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.
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.
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.
Cooper is honored and delighted to receive the award for “Best in Category, Optimizing”. We are proud to be in the company of some of the most creative and innovative designers and grateful to the Interaction Awards Jury for their consideration.
Over a year ago, Cooper teamed up with Practice Fusion to design an app that revolved around how medical professionals think. Instead of asking them to learn a new way of organizing information, this EMR for iPad app leveraged their natural mental model of treating and working with people. This app significantly simplified and reduced the work of using an EMR by eliminating complex navigation and abstract categories. Now doctors can clearly view and capture details about their patients, without being chained behind a desktop.
A few years ago, we designed a course to help individuals and teams learn how to work together better, knowing that if we could teach them how to be master communicators and collaborators, they’d get better products and services out into the world. Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with the content of that class, gathering feedback from alumni, and brainstorming how to take it up a notch. We’ve come up with a new and improved curriculum that goes beyond collaboration and communication, introducing participants to the skills and practices to become leaders in their organizations. We renamed the course to reflect this new emphasis.
At its core, Design Leadership remains a fantastic hands-on workshop for designers and managers alike to collaborate and learn from each other. But now, we’ve added more leadership techniques like using storytelling to communicate the value of your work and ways to impact the culture of your organization. This is the course your career wants you to take.
To entice you, we’re offering 20% off our first Design Leadership training on February 27-28. Just use this code when you register: DL20213
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.
2012 was the inaugural year of the UX Boot Camp, so we were overwhelmed by the response that we got from so many different organizations that were interested in partnering with us in 2013. We were deeply impressed by the amount of consideration that went into each entry. Many thanks to all of the organizations who contacted us, please stay in touch for our 2014 Boot Camps.
It is with great pleasure we announce that Fair Trade USA will kick-off our 2013 UX Boot Camps from March 25-28
We are proud to announce that our work with Practice Fusion’s EMR iPad app has been announced as 2013 Interaction Award winner in optimizing from the Interaction Design Association. The app was selected by an international jury and recognized for it's ability to make daily activities more efficient. Here's a look at what this app can do.
Congratulations to the Practice Fusion team and the Cooper team of Stefan, Andreas, Jayson, Elisha, Jenea, Doug, and Nick, and a big thank you to Jim.
Update:If you like this app, than let your voice be heard! Vote for this app to win the Interaction13 People's Choice Award
To create our new iPad interface, which just released as a beta version to active providers, Practice Fusion partnered with the award-winning design firm Cooper. Cooper is renowned for its work across the design world, from startups to over a third of the Fortune 500, with its emphasis on creating simple and enjoyable user experiences.
Our iPad User Experience Designer, Kramer Weydt (R), worked closely with Cooper’s Stefan Klocek (L) to make the Cooper design a reality. We met to chat about the process:
Stefan Klocek: We are user experience designers, meaning we focus specifically on how users interact with the EMR. Instead of just designing from scratch, we first understand our user’s needs and we determine how we can fulfill those needs with the technical resources we have available.
Kramer Weydt: We’re not doctors, but we understand how people interact with devices and we learn from doctors what they need from this technology through research and interviews.
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
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.
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.
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”.
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.
