Alan Cooper - About Face 3

Contents

About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

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Copyright 2007 Alan Cooper

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-08411-3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cooper, Alan, 1952

About face 3 : the essentials of interaction design / Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-470-08411-3 (pbk.)

1. User interfaces (Computer systems) 2. Human-computer interaction. I. Reimann, Robert. II. Cronin, Dave, 1972- III. Title. IV. Title: About face three.

QA76.9.U83C6596 2007

005.438--dc22

2007004977

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For Sue, my best friend through all the adventures of life.

For Maxwell Aaron Reimann.

For Gretchen.

And for Cooperistas past, present, and future; and for those visionary IxD practitioners who have helped create a new design profession.

About the Authors

Alan Cooper is a pioneering software inventor, programmer, designer, and theorist. He is credited with having produced probably the first serious business software for microcomputers and is well known as the Father of Visual Basic. For the last 15 years his software design consulting company, Cooper, has helped many companies invent new products and improve the behavior of their technology. At Cooper, Alan led the development of a new methodology for creating successful software that he calls the Goal-Directed process. Part of that effort was the invention of personas, a practice that has been widely adopted since he first published the technique in his second book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum , in 1998. Cooper is also a well known writer, speaker, and enthusiast for humanizing technology.

Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, portals, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, wireless, and handheld devices for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. As director of design R&D at Cooper, Reimann led the development and refinement of many of the Goal-Directed Design methods described in About Face . In 2005, Reimann became the first President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association ( www.ixda.org ), a global nonprofit professional organization for Interaction Designers. He is currently manager of user experience at Bose Corporation.

Dave Cronin is the director of interaction design at Cooper, where hes helped design products to serve the needs of people such as surgeons, museum visitors, marketers, investment portfolio managers, online shoppers, hospital staff, car drivers, dentists, financial analysts, manufacturing planners, the elderly, and the infirm. At Cooper, he has also contributed substantially to the ongoing process of developing and refining the Goal-Directed Design methods described in this book.

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Foreword: The Postindustrial World

The industrial age is over. Manufacturing, the primary economic driver of the past 175 years, no longer dominates. While manufacturing is bigger than ever, it has lost its leadership to digital technology, and software now dominates our economy. We have moved from atoms to bits. We are now in the postindustrial age.

More and more products have software in them. My stove has a microchip in it to manage the lights, fan, and oven temperature. When the deliveryman has me sign for a package, its on a computer, not a pad of paper. When I shop for a car, I am really shopping for a navigation system.