Editing Alan Cooper (software designer) (section)

==== 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.