Alan Cooper (Redux)
Alan Cooper was one of the first practitioners to ask “How do users interact with this?” His insights led him to create a design process focused on what could be designed to meet users’ needs. Through his consulting work, he began to interview the users of his client’s products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy.
Cooper is the originator of the concept of the user persona. Beginning in 1983, he started using a prototype of what the persona would become using data from informal interviews with seven to eight users. From 1995 on, he became engaged with how a specific rather than generalized user would use an interface with the software. The technique was popularized for the online business and technology community in his 1998 book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. In this book, Cooper outlines his methodology, called Goal-Directed design, based on the concept that software should speed the user towards his or her ultimate goal rather than ensnare him or her in minutiae. Further, this book covers the uses and best practices for creating personas, recommending that software be designed for single archetypal users. His ideas helped to drive the user experience movement and define the craft that would come to be called “interaction design.”
Cooper's best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, was first published in 1995. In it, Cooper introduces a comprehensive set of practical design principles, essentially a taxonomy for software design. By the second edition, as the industry and profession evolved, “interface design” had become the more precise “interaction design.” The basic message of this book was directed at programmers: Do the right thing. Think about your users. The book is now in its fourth edition, entitled About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and is considered a foundation text for the professional interaction designer.
Cooper is well known for his writings:
About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, 4th edition (2014).
About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design (2007).
About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design (2003).
The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (1998).
About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (1995).
