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.

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Last week I had a chance to attend Disrupting Markets By Design. What I expected was musings on design as a competitive advantage accompanied by Apple anecdotes. Or maybe a case for lean thinking for designers and the need to fail fast by using quantitative research methods. What I got instead was a compelling and nuanced review of the importance of empathy.

About six months ago, I switched from coffee to tea because I wanted to reduce the influence of caffeine in my life. After a somewhat painful adjustment period, I now look forward to my morning tea ritual as much as I once did my morning cup o' Joe - and I feel better. Until yesterday morning, though, I hadn't given much thought to the impact of how I was drinking my tea.

It started with a quote from a Fast Company article about leadership (Buddha Had It Right: Relax the Mind and Productivity Will Follow) that inspired me enough to end up on this index card:

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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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Shouts out to all the newly minted Cooper U alumni in the South Pacific! We had students from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia, representing a wide array of specialties: Marketing, development, visual design, company ownership, user research, and yes, interaction design as well.

Some travel snafus had some students arriving later, but we forged ahead with Day 1.

Following are some images and video from the fun and intense learning week we spent together.

When it was all said and done, students told me that they loved the pace and the content of the course, specifically appreciating learning...

• The power of pair design, and what to do if your company doesn't do it formally
• Why personas work
• How we make personas so they're useful design and communication tools
• That building anti-personas are sometimes necessary
• The principle of iterating in the cheapest medium possible
• How we align Agile methodologies and Goal-Directed Interaction Design

In a personal email, one student even told me it gave him fresh new eyes for understanding how to think about and critique his freshly-downloaded iTunes 11. He said he felt more equipped to have rational design conversations about things now, which is as much as any teacher could ask for.

Congratulations, again, to a vibrant class for crossing the...

(and thanks to April Hague-Smith for the lovely horse sketch. :)

Want a Cooper U in your part of the world?

Cooper loves the opportunity to travel to new places and teach how it is we do what we do: we learn a lot in the process. If you're around the world and think there's a classroom's worth of people eager to attend, let us know and we'll try and get there as soon as we can.

12/11/12 Update:Thank you to all the amazing organizations who were interested in partnering with us for the UX Boot Camp. We received many thoughtful inquiries and were deeply impressed by the work of each organization. Unfortunately, due to time constraints as we approach the end of the year, we are no longer actively seeking partnership for the 2013 Boot Camps, but stay in touch for future opportunities to partner with Cooper for the 2014 UX Boot Camps

What is UX Boot Camp?

Cooper’s UX Boot Camp is a four-day course in our user experience design methodology for designers, developers, and product managers. UX Boot Camp is also an opportunity for nonprofits to explore a real world problem of theirs that can be helped by design and technology. Under the guidance of Cooper senior staff, Boot Camp students perform an in-depth field study surrounding the problem, and the nonprofit receives approximately six distinct design explorations at no cost.

Who attends?

Design practitioners, developers, product managers, marketers, usability professionals, and decision makers who have some experience creating products but want to learn new design methods, get hands-on practice, and help a nonprofit along the way.

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This is the first post in a series of interviews exploring some of the fundamental questions in our field, like what user experience design (UX) is and why it matters to you. In this article, I’ve interviewed Alan Cooper, founder and President of Cooper and Chris Noessel Managing Director at Cooper and co-author of “Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction”.

How do you design a digital interaction?

Digital technology must respond in a meaningful way when a user expresses their intent. The job of a user experience designer is making this interaction feel natural and nearly invisible. As people around the world increasingly engage with digital technology on a daily basis, the need for smart UX becomes ever more apparent.

Alan says, “When a complex digital device is easy to understand and use, a UX designer has done their job.” A skilled UX designer understands the goals and mental models of users, along with the nuances of technology. He or she uses this knowledge to shape the behavior of the technology so that it all seems natural to the user, in just the way a talented author makes you forget the narrator.

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This 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 2: Don't Photoshop 'til you drop
Part 3: Start with a solid foundation

Part 1 of 3: Creativity Boosters

When computers and digital technology came onto the scene, a design revolution was born. Thanks to the advantages of the new digital workstream, the possibilities for our creativity expanded exponentially. But, given the complexity of learning the new programs that are available to us, many of us now find ourselves locked into a single toolset (read: Photoshop), afraid to try something different. As a result, our workflows are inefficient and not oriented to working effectively in teams.

The goal is to be creative
A well designed workflow cuts down your stress and increases your focus, allowing more time for what you want to do most: be creative.

Creativity starts with ideas.
The creative process is more than just finding the right tool for the job; it’s also about finding the best approach to being creative. Starting in the computer pushes designers down the path of putting the pixel first and the concept second. Instead, I find paper to be the best way to explore and develop a range of ideas.

A quick exercise I use to the get the juices flowing is to start sketching ideas in quick 5 minute sprints. I focus on generating as many different ideas as quickly as possible, then expand on those ideas. This is best done on paper so you think about the concept rather than the design.

Sketching is a critical part of your workflow so don’t ignore it. Drawing stencils play a big part of my process and are instrumental in helping me get ideas down on paper. I especially find circles, straighlings, curvers, and squares useful, which you can find at any local art store. If you’re a mobile application designer, check out the UI Stencils for iphone, android, and w8 interfaces. You’ll thank me later.

Finding inspiration
As an illustration major in college, my professor implored his students to start a reference library of interesting photos, textures, colors, and whatever else we found interesting. The idea was to create a massive library of photo references that you could refer back to if you needed to draw a sports car, a pine tree, or a leather jacket for example.

Growing as a designer means keeping up with the ever-shifting trends and visual innovations out there in the world, and a library of inspiration can be a useful tool to stockpile inspirational art and help to spark your creativity.

Inspired efficiency
As a visual designer, I've extended the idea of maintaining a reference library and started an asset library of Photoshop files, Fireworks files, icons, vectors, textures, brushes, swatches, fonts and whatever else I find useful. The idea is to curate a collection of elements so that you spend less time searching in the future.

Just about anything can inspire visual creativity. Don't just limit yourself to obvious things like icons or UI elements; branch out and explore non-digital works like paintings and illustrations. Over the years I've collected thousands of interesting and inspiring artifacts, including fonts, photographs, textures, color palettes, and even code snippets.

Here are some places I go when I want to find new material for my library:

www.behance.net
www.pinterest.com
www.ffffound.com
www.dribbble.com
www.thebestdesigns.com
www.losttype.com/browse
From thenextweb.com: 97 places to find design inspiration

Tools of the trade
If you’re looking to start your own digital asset library, I recommend giving Pixa App a try. It’s a promising new application for maintaining an asset library. Pixa supports all the file types I use as a designer: Photoshop, Illustration, EPS, PDF and Fireworks files. Additionally, the fact that Pixa works with dropbox makes it an ideal tool for sharing assets with other team members.

As my collection grew, however, it became increasingly difficult to maintain it and keep it useful. Enter Evernote. Evernote excels at nearly everything I was looking for in a digital asset management application: it makes content collection, tagging, and sharing a snap. But Evernote's secret awesomeness is in search: it can instantly find text not only in tags, titles, and notes, but also, using very accurate OCR, within the images themselves.

Tell us what you think
I hope your take away from this post is that understanding your workflow is just as important as understanding your tools. The approaches I’ve shared are simple ones, but they’ve made a big difference in my own design process. Give them a try, and share your favorite tools and methods for working smarter, not harder, in the comments or on the Cooper PUB Facebook Page. And, don’t forget to add your name to the waitlist if you’d like to be part of the Cooper PUB branch conversation on October 25th.

(Stay tuned for part 2 of this series next Wednesday, October 10th).