Part 2: Don’t Photoshop ‘til you drop

Part 3 of 3: Start with a solid foundation

When you’re designing in the digital domain, you’re working with files. Lots and lots and lots of files. You probably don’t give much thought to your Finder, but for most designers, it’s the interface that you spend a great deal of your time using. Streamlining your workflow around finding and managing files will save you a ton of time and frustration. 

Apps to supercharge your Finder

Building on last week’s celebration of targeted, lightweight apps that make a designer’s life easier, here are some apps that help me get the most out of my Finder and streamline my file management workflow.

TotalFinder

Totalfinder is a very powerful tool that adds multiple tabs to your finder window. This seems like a minor addition but the ability to stack Finder windows into tabs is big time saver. 

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This three-part series of posts and the subsequent Cooper PUB talk on October 25th are meant to get designers thinking about new approaches to their everyday workflow. The PUB is sold out, but we invite remote participation through Branch on the same evening. To be invited to Branch, add your name to the waitlist here and we’ll send you an invitation.

Part 1: Creativity Boosters
Part 3: Start with a solid foundation

Part 2 of 3: Using the right tool for the job

Given the complexity of learning new programs, designers often get locked into one tool that we learn in and out, reluctant to experiment with others. But to keep growing as designers, we have to keep exploring new tools that could make our job easier and push our creativity in new directions.

Don't Photoshop 'til you drop

We live in a Photoshop world! For all its power, Photoshop wasn’t designed to be an all-encompassing tool (even though Adobe appears to be pushing it in that direction). 

While it does many things well, there are other tools that are far better suited than Photoshop for certain tasks. For example...

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