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.”

Last week some designers from Google came to our studio for a discussion about the  practice of interaction design. We each shared a bit about our team structures and processes, and talked about some of the unique challenges that we face as a consultancy vs an in-house design team. But some of the most interesting discussions emerged when we focused on the areas of overlap - the basic bread and butter of interaction design. One of the most provocative questions posed by the Googlers was simply: “Where do ideas come from?”

We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how we do things around here, but if we’re honest, this is the “then a miracle occurs” step in our design process.

This is where the rubber meets the road for every designer: you’ve done your research, synthesis, and analysis to clearly articulate the problem you’re trying to solve, and now it’s time to produce that winning design solution. You get up, grab a marker, and hope inspiration strikes somewhere along those five small steps to the whiteboard. As seasoned designers, it’s not something we think much about anymore - it just happens (unless it doesn’t). But as mentors, it’s important not to yada yada yada the best part (though we DID mention the lobster bisque).

So this week, we’ve spent a little time looking inward to try to develop a deeper understanding of where design ideas come from. Here’s what we found:

Research matters

Cooper designers conduct our own user research, and many feel that this provides indispensible fuel for design ideas. Experiencing real people in their actual environments fuels our senses of empathy and intuition that helps to guide us towards the ideas that make people happy, successful (and even better looking). Plus, the research phase affords us the opportunity to be fully immersed in the users and the domain for a few weeks at the start of the project, which in addition to providing rich data and empathy, also gives our brains boot-up time to start noodling on the problem and explore possible solutions in the background. Many of our designers confessed that they often doodle during interviews, sketching design ideas when inspiration strikes without the pressure of being expected to produce a solution. At the end of the research and analysis phase when patterns, goals, and requirements have been formally defined, designers can flip back through these quick sketches and easily pick out the good ideas from the bad and begin to improve upon them based on their deeper understanding of the users and the problems that must be solved.

Sometimes, words are worth 1,000 pictures

The first step in our design ideation process comes before any “official” sketching is done: we describe the users’ ideal experience in words. The scenarios we develop at this stage are forward-looking and technology-agnostic, focusing on the personas and how they think, feel and behave rather than on specific interface elements or technical implementations. We also identify experience keywords that describe the emotional response that users should have to the product. Not having to answer the “how” frees us up to think big, imagining the best-case scenario for how the product supports each persona in achieving his or her goals. Then, when it comes time to actually start sketching and exploring interaction, form and visual languages, we’re already united around a clear vision for the kind of experience that would truly delight our users, helping us to focus on design solutions and visual styles that most fully embody that vision.

Just do it

Fear of the blank page can be daunting for all of us. Sometimes, just pushing past that fear and starting to sketch can get the juices flowing. Our designers make sure to have a tablet, sketchpad, or whiteboard easily accessible at all times, and we don’t wait until we have a fully formed thought or idea to use them. We may look like we have a brilliant idea in our heads as we approach the whiteboard, but often those few short steps aren’t where the thinking actually happens - the ideas start to come only after we draw the first few rectangles. There’s something special about the process of sketching - even jotting down some really bad ideas helps us learn about the tensions on the problem and gets us closer to a workable solution. (See Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences for a fantastic exploration of the idea that the act of sketching is integral to ideation and design problem solving.)

We recently came across a research study conducted by Frank Long at the National College of Art and Design that investigated the value of personas as a design tool. In his research paper, titled "Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design," Long concludes:

The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualization stages of the design process.

I’m impressed by Long’s efforts to gather evidence to support the claims of persona fans like myself, and am not surprised by the positive outcomes attributed to the use of personas. But in the debate over personas’ usefulness, I’m not quite ready to spike the ball and call it game over just yet.

As we all know, skeptics of personas abound. I won’t be dedicating my life to converting the non-believers, but I hate to see designers dismiss a useful tool simply because its’ worth has not been adequately demonstrated to them. Frank Long’s research is a great start, but I suspect that more work is needed to deliver compelling evidence that will persuade the detractors.

Recent reports on the holiday shopping season show that despite the tough economy resulting in a sharp decline in spending overall, the shift from brick and mortar to online shopping continues. Because “going to another store” in the online world is as easy as a mouse click, retaining customers throughout the shopping and buying process is critical. Does your site have what it takes to give customers a satisfying shopping experience and earn their loyalty?

Between some friends’ regrettably-timed birthdays and the holidays themselves, the past month has provided me ample opportunity to interact with and admire recent advances in online shopping and checkout design. From that admittedly unscientific sample, here are some thoughts on key aspects of the checkout experience to consider, as well as my take on the winners at each step.

Searching and inspecting

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As your customers’ first encounter with your site, the searching and inspecting experience is critical. Think of your site’s browse and detail pages as a top-notch personal shopper, and design them to mirror the qualities and behaviors of superstars in that role:

• Flexible: Make sure your site supports multiple modes of shopping (such as browsing within broad categories as well as focused searching based on specific criteria), and enables users to easily recover if they click into the wrong item or just want to continue shopping.
• Good listener: Many customers have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for - is your site designed to listen? Filters that expose a wide selection of available criteria, work together, and support multiple values are great ‘listeners’. If you’re not sure what options to provide, monitor the use of your search box to identify filter candidates.
• Efficient: Performance matters, so be sure you’ve tuned your page updates to deliver lightning-fast results.
• Forthcoming: Ensure that your browse pages provide users enough information to quickly disqualify undesired items and develop strong interest in appropriate items, and that detail pages include all information needed to close the sale. While a picture is worth 1,000 words, it can’t say anything if it’s too small - an image size that’s ample for displaying a collection of small items like shoes or belts could induce squinting and frustration when presenting full-length dresses. On browse pages, provide a control for adjusting image size, and include interactive swatches of color options to reduce the need to drill in. On detail pages, provide multiple views and close-ups with minimal navigation.

Winner: Endless

This site rocks my world with a half-dozen filter categories that work in tandem, allow multiple values, can be reset with a single click, and update results in the blink of an eye. Replacing the ‘more colors’ bar with a row of interactive color swatches would earn them an A+.

As my fellow Cooperistas will attest, I’m passionate about a lot of things: interaction design, birthday cake, shoes… But product packaging? No, I wouldn’t have included that last one in the list - at least, not until I caught myself swooning over Amazon’s new Frustration-Free packaging.

Suddenly, it all came back to me in a rush of emotion: the anger, frustration, and threat of serious injury when struggling to extract a tiny memory card from its giant plastic “clamshell” package. The tedium and anxiety of twisting countless plastic-coated wire ties in a seemingly never-ending effort to release toy components from incarceration before the child loses interest and starts playing with an empty box instead. The disbelief and disgust over the trail of excessive plastic waste left behind after opening a single product. And I am not alone. To tap into the packaging-frustration zeitgeist, Amazon has encouraged customers to post pictures and videos of their worst experiences to the Gallery of Wrap Rage, and the responses are pouring in.

These consumer-hostile packaging practices are a perfect example of business needs trumping user needs. For far too long, companies have designed packaging that serves only two masters: product marketing and theft reduction. Mark Hurst's This Is Broken features a particularly rich example of product packaging that fails to address the need to get the item out of the package.

Because Amazon doesn’t have to deal with retail display or shoplifting, they were in a unique position to sidestep the usual drivers for package design and think (pardon the pun) “outside the box”, focusing on customers’ goal of liberating products from the package so they can actually use them! And as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos notes in his letter to customers introducing the program, “in addition to making packages easier to open, a major goal of the Frustration-Free Packaging initiative is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material.” According to their FAQs, products with Frustration-Free Packaging can often be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

Just in time for the holiday consume-a-thon, Amazon delivers human-friendly, eco-friendly package design. Now really, who wouldn’t be passionate about that?

Here at Cooper, we’re pretty well known for our holistic and methodical approach to design, but don’t let that fool you - when the situation calls for it, we’re more than happy to get all “mavericky” with our clients and provide some good old fashioned ad-hoc consulting.

For example, I was recently asked to provide management support to a client who is in the midst of implementing a Cooper re-design of their robust web application. As I immersed myself in the project, I was quickly reminded of my previous life as a project manager and business analyst at a large software company, and how easy it is to fall into the many efficiency traps that often permeate large-scale development projects.

Over the course of my recent engagement, I identified several critical success factors for effective project teams, and some specific things that both project managers and team members can do to ensure project success.

Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!

As interaction designers, it’s natural for us to pick apart the failings or successes of every website and electronic device we see and apply that knowledge to our work. But every day, we’re faced with countless products, services, and even people that provide us with positive or negative experiences. Gaining an understanding of what makes each of those non-digital experiences good or bad also exposes patterns and commonalities that we can draw upon when it’s time to design.

Not long ago I found myself growing increasingly annoyed and frustrated with a substitute instructor for my regular spinning class at the gym. To keep myself from leaping off my bicycle and strangling her, I spent the class analyzing what worked so well with my regular instructor’s approach, and what made me so crazy with the substitute’s.

Setting aside the fact that the regular instructor is a Brazilian Adonis and the sub was a perky size 0 cheerleader type, I identified that the substantive distinctions in their styles were tone and frequency of communication. My Adonis is the strong silent type; he speaks only as much as is necessary to guide our action on the bikes, using a tone that conveys respect: You have shown up for class, and are therefore self-motivated, driven, and capable of pushing yourselves to your appropriate limits. He lays out the plan for the training, cranks up the music, and lets us get in the zone. The sub, on the other hand, yammered over the music non-stop throughout the class, reminding us to breathe (gee, thanks!), stressing that we came here for a workout, and regularly demanding that we give her 10% more. Excuse me? I don’t even like you - I’m not giving YOU 10% more of anything!

As luck would have it, back here at the studio, I’m working on a business application that will be used primarily by workers who are relatively new to the job. (Advancement at my client’s company happens quickly, so just as users get good at what they’re doing, they get promoted and no longer have to perform the work that the software supports.) Knowing that the application we’re designing will need to guide users through their work, and keeping in mind my recent experiences at the gym, I made sure to ask users about the qualities they appreciated most in their human mentors. My design partners and I then took care to embody those personality traits in the visual and interaction design of the application. (For a nice list of factors that affect the perceived personality of an application, see Martijn van Welie's blog post Brand behavior in interaction.)

So the next time you find yourself particularly delighted or disgruntled as you move about your daily life, challenge yourself to figure out why — it just might help you hone your design skills.

In a perfect world, interaction design would begin when a product was still just a twinkle in a venture capitalist’s eye. In reality, many software products make it all the way through the development cycle with little thought to the users’ experience, and when executives, sales people, or QA testers finally get their hands on the functioning product and start sounding the alarm bells, interaction designers are brought in to clean up the mess. With increasing demand for design “swat teams” to rescue fully developed but flawed software that is scheduled to ship within months or even weeks, the critical question becomes: how can you avoid getting caught up in the chaos that frequently permeates “crisis-mode” engagements?