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Cooper U filling fast, fueling change

The Editors — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:28:12 -0800

Grab the last seats for the Communication & Collaboration course. We geared this course for practitioners who want to take their effectiveness working within design groups and spread it to their larger product and stakeholder teams. We've packed years of experience as consultants into a fun, engaging two-day intensive. The class delivers lots of information with the intent of reframing the focus of your work and many hands-on exercises to get practice before applying your new skills back home.

Some topics include:

Learn how adopting a new approach to engaging with others improves responsiveness, feedback and support for your work
Practice new methods for collaborating with your teams which lead to more productive meetings and better working relationships
Discover ways to empower your organization with tools which will focus work, improve cross-functional partnerships and support more strategic discussions

You'll leave excited and eager to bring this new approach to communicating and collaborating with others. In addition to the course materials you'll receive a sharp set of Communication and Collaboration Method cards to keep in your back pocket for when you need a refresher.

We've got less than 10 seats left, you can register now.

UX Bootcamp Midwest added 10 more spots!

The inaugural UX Bootcamp Midwest in partnership with Red Cross of Columbus filled so quickly we added 10 spots, increasing the class size to 30. Space is limited to ensure one-on-one attention.

Rock Health classes off to an exciting start

We're proud to be working with Rock Health's 2012 class of start-ups. We're delivering a lightning round of design classes and hosting regular office hours for deep collaboration. Two weeks in and we're really excited by the great ideas, super motivated teams, and new approaches to improving healthcare.

The revolution will be portable: Understanding the tablet opportunity for alternative media

The Editors — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 04:30:00 -0800

The Association of Alternative Newsmedia's 2012 Web Conference was held in San Francisco and attended by publishers, editors, and owners from over 130 of North America's alternative news organizations. Stefan Klocek spoke about how alternative news organizations can bring their content to the emerging platform of tablets in "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" session. He highlighted unique qualities of the tablet for local news consumption and gave an overview of how organizations with a cultivated and established brand presence can deeply engage with their audience. View Stefan's presentation below or download it.

Sketchnoting IxDA 2012

Chris Noessel — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:16:26 -0800

We're working on a larger post about the awesome IxDA 2012 in Dublin last week, but in the meantime, I wanted to chat separately about sketchnoting.

I'm a drawer, there's no doubt about it. I can barely manage to consider a design problem before I'm reaching for a pen and paper, or my Tablet PC and a stylus and cranking open OneNote for an explanatory drawing or mind map. But that got taken to the next level when I attended "Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes," a workshop by MJ Broadbent & Eva-Lotta Lamm.

In it we covered the basics of sketching and then went further into what that means for capturing the complex ideas communicated in lectures and speeches. I was hooked, and challenged. I spent the next three days both enamored of the excellent ideas being presented (high marks on all four things I look for in presentations, nearly across the board), but also trying my new skills at sketchnoting. Here's the whole set.

Sketchnoting IxDA 2012

View more PowerPoint from ChrisNoessel

I got some good feedback, but as a perfectionist, I still think I've got a long way to go. There are a few I'd like to call attention to where I made some mistakes or scored some points.

The order of information should be clear.

This first sketch is of Tony Dunne's talk about Crafting Design Speculations. The bust of Tony (which I used almost throughout the sketches) is a nice central anchor, but even with the arrows it's tough to know what should come next and how this should be read. White space may help, but so does adopting a more traditional structure that matches Western writing, starting at the left and working right. It's also simpler in shorter talks, where the ideas have to be simpler and more straightforward, as this note from Michael Hawley's 10 minute talk on UX Leadership shows.

Don't make it hard to follow the logic of the talk.

Do use white space to make it clearer.

One colored pen helps a lot

I left my colored pen at home on the first part of the second day, and I missed it. Though I managed to keep it interesting in this sketch of Kel Smith's talk about Digital Outcasts, the addition of the color on the notes of Jonas Löngren's talks adds a great deal more visual distinction and interest.

No color.

Color!

Stick to one reading orientation

I tried some experiments with turning my page during the notes, but it actually only serves to make it harder to parse. See the notes from Jeff Gothelf's talk about demystifying design for the case in point. I'd recommend keeping the orientation consistent for each note, as I did for Amber Case's talk on the Future of Cyborg Interface.

This is like trying to sıɥʇ ǝʞıן buıɥʇǝɯos pɐǝɹ.

Ah. Much better.

Develop a visual vocabulary

This was one piece of advice given by Eva-Lotta and MJ that paid off well. The busts of the speakers, my all-nose figure thing, the icon for "search", and consistent use of a "closer" that attempts to wrap up the big last thought help give these a consistency that makes it easier to parse and makes them work together as a whole. Inside of individual talks, we were encouraged to develop a sketchy shorthand for the core ideas and keep using them, while riffing on them with the content. The little dude with the x-ray heart is a good example. It takes a lot of time-intense visual improvisation, but it's fun and worth it.

Sketchnoting is a fast and intense way to capture complex ideas in an engaging way. As I hone my skills, I'm also thinking about how to use this technique for documenting goal-directed research findings and our big ideas at Cooper to our clients.

If you're interested to know more, there are a number of brilliant people working on topics of sketching. Check them out, and happy sketching!

Eva-Lotta Lamm: www.evalotta.net, http://www.slideshare.net/evalottchen/visual-note-taking-3768130
Sam Smith: http://www.slideshare.net/pubsmith/sketching-interfaces-workshop-interactions12-dublin
Mike Rohde & Binaebi Akah: http://sketchnotearmy.com/
I also dig this overview by Craighton Berman: http://www.core77.com/blog/sketchnotes/sketchnotes_101_the_basics_of_visual_note-taking_19678.asp

Strategies for early-stage design: Observations of a design guinea pig

Jim Dibble — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:21:58 -0800

Where do you start when you're approaching a complex software design problem? If you work on a large development team, you know that software engineers and UX designers will often approach the same design problem from radically different perspectives. The term "software design" itself can mean very different things to software architects, system programmers, and user experience designers. Software engineers typically focus on the architectural patterns and programmatic algorithms required to get the system working, while UX designers often start from the goals and needs of the users.

In the spring of 2009, I participated in a research study that looked at the ways in which professional software designers approach complex design problems. The research study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was led by researchers from the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers traveled to multiple software companies, trying to better understand how professional software designers collaborate on complex problems. At each company, they asked to observe two software designers in a design session. At my company, AmberPoint, where I worked at the time as an interaction designer, I was paired with my colleague Ania Dilmaghani, the programming lead of the UI development team. In a conference room with a whiteboard, the researchers set up a video camera, and handed us a design prompt describing the requirements for a traffic control simulation system for undergraduate civil engineering students. We were allotted two hours to design both the user interaction and the code structure for the system.

Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session

As I'm sure you're thinking right now, two hours is not enough time to fully grasp the intricacies of traffic control, let alone to design the mission-critical software architecture and the user interaction model of a traffic control simulation system. As designers who approach problems from the user's perspective, Ania and I spent most of our allotted time considering the user's experience. We explored the real-world problems involved in traffic control and the tools that users would need to construct maps, set traffic light timings, seed traffic, and evaluate the results of a simulation run. We touched briefly on the way in which the simulation engine might work, but definitely did not provide sufficient detail to enable programmers to get started on the innards of the system.

The final whiteboard diagrams after the two-hour design session

Our team was selected for study

Several months after our design session, the researchers wrote to tell us they were planning a conference on studying professional software design at UC Irvine. They chose our design session as one of three to be analyzed and interpreted by invited participants. The organizers put the call out to researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, including software engineering, design studies, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and psychology. Participants were given access to both the videos and transcripts, and were encouraged to analyze the design from any of a number of perspectives, including design strategies, design notation, interpersonal communication, decision-making strategies, comparisons to established software design methodologies, and design outcomes. Because the organizers felt that the conference participants would appreciate the ability to discuss their observations and theories with design practitioners, they invited us to attend.

In February 2010, we traveled to UC Irvine to attend the conference. Walking into a lecture hall with more than 50 researchers who had viewed our videos repeatedly, we had a small sense of what Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie might feel like when walking into a restaurant in LA. Heads turned, and people pointed and whispered.

Researchers from multiple disciplines came from around the world, from as far away as Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Europe. Over a period of three days, we heard over 30 papers analyzing our design strategies, our communication patterns, and our final design solutions. And at the end of each day, we heard closing thoughts from luminaries in the fields of computer science, design studies, and psychology, such as Frederick Brooks (professor at UNC Chapel Hill and author of "The Mythical Man-Month"), Nigel Cross (design studies professor at The Open University, editor of Design Studies, and author of "Designerly Ways of Knowing"), and Michael Jackson (computer science professor at The Open University and author of "Software Requirements and Specifications").

The panel of luminaries speaks at the close of the conference: (L to R) Michael Jackson (The Open University), Mary Shaw (Carnegie-Mellon University), Clayton Lewis (University of Colorado, Boulder), Nigel Cross (The Open University), Barbara Tversky (Stanford and Columbia), and Frederick Brooks (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

The three design teams had taken very different tactics in approaching the design problem. Because we came from a user interface background, our design strategies focused on exploring the problem from the user's perspective: how does traffic signal timing work, and what tasks do civil engineering students need to perform to gain a better understanding of traffic signal timing? The other teams, composed of software architects, worked from the inside out: how does traffic signal timing work, and what architectural patterns can be used to implement the traffic simulation system? While one of those teams touched briefly on the user interface, the other team completed their architectural design in an hour, waving their hands to indicate that all that remained was a basic user interface design.

How our design fared

So, how did the researchers assess our designs? Well, their evaluations depended on their research perspective. Several computer science researchers evaluated the design session based on the technical skills exhibited: the ability to accurately frame the technical problem based on the explicitly stated requirements and the ability to choose an appropriate architectural pattern for the implementation. Design studies researchers tended to evaluate the design on the "soft skills" associated with design: interpersonal communication, ability to articulate the reasoning behind design choices, and the ability to examine and evaluate requirements based on the end-users' needs. Other researchers, rather than being prescriptive, examined the processes and strategies used by the design teams: how did the designers structure their design sessions, how did they explore the breadth and depth of the problem, and how does this compare to the way that the academy teaches software design students to approach problems?

Not many designers have the opportunity to hear a team of cross-disciplinary researchers examine their work. We heard much in those three days, reminding us of the importance of explicitly planning a design session, of framing the design problem, and of conversation as part of the design process. Throughout the workshop, we also passed on our observations to the researchers, letting them know that real-world design problems seldom begin from a complete problem statement or requirements document, and that architects and developers can easily jump to the system's architectural structure while overlooking the user's goals, needs, and outcomes.

Mary Shaw and Frederick Brooks discuss the conference proceedings during a break

After the conference, Ania and I discussed how differently the design session might have turned out if either one of us had been paired with a software architect. We definitely would have spent more time addressing the system's architecture, but we were unsure whether we would we have been able to frame the problem around meeting the user's needs. In engineering-led organizations, designers are seldom included in early-stage design sessions, which can lead to products that don't meet the target users' needs. Collaborating with engineers and architects in early-stage design can be incredibly difficult because we often don't share the same criteria for evaluating design decisions. While many engineers are starting to express requirements in more user-centered ways, for example through the use of agile user stories, they often have difficulty moving these beyond low-level narrative that describes the purpose of technical features.

Several publications have come out of the work of the conference, including a special issue of Design Studies (Volume 31, Issue 6, November 2010), a special issue of IEEE Software (Volume 29, Issue 1, January/February 2012), and a forthcoming book on studying professional software design. Because of our participation in the conference, the researchers encouraged us to write an article based on our experiences in software design, for the special issue of IEEE Software. Our article, Strategies for Early-Stage Collaborative Design, (Ania Dilmaghani and Jim Dibble, "Strategies for Early-Stage Collaborative Design," IEEE Software, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 39-45, Jan./Feb. 2012, doi:10.1109/MS.2011.124), offers a set of ten ground rules for conducting collaborative design sessions. In our article, we encourage engineers and architects to develop the "soft skills" of design, and to evaluate design solutions against user needs and scenarios. These ground rules, based on our experience and our learnings from the conference, will be helpful to anyone running a collaborative design session, whether UX designers or software architects.

The experience has us thinking about early collaboration outside the research laboratory. UX designers and software architects each bring unique understandings to problem-solving. Depending on how an organization structures design work, these differing perspectives can be either complementary or conflictual. We're familiar with how it works in our business, and curious about how it works in yours. How does early-stage design work in your organization? Do your interaction designers and architects work collaboratively from the outset to understand the problem? How do you establish a feedback loop to bring understandings from each design approach back to the overall solution?

Looking forward to a few good interns...

Susan Dybbs — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0800

Here in San Francisco the sun is shining, the sky is clear and we are already looking forward to this summer. But we're not just looking forward to more good weather; we can't wait to welcome summer interns.

What better place to apply what you've been learning than in the collaborative Cooper environment? We don't have wireframe monkeys here, you and your ideas and input will be applied on real projects for real products.

Our internship program is a 10-week paid position in San Francisco for current undergrad, graduate, or recently graduated students. We're looking for both interaction and visual designers who have a mix of self-motivation, design skills, open-mindedness, curiosity, empathy, and thirst for knowledge.

As an intern, you'll get a chance to take part in user research, strategy creation, concept explorations, and detailed design. Along the way, mentors will guide you through project work and help you reach larger career goals. We'll make sure you're set to roll up your sleeves and get involved, and that you get as much as you can out of your experience at Cooper.

Sound like something for you? Send a résumé along with a letter stating your internship
goals and portfolio samples (PDF or link to your website) by March 15th to internship@cooper.com.

The sCoop: week of January 30

Andreas Braendhaugen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:31:36 -0800

This week we sent a few of our colleagues to Dublin, Ireland to represent Cooper at the IXDA 2012 conference. Managing director Chris Noessel has kept us up to speed on the proceedings with delightful sketchnotes. (This one is from "cyborg anthropologist" Amber Case's talk).

(For more of Chris' dispatches from the IXDA conference, take a look at his twitter feed).

On the home front, Cooper continued bringing design methodology to health startup incubator Rock Health. Susan Dybbs treated this year's batch of entrepreneurs a lecture on using design to create successful health care products. We can't wait to see these companies designing their way to industry domination!

Although there are no Facebook stockholders at the office, this week's announcement of an imminent IPO was unignorable. We were intrigued by the iconography that accompanied the SEC filing.

On a different note, the increased availability and lower cost of small, unmanned aircraft has opened up a range of possibilities for filmmakers. We marvelled at one example by Tabb Firchau.

Using unmanned aircraft for photography has actually become quite a common phenomenon. So common, in fact, that the LAPD has issued a warning against real estate agents who use drone aircraft to photograph properties. Take care when you take your kids out to play with your autonomous, computer-vision-guided helicopter this weekend!

--
Update 2/3/2012 - 5:03pm

A musical experiment created with the app VidRhythm has just come in my possession, and is posted below. These video apps are proliferating fast!

Playing with iBooks

Nick Myers — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0800

At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run.

The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that call, though. Our initial impression? It's an accessible tool aimed at a user population that, up to this point, hasn't been equipped to produce engaging and usable interactive educational content.

In our trial run, we produced a look book with some of recent work, including slideshows, imagery and video. It's a little rough in some areas, but we'd love to see what you think. You can download it via the link below and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Download the Cooper iBook.

The eye of the brainstorm

Alan Cooper — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:00:00 -0800

In our modern digital environment, all businesses have a great competitive need for creative thinking that far exceeds our industrial forebears. In the quest for an institutional source of creativity, the brainstorming session, where several people meet to have fresh ideas, has emerged as the front runner. Brainstorming can be fun, and some prominent consulting firms have prospered proselytizing this technique, but it has a remarkably thin track record of success.

While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.

I believe that all people share these three modes of behavior: solo, paired, and group. Generally, these differences are noted only as interesting social quirks, and have not been investigated by academia or exploited by business, but their differences have important implications for the creative manager.

Brainstorming's adherents believe that a group of people can together imagine more and better solutions than any one person can alone. I won't dispute that assertion, but just because one is better than the other doesn't imply that either is anywhere close to being optimal.

A recent article in the New York Times put forth the radical idea that brainstorming might not be such a good idea, and cites recent research indicating that working solo is more productive than working in groups. The author, Susan Cain, points out that many of our greatest innovations came not from large groups of ideating peers, but from solo geniuses working in isolation. Her case in point is Steve Wozniak, the enigmatic inventor of the Apple computer.

As a former inventor who worked almost exclusively by myself, I agree with Cain. The problem is that, at the time, I would only work for myself, and like me, few independent creative people can be motivated to solve the problems of someone else's business. Unless you get remarkably lucky, you need to find a way to reliably innovate with people content to have a steady job.

When I began to consult for others, I too faced the challenge of generating consistent, reliable, and predictable imaginative problem solving. After some struggle, the correct solution finally emerged: pair designing.

This year marks Cooper's twentieth anniversary engaged in intensively creative work performed for hire, on schedule, on budget, for a wildly diverse clientele. Our work is nothing if not creative, and we consistently astonish our clients with the depth of our innovative thinking. What's more, we almost never do group brainstorming, and solo problem solving is, while not forbidden here, institutionally frowned upon as being too slow and expensive. Our ability to innovate reliably and effectively is largely due to our insistence that our creative consultants work in pairs.

The advocates of brainstorming paint a picture of innovation being like a seance, with the product team gathered around a large table, while their collective human spirit conjures up bolts of originality. As author Cain asserts, and I agree, creative thinking doesn't work that way.

Inventing new solutions to hard challenges demands intense focus, hard work, and generous quantities of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a difficult but teachable skill. It is a systematic discipline demanding good tools, skill, and practice. Just like most other things of value, doing purposeful critical thinking isn't necessarily easy or fun, but it is always satisfying and rewarding.

Critical thinking is difficult to do in large groups. Criticizing in a group setting tends to polarize it, and there are immediate and overriding political considerations of doing so. What's more, some people hate to speak out in a group, while others thrive on so doing. This guarantees that the group will be led by personalities and personal interests more than it will be by the quality of ideas.

Thinking critically is difficult to do alone for the same reason that most sports are not done alone. There isn't enough good feedback when you are by yourself. It is always easier to pace yourself by competing fraternally against another. You can see how you are doing, and you can encourage each other to new heights of accomplishment.

In my experience, the most dependable way to do seriously creative work in a businesslike manner, on a day-to-day basis, with individuals of normal capabilities, is to put them to work in groups of two. The interpersonal dynamics of a group of two are dramatically different from those in a group setting. Both partners can assert their ideas with much reduced risk of social embarrassment. One other person in the room can be a non-judgmental critic and offer encouragement for further imagination without being threatening. And just as two bike riders, runners, or soccer players will bring out the best in each other, two designers will also.

Although I believe that any pairing can be more effective than solo work or group brainstorming, we put quite a bit of effort into selecting our pairs, preferring those whose skills are complementary. Primarily, we like to pair explorers with planners. Explorers soar with ideas, flying to new heights of creativity. Planners make certain that the explorer's ideas are realistic and can be made complete.

Cain devotes most of her text to casting doubt on the millennial generation's tendency to do everything as a group. Schooled early in the political correctness of what she calls "groupthink," young people seem inclined to attack everything as a large collaborative team. I'm a big fan of teams and teamwork for getting most things done, but for innovation, give me just two people, a whiteboard, and the challenge of a Gordian Knot to untie.

The sCoop: week of January 23

Jayson McCauliff — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:38:56 -0800

Some people like to dance and shake it in the dark. Others wear their sunglasses at night. Here's proof some like WORKING in the dark (and they're not hookers). Stefan snapped these, catching a glimpse of the Cooper evening crew in action...

Speaking of Stefan, he spoke at the Association of Alternative Media 2012 AAN Web Conference, here in SF, on "The Revolution will be Portable: Understanding the Tablet Opportunity" An exquisitely designed on-the-go tablet app is Pyrolia's Road Inc., an in-depth, feature-rich anthology of classic automobiles.

We've all heard the hype around HTML5, so let's get on with it already! Check out Tumults Inc.'s aptly named HYPE for some of the easiest ways to implement HTML5 animations and eye-opening interactive prototypes.

An interaction HTML5 has breathed new life into is: s c r o l l i n g. This eye-opening interaction even has its own name: parallax. The term is derived from the Greek παράλλαξις (parallaxis), meaning "alteration". Parallax helps accurately portray our visual perception of distance. Not only do objects in the background appear smaller, they also MOVE slower than their foreground counterparts. Slavery Footprint and Moods of Norway (best viewed in the horizontal position) are notable examples of the parallax in action.

When your back in the vertical position and ready for some moving of your own, check out this interactive, motion-sensing, motivational 7 foot wall! Designed to get gym members actively engrossed in nutrition and physical activity, this is one funhouse mirror that builds UP your confidence. Its "Future Self" application composits what YOU (the fairest one of all) may look like in the near future if you heed the advice of this great wall of fitness.

The new iBGStar blood glucose meter is another innovative way to monitor nutrition. Designed for iPhone/iTouch-lovin'-diabetics-on-the-go, it can actually take and read blood samples, your nutritional intake, missed meals, and yes, amount of exercise.

All these new ways to monitor nutrition and exercise has made me HUNGRY! So, I leave you with a recent snapshot of our sustenance request board...

Personally, I prefer Desvenlafaxine, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, and Toaster Strudels® - portable and perfect for when your on-the-go.

Beyond the pixel: Measuring visual designers' strategic value

Steve Calde — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:35:43 -0800

I collaborate with clients about how to scope and staff project work, and they often have questions about when to bring a visual designer into the process. In the early part of my career, I wouldn't have had a good answer; it likely would have been something like, "at the end." But after 20 years of working in-house and as a consultant with product teams in various capacities — and having no background in visual design myself — I have a much different perspective on the value that visual design thinking has throughout the process of building a product.

Visual designers bring a unique perspective to product vision

First, visual designers are uniquely skilled at defining the overarching experience strategy, called attributes, for a product or service. These aren't specific design principles, but rather descriptions of what the experience should feel like for users, customers, and anyone interacting with it.

One way to define experience attributes is to conduct an experience workshop, where you facilitate a brand and "look and feel" discussion with stakeholders. Framing the discussion by using visual artifacts (pictures of products, cars, buildings, interfaces, art, etc.) helps stakeholders to engage at a visceral level instead of relying on cliché's or generalizations. Visual designers, on the other hand, are great at this, as they are skilled at talking about how the things we see translate into certain feelings and emotions, and how visual elements relate to brand perception.

Facilitating an experience workshop with images makes it easier for participants to articulate what visual approaches feel appropriate and inspiring. A visual designer is skilled at using this input to shape a visual strategy.

Even for companies with a well-defined brand and digital branding assets, it's vital that the product team has a good understanding of what the brand means in the context of the product or service you are designing. This isn't just about proper logo use and the corporate font. It's about knowing how your company wants users to feel when they are using your brand, and about how your users want to feel while using them. Understand that intersection, and you have gold.

Look at things differently during field research

During design field research activities, a visual designer can focus on things like the visual look of the physical environment in which people use the product or service we are investigating. For example, in a medical setting, the visual designer may pay special attention to the signage and décor within a hospital. We wouldn't mimic this in an interface, but getting a feel for the environment can give us clues as to what kind of visual styles may fit—or not fit—within that setting.

Jayson, a visual designer at Cooper, gets to experience user research firsthand at a doctor's office.

I recently worked with Jayson McCauliff, a visual designer, on a product for a large technology manufacturer. The product's users were internal, so Jayson took photos of lobbies, wall art, the small in-house museum, and even the cafeteria. The effort was worth the funny looks he got, as the images later helped give him inspirations for some subtle background textures that made a direct appearance in the interface. (See more about how visual designers work at Cooper)

Early design thinking should include visual language explorations

While the interaction designers begin a design solution phase by exploring key interactions and high-level workflows, the visual designer can explore high-level visual style approaches. Because stakeholders may not be used to or comfortable talking about aesthetic and brand, having someone who understands visual design but can communicate about the effects that color, shape, white space, etc. have on users and brand are vital to making sure that everyone is aligned. It takes skill to talk about style concepts without having the conversation degrade into an argument about the specific shade of blue in a style study, so it's important to have someone who is proficient in facilitating these discussions and in creating artifacts that solicit the right kind of feedback.

Visual language studies keep initial visual strategy conversations focused.

Defining and building a winning product includes attention to the aesthetic and overall experience

Last, visual design isn't just about producing beautiful visual assets for the development team. It's also about creating a coherent product or service in the first place. A visual designer brings a unique perspective to problem solving that augments the other design team members. We find that having the visual designer involved early in design exploration activities makes our design concepts better and more well-rounded. When we are fleshing out the design framework, early and consistent involvement from the visual designer ensures that the interaction design isn't getting too crowded, and that the overall experience is achieving the experience strategy we defined early in the project.

During detailed design activities and implementation, the visual designer needs to be able to react quickly and fluidly as the design and implementation iterate and get refined. If the visual designer has been involved with the project from day one, it's easy for her to work in an agile way while still maintaining the original spirit and intent of the design, and she'll be able to make good decisions and recommend improvements because of that greater understanding.

As you plan your next redesign effort, make sure that a strong visual designer is part of the team from day one. You'll not only gain efficiencies when it's crunch time during implementation, you'll gain a valuable strategic partner and an overall better experience.

Sign up for the visual design course

Learn more about the role of visual design, experience attributes, experience workshops, and effectively presenting visual design to stakeholders in Cooper's Visual Interface Design course on February 6 - 7.

Vote for the TaskRabbit iPhone app!

Nick Myers — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:40:17 -0800

Last summer, Cooper partnered with TaskRabbit and Pivotal Labs to design their new iPhone app. The app works with their service to help people who need help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with "Rabbits," a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

The TaskRabbit iPhone app has been nominated for the 2011 Crunchies and the 2012 IxDA awards. This week, you can vote for the app in both awards and check out the other nominations.

The TaskRabbit project

Posting a Task is super easy

The TaskRabbit service is continuing to expand in new cities, including Austin, and we're excited to see their service evolve and grow. Congratulations to Leah Busque for her nomination as Founder of the Year in the Crunchies also.

The sCoop: week of January 16

Glen Davis — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:05:06 -0800

The past week at Cooper started out with bang...and a crash...and boom...and a kapow! Lunchtime fun with the endless entertainment of Action Movie FX. Blow up your friend's egg roll and then laugh it off together:

Something else that dropped like a bomb this week were the SOPA and PIPA protests! Wikipedia shut down for 24 hrs Wednesday in protest of the legislation and countless students everywhere simultaneously said, "My dog ate it." A historic moment no doubt as the controversial bills were "put on hold" shortly after.

CES wrapped up in Las Vegas, but I still covet this Samsung Transparent Smart Window:

Why would I want to walk to my kitchen window to check Facebook and the weather instead of just pulling out my phone wherever I already am? I dunno, I guess touchscreens should be on everything, right? Right?!

This past week designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and medical professionals gathered for the Health Innovation Summit. Stefan explored how a group of panelists incorporated the patient perspective into their products, as Susan and the newest Cooper Interaction Designer, Christina Worsing, guided conference attendees through a design challenge to re-envision four different aspects of healthcare.

Apple announced their iBook 2 and iBooks Author applications targeting the reinvention of the textbook for the education sector. I think by now it's obvious Apple doesn't want to just design products, they want to redesign whole industries. When you're out to fix a problem, you might as well start at the root.

Another announcement that caught our attention was Nike's NikeFuel and FuelBand. Trying to pick up the ball dropped by Jawbone's Up, Nike's solution seems elegant and simple at first glance. One to watch, indeed.

A random link I found this week featuring some impressive re-coloration of old photography. Color is one of the number of powerful tools in a designer's kit. This collection is a great example of how a little hue can bring an image strikingly closer to reality.

Oops! I ruined your life. :)

Golden Krishna — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:00:00 -0800

It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”

Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.

Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?

Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:

Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.

Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:

(windows.staenz.com)

Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.

Not to be oops-outdone by Google, Microsoft’s XBox website includes the word, “Oops!” twice in an error message, first in the header and then as the first word to explain the header. Obviously, after frustrating someone, the best thing to do is say “Oops!” over and over again.

Sure, I’ll “like” that page.

And if you thought the non-profit Mozilla Foundation avoided this kind of creepy, cutesy error messaging in their Firefox browser, you thought wrong.

The legoman is sorry that you can’t load your favorite TV show.

In times like this, there’s always YouTube, right? Millions of fun videos to help us laugh at times of stress.

Facebook?

(Downtime Blog)

Grab some music off my Apple iCloud?

(MacRumors)

Check my Twitter feed?

Is there no escape from this cute hell‽

The hip company Plaxo — your address book for life — has not only embraced the “oops” but entered another level of creepy. Shhh…this error is just “our little secret.”

(Dfbills)

What’s happening?

You know, not too long ago, whenever something in software was confusing to users, software-makers had a brilliant, can’t fail, simple solution: add a how-to in the help section. Instead of spending hours making strange features straightforward, software companies passed the buck to the user: “Um, we can’t figure out how to make it easy to do, so just read the manual.”

Now it seems like there is another, new kind of awful simple solution for glitches and errors that infuriate people: a cutesy smiley face. After all, no one cares if you ruin their life as long as you do it with a smile, right?

(spinoff.comicbookresources.com)

The root of Oops!

In 1925, a New Yorker cartoon caption is credited with being the first published instance of “Whoopsie Daisy!” But the real root of the “oops” phenomenon in software might be pointed to the Linux operating system.

(Linux-mag)

This is your fault, Penguin. Please stop looking at me like that.

Upon “a bug in the kernel” Linux kicks back an OOPS error message. First developed in 1991, Linux’s code for error messages may have crept into the developer’s subconscious eventually leading to today’s proliferation of “oops.” Here’s an example:

  Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 211e2018

  c0129577

  *pde = 00000000

  Oops: 0000

  CPU:    0

  EIP:    0010:[<c0129577>]    Not tainted

  Using defaults from ksymoops -t elf32-i386 -a i386

  EFLAGS: 00010083

  eax: d7ee5000   ebx: b420e080   ecx: c164e000   edx: c1615d04

  esi: c16073d0   edi: 00000246   ebp: 000001f0   esp: d7c5de84

  ds: 0018   es: 0018   ss: 0018

  Process mount (pid: 25, stackpage=d7c5d000)

  Stack: 00000000 c0309c00 000001f0 00000000 c01fadb7 c16073d0 000001f0 c1615a40

        c1615700 c1615a40 c01fa126 00000001 000001f0 00000000 c022f793 c1615a40

        00000001 00000000 000001f0 d7b6fde0 d7c5df14 0000006e bfffec0c 00000018

  Call Trace: [<c01fadb7>] [<c01fa126>] [<c022f793>] [<c01f8acb>] [<c01f8720>]

    [<c01f9450>] [<c0106d40>] [<c0106c4f>]

  Code: 8b 44 81 18 89 41 14 83 f8 ff 75 1d 8b 41 04 8b 11 89 42 04

(If you’re curious about all the hex, an explanation is available from madwifi.)

When cute works

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with cute.

(Cute overload)

Cute works well when you expect nothing from something. Like, babies.

LOL, he pooped his pants!
Awww, he farted!
Haha, he just puked on me!

But cute doesn’t work when you have expectations. Like, with adults.

Please, use the toilet...and the toilet paper.
Ohmygawd, that smells awful!
Do you need to go home?

So when a company like Google was still young, hip and start-upy, their error messages were indeed cute. Those silly Nooglers!

(Geekrant)

How fresh!

But now that they are a publicly traded, 186 billion dollar company that we rely on for important business communications, which could make or break jobs, their cute error messages are about as cute as a Bill Gates tossing floppy disks. In other words, just plain creepy.

(Snopes)

Whaaa? You don’t find Mr. Gates cute?

Turn it down from 11

The language of error messages in old software like MS-DOS were notoriously unfriendly.

Oh yeah, duh, ff0a8e6c shouldn’t have been pointing to HAL.DLL!

So, people who care about user experience have provided guidance. So, so many articles about writing good error messaging have been written over the past three decades. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. And another. And another. And another from Yahoo! writers. Another, equating error messages to lost revenue. Another, on 404s…

But today’s insulting cutesy error message writers have swung the pendulum too far. A common recommendation to use natural language to turn an incomprehensible “Error: Stack Overflow” has not turned into something polite and understandable, but instead an insulting “Oops! Aw, snap!”

What we need to do is dial it down from 11 on the friendly meter…11 is just too creepy. There is a happy middle ground where developers can apologize and software can provide the user polite guidance about what to do next. Website, app, software, you screwed up; help the user get their desired task completed ASAP.

To paraphrase Jon Stewart, oops is not the four letter word I would have chosen.

(The Daily Show) For the impatient, start at 6:52

Driving innovation in healthcare organizations

Susan Dybbs — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:30:00 -0800

Last week, I joined entrepeneur Enrique Allen and designer Leslie Ziegler at Kaiser, where we spoke to doctors from their internal innovation program. We hoped to inspire them as well as to illustrate how design could be used inside Kaiser to improve processes and overall care.

I referred to two case studies—Cooper's work on the Practice Fusion iPad-based EMR, and a visioning project around the patient clinic experience. In these, I illustrated how we identify problems, generate ideas, and drive decision-making during detailed design.

Both case studies highlighted ways in which multidisciplinary teams can make progress by using cheap prototypes that are quickly iterated. In the case of the Practice Fusion app, we used paper prototypes to test and evolve everything from content organization to animation. We did not need to get permission of a hospital IT staff or work with an engineer; we simply needed a new piece of paper and a Sharpie. Prototyping a service starts in a similar manner. Using storyboards and cartoons, we were able to generate and evaluate myriad patient journeys without making costly process and staffing changes.

Many of the questions during the Q&A were symptomatic of a large organization that is beholden to fluctuating regulation. One attendee asked how to get front-line staff on board when they're already suffering from change fatigue. This will require both communication and empowerment. At Cooper U we teach the value of a radiator wall (a wall showing the progress and decisions of a project) in rallying a team and communicating with an organization; this kind of tool could help establish a sense of consistency and direction amid large-scale changes.

All of Kaiser's departments were represented at our talk, from general practitioners to specialists. All are charged with improve patient care and overall quality. I appreciated the opportunity to bring some lessons from my experience in healthcare and design, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they tackle next.

The sCoop: January 1-13, 2012

Jim Dibble — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:05:47 -0800

At the start of the new year, we're looking to discover how we can grow and improve as designers. .net Magazine proposes some interesting new year's resolutions for designers. To this list, we've add a few of our own:

Inspired by the Dieter Rams exhibit at SF MOMA, Kim Appelquist resolves to foster relevant design and a heightened awareness of symbiotic coordination.
Dieter Rams, Braun phonosuper (SK 4), 1956; design: Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams, photo: Koichi Okuwaki

Chris Noessel resolves to empathize even more with users, such as trying out a tool for better understanding the needs of the elderly by wearing a suit that makes you feel 75 years old.

Peter Duyan resolves to look beyond standard interface paradigms, to possibilities such as multitouch on any surface with a contact microphone.

And we all resolve to extend our impact as designers, whether it's through conveying the value of designers who code, or being the new secret weapon for start-ups.

And as January gets underway, we're happy to share the release of our most recent work with Thomson Reuters on their new mobile newsreader app for the iPad. Thomson Reuters provides real-time news and information to financial professionals around the world. Cooper designed an iPad app that facilitates the creation of a list of news topics, companies, trends, people, or ideas that interest them, and then populates these with relevant market data and up-to-the-minute analysis. The first version of this app is now available in the iTunes store for Thomson Reuters subscribers.

Here's to great design in 2012!