Editing Alan Cooper (software designer) (section)

=== Interaction design and 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.<ref>Cooper, Alan (1995). About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design. John Wiley & Sons. {{ISBN|1-56884-322-4}}, {{ISBN|978-1-56884-322-3}}</ref>

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 ''[[persona (marketing)|personas]]'' as design tools. Cooper preached his vision in two books.<ref>Cooper (1998 and 2004) and Cooper (1995)</ref> His ideas helped to drive the [[user experience]] movement and define the craft that would come to be called “[[interaction design]].”

==== About Face ====
{{anchor|AboutFace}}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.<ref>Cooper, Alan (1995)</ref> 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 introduced the ideas of software [[application posture]] such as a "sovereign posture" where an application uses most of the space and waits for user input or a "transient posture" for software that does not run or engage with the user all the time. With websites he discusses "informational" and "transactional" postures. 
==== The Inmates Are Running the Asylum ====
{{anchor|inmates}} 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 his or her ultimate goal rather than ensnare him or her in computer minutiae.<ref>Cooper, Alan (1998)</ref> 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<ref>Pruitt, John and Adlin, Tamara (2006), Morgan Kaufmann. {{ISBN|0-12-566251-3}}, {{ISBN|978-0-12-566251-2}}</ref> 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.

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.