Alan Cooper
Encyclopedia
Alan Cooper is known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design
. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Cooper is the author of the books, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed® design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design
tools to create high-tech products that address user’s needs.
and Interface Age. This software was, according to the historical account in Fire in the Valley (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first serious business software for microcomputers.” It was both the start of Cooper’s career as a software author and the beginning of the microcomputer software business. Ultimately, Cooper developed a dozen original products at Structured Systems Group before he sold his interest in the company in 1980.
Early on, Cooper partnered with Gordon Eubanks
to develop, debug, document, and publish his business programming language, CBASIC
, an early competitor to Bill Gates
’ and Paul Allen
’s Microsoft BASIC. Eubanks wrote CBASIC’s precursor, BASIC-E as a student project while at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California with professor Gary Kildall
. When Eubanks left the Navy, he joined Kildall’s successful operating system company, Digital Research, Inc.
, in Monterey. Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and development department. After two-years at DRI, Cooper departed to develop desktop application software on his own.
During the 1980s, Alan Cooper authored several business applications including Microphone II for Windows and an early, critical-path project management program called SuperProject. Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved success in the business-to-business marketplace.
purchased it. At the time, Gates commented that the innovation would have a “profound effect” on their entire product line. Microsoft decided not to release the product as a shell for users, but rather to transform it into a professional development tool by marrying it to their QuickBASIC
programming language. They called the product Visual Basic
. This groundbreaking software proved to be the key that unlocked Windows for widespread business application development.
Cooper’s dynamically installable control facility, which became famous as the “VBX” interface, was an important component of "Ruby". This innovation allowed any 3rd party developer to write a widget (control) as a DLL, put it in the Visual Basic directory, and Visual Basic would find it, communicate with it, and present it to the user as a seamless part of the program. The widget would appear in the tool palette and appropriate menus, and users could incorporate it into their Visual Basic applications. The invention of the “VBX” interface created an entire new marketplace for vendors of these “dynamically installable controls.” As a result of Cooper’s work, many new and existing software companies were able to take advantage of the booming Windows software market in the 1990s.
The first book ever written about Visual Basic, The Waite Group’s Visual Basic How-To by Mitchell Waite
, is dedicated to Alan Cooper. In his dedication, the author calls Cooper the “Father of Visual Basic.” This nickname has often served as Cooper’s one-line resume.
In 1994, Bill Gates presented Cooper with the first Windows Pioneer Award
for his contributions to the software industry. During the presentation, Gates took particular note of Cooper’s innovative work creating the VBX interface.
In 1998, the SVForum honored Cooper with its Visionary Award.
In 1992, in response to a rapidly consolidating software industry, Cooper began consulting with other companies, helping them design their applications to be more user friendly. Within a few years, Alan Cooper had begun to articulate some of his basic design principles. With his clients, he championed a design methodology that puts the users’ needs first. Cooper interviewed the users of his client’s products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy. Born of this practice was the use of personas as design tools. Cooper preached his vision in two books. 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 third edition, entitled About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and is considered a foundation text for the professional interaction designer.
In his 1998 book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Alan Cooper outlined his methodology, called Goal-Directed design, based on the concept that software should speed the user towards their ultimate goal, rather than ensnaring them in computer minutiae. In the book, Cooper introduced a new concept that he called personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on a brief discussion in the book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Today, the concepts of interaction design strategy and the use of personas have been broadly adopted across the industry. Cooper directs the message of his second book to the businessperson: know your users’ goals and how to satisfy them. You need interaction design to do the thing right. Cooper advocates for integrating design into business practice in order to meet customer needs and to build better products faster by doing it right the first time.
As the field of interaction design
has matured, so has Cooper’s message. Alan Cooper’s current focus is on how to effectively integrate the advances of interaction design with the effectiveness of agile
software development methods. Cooper regularly speaks and blogs about this on his company’s website.
, CA (in Silicon Valley). His wife, Susan Cooper, played an important role in the creation and growth of Cooper (the company). They have two adult sons. Alan Cooper writes about his varied interests via his personal blog at mralancooper.com.
Software design
Software design is a process of problem solving and planning for a software solution. After the purpose and specifications of software are determined, software developers will design or employ designers to develop a plan for a solution...
. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Cooper is the author of the books, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed® design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design
Interaction design
In design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
tools to create high-tech products that address user’s needs.
Early life and education
Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California. He attended the College of Marin, studying architecture. As a way to pay for college, he learned programming and took on contract programming jobs. He left school to found one of the first microcomputer software companies.First company, first software
In 1975, as the first microcomputers became available, Alan Cooper founded his first company, Structured Systems Group (SSG), in Oakland, California. SSG’s software accounting product, General Ledger, was sold through ads in popular magazines such as ByteByte
The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...
and Interface Age. This software was, according to the historical account in Fire in the Valley (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first serious business software for microcomputers.” It was both the start of Cooper’s career as a software author and the beginning of the microcomputer software business. Ultimately, Cooper developed a dozen original products at Structured Systems Group before he sold his interest in the company in 1980.
Early on, Cooper partnered with Gordon Eubanks
Gordon Eubanks
Gordon Eubanks is a microcomputer industry pioneer who worked with Gary Kildall in the early days of Digital Research. Eubanks attended Oklahoma State University. Dr. Kildall was his graduate thesis advisor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California...
to develop, debug, document, and publish his business programming language, CBASIC
CBASIC
CBASIC is a compiled version of the BASIC programming language written for the CP/M operating system by Gordon Eubanks in 1976–77. It is an enhanced version of BASIC-E, his master's thesis project.-History:...
, an early competitor to Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...
’ and Paul Allen
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates...
’s Microsoft BASIC. Eubanks wrote CBASIC’s precursor, BASIC-E as a student project while at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California with professor Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall
Gary Arlen Kildall was an American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur who created the CP/M operating system and founded Digital Research, Inc....
. When Eubanks left the Navy, he joined Kildall’s successful operating system company, Digital Research, Inc.
Digital Research
Digital Research, Inc. was the company created by Dr. Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related products. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world...
, in Monterey. Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and development department. After two-years at DRI, Cooper departed to develop desktop application software on his own.
During the 1980s, Alan Cooper authored several business applications including Microphone II for Windows and an early, critical-path project management program called SuperProject. Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved success in the business-to-business marketplace.
Visual Basic
In 1988, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language (code-named “Ruby”) that allowed Windows users to build “Finder”-like shells. He called it “a shell construction set." After demonstrating Ruby to Bill Gates, MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
purchased it. At the time, Gates commented that the innovation would have a “profound effect” on their entire product line. Microsoft decided not to release the product as a shell for users, but rather to transform it into a professional development tool by marrying it to their QuickBASIC
QuickBASIC
Microsoft QuickBASIC is an Integrated Development Environment and compiler for the BASIC programming language that was developed by Microsoft. QuickBASIC runs mainly on DOS, though there was a short-lived version for Mac OS...
programming language. They called the product Visual Basic
Visual Basic
Visual Basic is the third-generation event-driven programming language and integrated development environment from Microsoft for its COM programming model...
. This groundbreaking software proved to be the key that unlocked Windows for widespread business application development.
Cooper’s dynamically installable control facility, which became famous as the “VBX” interface, was an important component of "Ruby". This innovation allowed any 3rd party developer to write a widget (control) as a DLL, put it in the Visual Basic directory, and Visual Basic would find it, communicate with it, and present it to the user as a seamless part of the program. The widget would appear in the tool palette and appropriate menus, and users could incorporate it into their Visual Basic applications. The invention of the “VBX” interface created an entire new marketplace for vendors of these “dynamically installable controls.” As a result of Cooper’s work, many new and existing software companies were able to take advantage of the booming Windows software market in the 1990s.
The first book ever written about Visual Basic, The Waite Group’s Visual Basic How-To by Mitchell Waite
Mitchell Waite
Mitchell Waite is known for many famous programming books he has written. His first book "Projects in Sight, Sound and Sensation" was published in 1974. He did a physics degree at Sonoma State University during 1971–1975....
, is dedicated to Alan Cooper. In his dedication, the author calls Cooper the “Father of Visual Basic.” This nickname has often served as Cooper’s one-line resume.
In 1994, Bill Gates presented Cooper with the first Windows Pioneer Award
Windows Pioneers
The Windows Pioneers are the seven individuals who received awards from Microsoft in 1994 in recognition of their contributions to Microsoft Windows...
for his contributions to the software industry. During the presentation, Gates took particular note of Cooper’s innovative work creating the VBX interface.
In 1998, the SVForum honored Cooper with its Visionary Award.
Interaction Design & User Experience
Early in his career, Cooper began to critically consider the accepted approach to software construction. As he reports in his first book, he believed something important was missing—software authors were not asking, “How do users interact with this?” Cooper’s early insights drove him to create a design process, focused not on what could be coded but on what could be designed to meet users’ needs.In 1992, in response to a rapidly consolidating software industry, Cooper began consulting with other companies, helping them design their applications to be more user friendly. Within a few years, Alan Cooper had begun to articulate some of his basic design principles. With his clients, he championed a design methodology that puts the users’ needs first. Cooper interviewed the users of his client’s products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy. Born of this practice was the use of personas as design tools. Cooper preached his vision in two books. His ideas helped to drive the user experience
User experience
User experience is the way a person feels about using a product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership, but it also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such...
movement and define the craft that would come to be called “interaction design
Interaction design
In design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
.”
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 third edition, entitled About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and is considered a foundation text for the professional interaction designer.
In his 1998 book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Alan Cooper outlined his methodology, called Goal-Directed design, based on the concept that software should speed the user towards their ultimate goal, rather than ensnaring them in computer minutiae. In the book, Cooper introduced a new concept that he called personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on a brief discussion in the book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness. Today, the concepts of interaction design strategy and the use of personas have been broadly adopted across the industry. Cooper directs the message of his second book to the businessperson: know your users’ goals and how to satisfy them. You need interaction design to do the thing right. Cooper advocates for integrating design into business practice in order to meet customer needs and to build better products faster by doing it right the first time.
As the field of interaction design
Interaction design
In design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
has matured, so has Cooper’s message. Alan Cooper’s current focus is on how to effectively integrate the advances of interaction design with the effectiveness of agile
Agile software development
Agile software development is a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams...
software development methods. Cooper regularly speaks and blogs about this on his company’s website.
Cooper (the company)
Today, Cooper is the President of Cooper (formerly Cooper Interaction Design), a leading interaction design consultancy in San Francisco, California. The company helps clients tackle interaction design challenges and offers training courses in software design and development topics, including their Goal-Directed design (under the CooperU brand).Personal life
Alan Cooper lives in Menlo ParkMenlo Park, California
Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...
, CA (in Silicon Valley). His wife, Susan Cooper, played an important role in the creation and growth of Cooper (the company). They have two adult sons. Alan Cooper writes about his varied interests via his personal blog at mralancooper.com.
See also
- Design methodsDesign methodsDesign Methods is a broad area that focuses on:* Divergence – Exploring possibilities and constraints of inherited situations by applying critical thinking through qualitative and quantitative research methods to create new understanding toward better design solutions* Transformation – Redefining...
- Design thinkingDesign thinkingDesign Thinking refers to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge, and positing solutions in the design and planning fields...
- Interaction designInteraction designIn design, human–computer interaction, and software development, interaction design, often abbreviated IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Like many other design fields interaction design also has an interest in form but its main...
- User centered design
- User experience designUser experience designUser experience design is a subset of the field of experience design that pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models that affect user experience of a device or system...
- Windows PioneersWindows PioneersThe Windows Pioneers are the seven individuals who received awards from Microsoft in 1994 in recognition of their contributions to Microsoft Windows...
External links
- Profile at Cooper.com
- Agile 2008 interview, “Similarities Between Interaction Designers and Agile Programmers”
- Interview Alan Cooper Interview on .NET Rocks
- Interview Conversation with Alan Cooper at Microsoft's Channel 9
- Article, Alan Cooper on why he has been called "the Father of Visual Basic"
- Interview, SEOV: Visions of Alan Cooper (Video Interviews)
- Discussion, Alan Cooper on what companies must do to improve software products - mp3 format
- Interview, UX Pioneers: 2007 Interview with Alan Cooper
- Article, Alan Cooper and the Goal Directed Design Process—Gain AIGA Journal of Design for the Network Economy, 2001
- Software Development Forum’s Software Visionary Award
- Article, "Tech Republic" The Church of Usability, Alan K'necht
- Article, Dr. Dobbs Special Report 1997 (re. Gary Kildall), Michael Swaine
- History of CBASIC (web archive.org)
- Encyclopedia entry, Structured Systems Group (Britanica.com)