Sure we're designers, but what do we like to do for fun? This week, we filled our spare time with coaching our friends, listening to thought-provoking talks, beaming with pride for our clients, discovering cool new tools and sources of inspiration, debating photo philosophy, laughing out loud, and gearing up for another round of teaching. Here's what we've been up to:

Coaching

We kicked off our first session of office hours with the new Rock Health crew. Attendance was high, with seven teams coming in for 1:1 sessions with a Cooperista, each tackling a specific type of problem based on the team's needs. More on these great sessions next week...

Listening

We took a break from speaking this week (in solidarity with Alan, Doug, and Nick as they put finishing touches on their upcoming talks at SXSW) and instead doubled down on listening, checking out some inspiring thinkers on the subjects of storytelling and alternative education.

First up was an inspiring talk at CCA from the very talented Jonathan Harris, creator of Cowbird and We feel fine. We love this guy; how do we make more of him in the world? If you haven't looked around in cowbird.com, you should. One of our fave quotes of his is: "I think we're going to want more nourishment from our technology." And a key question he asked we'll strive to answer while we design is: "What's the quality of a human I am trying to amplify through this technology?"

Next up, author and Forbes blogger Michael Ellsberg came by our offices to talk about our shared interest in education and brainstorm opportunities to collaborate to further that mission. Later that night, Michael spoke at the Commonwealth Club, expanding on his vision for alternative education that focuses on developing practical success skills for the real world, as opposed to "college skills". This is the theme of his new book, "The Education of Millionaires"

As an added bonus, after the talk Michael introduced Kendra and Teresa to his father, Pentagon Papers activist Daniel Ellsberg, who proceeded to charm and dazzle them with scarf tricks. It's not every day that you get to participate in magic tricks with "the most dangerous man in America"!

Beaming

We're like proud parents when we see our work getting praise out in the world, so we were thrilled to hear that Practice Fusion's iPad EMR prototype got noticed at HIMSS last week: "I got to use it and was very impressed with the design and approach to mobile. The app strips out anything not essential to physicians seeing patients and charting encounters. Basically the iPad app is not simply a mobile version of the EMR -- it is mobile clinical tool specific to patient encounters. The rest of the functionality of Practice Fusion (scheduling, PM, etc,) is left to the Web/desktop version. The app itself flows like the Twitter iPad app, with expanding and collapsing frames all built specifically for touch experience."

Discovering

If infographics are your thing, you'll want to check out what Chris gushingly referred to as "The most beautiful annual report concept I've seen in a long while." And don't miss the buzz-worthy IL-Intelligence in Lifestyle, the monthly magazine of Il Sole 24 ORE, Italy's leading financial daily. This video interview with Art director, Francesco Franchi shows off some of their handiwork, and you can see more at his portfolio site.

On the topic of public good, our mouths were watering over news of the nation's first food forest, a public park in Seattle planted with hundreds of kinds of edibles, from pears to walnuts, all available for public consumption. And we put our money where our mouths are with Redesign Democracy, a Kickstarter project to redesign voting ballots. Want a group who's investigating grassroots, affordable, open-source biotech? Yeah, the Bay Area's got that.

We gained efficiencies and drew inspiration from tools like Dropmark, Memolane, and Readability's new mobile apps, checked out a cool Windows Desktop UI concept, and read some thought-provoking articles on new visual proportions for the iOS user interface and hidden gems in UI details.

Debating

We've been known to "trade perspectives" on all kinds of topics around the office, so we were interested to discover this "rant" and subsequent commentary on the ethics of instagram for journalistic photos, which called to mind a recent spirited debate between Stefan and Chris on the topic of post processing photos. Purists like Chris argue that it alters the image, compromising the authenticity. Others, like Stefan, think all tools distort the original and authentic, so you might as well make it look good. Feel free to declare your allegiance to team Chris or team Stefan in the comments.

Laughing

We cracked up over this clip from Stephen Colbert, which serves as a cautionary tale on the perils of trying to control your brand too tightly.

Teaching

Want more Cooper goodness? Come to Cooper U!

• Design collaboration, March 12-13, 2012
• UX bootcamp, March 26-29, 2012
• Interaction design, April 10-13, 2012 or May 1-4, 2012
  
  

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After pausing for our in memoriam issue last week, there's lots to catch up on.

We're eagerly awaiting Indi Young's one-day workshop on Mental Models at Cooper U. Join us on November 14 for what is sure to be a great session. Meanwhile, Susan gave a talk about designing for health, and judged teams at UC Berkeley's Health Hackathon.

Golden and Greg cheered for Platfora, hoisting a sign featuring font and imagery from the startup's newly-launched Cooper-designed website.

Golden and Greg raise Platfora's new sign

We said "Do svidaniya" to Chris, Alan, Tamara, and Kendra as they made their way to Moscow this week for some design glasnost. More on that next week...

We considered a living art installation to spruce up a bare wall...but settled on a solution that combines our love for Tom Selleck and typefaces.

Stefan as a living art installation

We pondered all the things we could accomplish with ifttt and wondered what Siri would say next. And we gave a hearty golf clap to Netflix for returning to their senses.

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This week’s sCoop is dedicated to the legacy of Steve Jobs. Though most of us never knew him personally, as designers, Steve’s death has touched us all in very individual and very personal ways. Below, Cooper staff, alumni, and clients share some reflections on the impact Steve had on our industry, our careers, and our lives.

Doug LeMoine

Obviously, all interaction designers are indebted to Steve Jobs, so I want to personally say: Thanks for making it a little bit easier to explain what I do. And even more importantly: Thanks for demonstrating to the rest of tech world the power of good taste, and the differentiating power of design. Let’s be frank, Apple’s success continues to be a major reason why “design” has so much currency in business these days, and I'm personally relieved that I've been subjected to very few conversations about “the ROI of design” since the iPhone debuted in 2007.

Of course, Steve Jobs wasn’t a designer. In tech organization terms, he was more like a superhuman product manager. I don’t mean to diminish his organizational achievement; he was a chief executive who built a powerhouse. Nevertheless, he had an uncommonly direct impact at a very low level in product development. He could blow up a schedule if he wanted to (and he did); he could blow up a product if he wanted to (and he did); he could hire the best, and get the best out of them (or fire them). To top it off, he knew a good thing when he saw it, down to the last detail.

In other execs, his behavior would be seen as micromanagement or schizophrenia, but Apple seemed to thrive on it and vibrate with the energy of a start-up. Manic, urgent, cultish. Jobs himself was perpetually restless, always aware that a company’s window of opportunity was narrow, as he said in this introduction to an ad campaign: “We're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company does. And so we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about." Then he showed the original Think Different commercial. Wow … I mean, WOW. It all seems so easy and obvious in retrospect, but I guess that’s what they say about all the crazy ones. Here's to Steve Jobs; only a truly Crazy One could have pulled this off.

Cooper alum Jonathan Korman

Steve Jobs (1955-2011): Titan of industry. Look at his face at 4:00

He's not smiling for the applause. He's smiling because he got it done. The loss of him would have been news if he had only created the personal computer industry. Or if he had only committed to turning the Xerox Star into the Macintosh, “the first computer good enough to be worth criticizing.” Or if he had only founded the first major computer animation film studio. Or if he had only rescued Apple from the brink of disintegration. Or if he had only led the Macintosh renaissance of OS X and the iMac et cetera. Or had only rescued the music industry from their own stupidity. Or had only captained the creation of either the iPhone or the iPad. Having done all of those is hard to conceive, even knowing it to have happened. A life well lived. Let's memorialize him by making it unexceptional that a corporation should make beautiful products that empower people and bring them joy, shall we?

Chris Noessel

I feel I owe him some thanks. Personally for some of the beautiful software experiences he oversaw and for many software experiences he made possible. As an interaction design industry we owe him for raising interaction design to the forefront of product experiences and pushing the computer industry forward at a pace it might not have initially been comfortable with. He's also an iconic figure, coming up in design discussions with clients as a litmus test for purist, beautiful, uncompromising design. (Even sometimes unfairly absorbing the credit for Ives and others who worked with him, but still: WWSJD?)

My closest connection: Apple was a client when I worked at marchFIRST, and I was the information architect for the first mac.com launch. I made a 3D map to illustrate my design. Though I wasn't present at the meeting where it was shared, when Jobs saw the map he interrupted the meeting to point at the map and ask, "Is that one of our guys?" Even that recognition was enough to have thrilled me as a young designer at the time. No, it wasn't, Steve, but thanks for asking. :) RIP.

Kim Appelquist

I was studying "commercial art" using Rapidograph pens, Letraset type, and trees of tissue paper. I enrolled in a PC-based "computer-aided" drafting course. It took five steps to draw a line. I decided to be a chef. Then the Macintosh came out and changed everything. I've been in and around design ever since. The cooking still comes in handy.

Client and friend John Chaffins

A sad day Wednesday. When I was 16, my Grandmother offered to help me either purchase a car or a computer. I chose the computer, an Apple IIe. My life was forever changed by that decision. Everything that I started learning then has enabled me to travel the world, earn a living, support my family, and have so much fun in so many different ways. None of this would have been possible if not for the vision, creative genius, and perseverance of Steve Jobs. It's hard to imagine any one person having as much impact on the way that the world works, lives, and plays that he has. Thank you, Steve, may you rest in peace.

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At Cooper, we hire stars. There, I said it. No apologies.

Not divas, not egomaniacs. Just the brightest designers we can find. You’ve got to be that good in order to leave your ego at the door, which is exactly what our methods demand.

Cooper is a highly collaborative environment: our paired design approach challenges designers to work together to deliver synthesis, ideation and exploration, design, and communication that stands up to skepticism and scrutiny. If you’re sketching design ideas, there’s someone right there with you, pointing out weak spots and pushing you to evolve the designs in ways that better serve your users’ and your client’s goals. You’d better have a deep bullpen of great ideas, because you’re going to need them. And when you’re poking holes in your partner’s design ideas, you’re going to need a stronger reason than “I like my idea better.”There’s not a lot of time for “compliment sandwiches” and “gee your hair looks great today” - it’s just a couple of folks working together to get to the best possible design as quickly as possible. So you’d better know that you’re good at what you do, and be confident that I know you’re that good, so we can just get down to the business of delighting users and clients alike.

Sure, we’ll butt heads once in a while. That’s cool, it’s part of the process. But after 15 minutes of stand-off, we’ll grab another designer (any designer, because we know they’re all playing at our level), talk them through the problem we’re trying to solve, and watch how quickly they untangle it and show us the way. And if you ask us, paired design not only yields better results, it’s also a heckuva lot more fun.

Because of the demands of our highly collaborative methods, there’s no room for the pursuit of personal glory. There’s no pointing to a design and saying “that was all me.” We’ve designed it together, vetted it together, and presented our rationale together. And a great idea is a great idea, whether it comes from our design partner, another designer on staff, the client, a user - you name it, all input is welcome.

So no, we don’t do ego-driven design. But if you want to approach your design work as a humble servant, you’ve come to the wrong place. Being a Cooper designer takes guts. It means telling the client what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. It means making a strong argument for what you feel is right. And it means making tough choices between ideal user experiences and clients’ business goals. Our clients come to us for our expertise and our willingness to tell it like it is, not because we’re the best-dressed yes-men in town.

And since when is being humble a professional requirement, anyway? I don’t expect my dentist to treat me as a colleague when determining how to alleviate my toothache, nor do I take offense when he doesn’t hand me an instrument and let me assist with my root canal. He’s spent years studying and practicing his craft. I expect him to listen to me about where it hurts, and seek my input when there are choices to be made about his treatment approach. But at the end of the day, when he’s sticking sharp instruments into my mouth, he’d better be a rock star at what he does. And if he tells me I probably know just as much about how to do his job as he does, I’m outta there. Why should the design profession be any different?

Cooperistas are the highest caliber, least ego-driven designers I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. We take pride in our work and marvel at the talents of those who work alongside us. We know that the sweetest music is made by accomplished people who play together tightly – maybe even with a touch of swagger. If that makes us rock stars, so be it. Want to join the band?

P.S. If the gift of a soda can on your desk is going to offend your tender sensibilities, then you probably need not apply.

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Last week some designers from Google came to our studio for a discussion about the  practice of interaction design. We each shared a bit about our team structures and processes, and talked about some of the unique challenges that we face as a consultancy vs an in-house design team. But some of the most interesting discussions emerged when we focused on the areas of overlap - the basic bread and butter of interaction design. One of the most provocative questions posed by the Googlers was simply: “Where do ideas come from?”

We spend a lot of time thinking and talking about how we do things around here, but if we’re honest, this is the “then a miracle occurs” step in our design process.

This is where the rubber meets the road for every designer: you’ve done your research, synthesis, and analysis to clearly articulate the problem you’re trying to solve, and now it’s time to produce that winning design solution. You get up, grab a marker, and hope inspiration strikes somewhere along those five small steps to the whiteboard. As seasoned designers, it’s not something we think much about anymore - it just happens (unless it doesn’t). But as mentors, it’s important not to yada yada yada the best part (though we DID mention the lobster bisque).

So this week, we’ve spent a little time looking inward to try to develop a deeper understanding of where design ideas come from. Here’s what we found:

Research matters

Cooper designers conduct our own user research, and many feel that this provides indispensible fuel for design ideas. Experiencing real people in their actual environments fuels our senses of empathy and intuition that helps to guide us towards the ideas that make people happy, successful (and even better looking). Plus, the research phase affords us the opportunity to be fully immersed in the users and the domain for a few weeks at the start of the project, which in addition to providing rich data and empathy, also gives our brains boot-up time to start noodling on the problem and explore possible solutions in the background. Many of our designers confessed that they often doodle during interviews, sketching design ideas when inspiration strikes without the pressure of being expected to produce a solution. At the end of the research and analysis phase when patterns, goals, and requirements have been formally defined, designers can flip back through these quick sketches and easily pick out the good ideas from the bad and begin to improve upon them based on their deeper understanding of the users and the problems that must be solved.

Sometimes, words are worth 1,000 pictures

The first step in our design ideation process comes before any “official” sketching is done: we describe the users’ ideal experience in words. The scenarios we develop at this stage are forward-looking and technology-agnostic, focusing on the personas and how they think, feel and behave rather than on specific interface elements or technical implementations. We also identify experience keywords that describe the emotional response that users should have to the product. Not having to answer the “how” frees us up to think big, imagining the best-case scenario for how the product supports each persona in achieving his or her goals. Then, when it comes time to actually start sketching and exploring interaction, form and visual languages, we’re already united around a clear vision for the kind of experience that would truly delight our users, helping us to focus on design solutions and visual styles that most fully embody that vision.

Just do it

Fear of the blank page can be daunting for all of us. Sometimes, just pushing past that fear and starting to sketch can get the juices flowing. Our designers make sure to have a tablet, sketchpad, or whiteboard easily accessible at all times, and we don’t wait until we have a fully formed thought or idea to use them. We may look like we have a brilliant idea in our heads as we approach the whiteboard, but often those few short steps aren’t where the thinking actually happens - the ideas start to come only after we draw the first few rectangles. There’s something special about the process of sketching - even jotting down some really bad ideas helps us learn about the tensions on the problem and gets us closer to a workable solution. (See Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences for a fantastic exploration of the idea that the act of sketching is integral to ideation and design problem solving.)

The power of paired designing

Because we work in pairs, Cooper designers often can’t say for sure where one person’s idea ends and the other’s begins. But what we do know is that our design partners are a major source of inspiration and design ideas. We come up with ideas while we’re talking through the problem with our partners, or while listening to them talk through it with us. We piggyback on each others’ ideas, zeroing in on what’s good about our partner’s proposed solution and tweaking what’s not working, buoyed by the collective energy in the room. And just having someone there to call b.s. when we’ve gone too far off the reservation frees us up to explore novel and even downright crazy solutions that may yield useful insights or contain aspects that can be applied to a more practical design approach.

As Richard Buchanan (Emma’s grad school professor) used to say, “Ideas don’t live in your brain or my brain but in the collective space between our brains.”

Beg, borrow, and steal

As one of our designers self-deprecatingly put it, sometimes ideas come from “stealing from other people.” When we speak about it more formally, we call this drawing upon our knowledge of patterns, which sounds more legitimate - and it is.

In The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun purports that ideas never stand alone, and that all innovations are really just a combination of things that existed before. “The combination might be novel, or used in an original way, but the materials and ideas all existed in some form somewhere before...”

Many of the design problems we encounter have been solved before, and if that solution is familiar to your users and works in the current context, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Employing a familiar pattern like tabs for navigation may actually be the best answer, or it may establish a jumping off point from which you can then start to diverge in an effort to make it better or more interesting, without abandoning its virtues.

Drawing inspiration from products we use and like, others’ design work we admire, or even going on deliberate internet fishing expeditions to see how a particular problem is solved elsewhere are all common and commonly accepted sources of design ideas. So go ahead and steal - er, draw upon your vast knowledge of design patterns - without shame.

Draw inspiration from the world around you

In addition to relying on established interaction and visual design patterns in interfaces, many of our designers look more broadly to the world around them for inspiration. One designer noted that most of the books and blogs he reads are outside of the realm of design, which helps him think more broadly, with insights about psychology or business swirling around his brain along with technical innovations and even science. The physical world is also a great source of inspiration and ideas - whether it be designed objects like cars or running shoes, or things found in nature during a hike. Some of our designers keep collections of objects, elements, and even materials and textures that really inspire them. Visual designers in particular tend to turn to the physical world for inspiration as they seek to create the desired emotional responses defined by the experience keywords: if this interface needs to be approachable, what objects or even people do we perceive as very approachable?

Don’t be afraid to stare out the window

One of the benefits our designers enjoy is that we are typically assigned to only one project at a time, which means that our design problems not only get our focused attention during work hours, but also find their way into our background brain cycles outside of the office. Oftentimes, ideas come in the shower, on a run or bike ride, or while washing dishes - any time that our minds are given the freedom to wander. Even here in the studio, you’ll often see designers staring out the window, watching a ship come into port or commuter-ants scurry through the crowded streets below. Taking some quiet time for woolgathering helps to reduce stress, while also distracting the judging part of our brains. After letting our minds meander for a bit, we can often corral some of those fragmented thoughts into a useful idea.

Play with the constraints

While we’re ultimately trying to generate ideas to solve real problems, in the early stages of design it’s important not to confuse idea generation with problem solving. Hyper-constraining the problem, removing the constraints, or changing the constraints in unusual ways can really get the creative juices flowing. A few examples of tricks our designers like to use:

• Ignoring technical feasibility for a bit, what’s the best way to inspire the desired emotional response to the product?
• If we imagine we’re designing this product for the science fiction future, what would it be like?
• What if the product were magic - how would it behave?
• What if we needed to design this product for an alien who has one arm, gills (so it must be in constant motion), and can only see in the infrared spectrum?

One of our more popular sayings around here is “reality bats last,” which is our way of acknowledging that technical feasibility and the laws of physics DO apply to the design problem at hand. We know we’ll need to fold the necessary constraints back in to our design solution as we iterate it, but lifting them for a bit can provide inspiration or even just some much-needed levity as we tackle a particularly challenging design problem.

But enough about us. Where do your ideas come from? And we’re not buying that story about the design stork!

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We recently came across a research study conducted by Frank Long at the National College of Art and Design that investigated the value of personas as a design tool. In his research paper, titled "Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design," Long concludes:

The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualization stages of the design process.

I’m impressed by Long’s efforts to gather evidence to support the claims of persona fans like myself, and am not surprised by the positive outcomes attributed to the use of personas. But in the debate over personas’ usefulness, I’m not quite ready to spike the ball and call it game over just yet.

As we all know, skeptics of personas abound. I won’t be dedicating my life to converting the non-believers, but I hate to see designers dismiss a useful tool simply because its’ worth has not been adequately demonstrated to them. Frank Long’s research is a great start, but I suspect that more work is needed to deliver compelling evidence that will persuade the detractors.First, a common understanding of the craft of developing and using personas is needed. Like any tool, personas must be made and employed properly in order to yield the best results. To this end, the Long study highlights an interesting phenomenon: Depicting personas with a sketch rather than a photograph impacts their effectiveness. The sketched persona felt, well, sketchy - and the design work that followed suffered as a result:

Using illustrations instead of photographs of the persona would seem to reduce effectiveness. It can lead to selective consideration of the persona characteristics and can increase the risk of self-referential details being superimposed onto the persona. The study also reported a lower level of empathy towards the illustrated persona and a diminished ability among students to recall details about the persona after time.

Another major aspect of effective persona use that is often overlooked is the importance of giving personas a workout, rather than simply creating them and then setting them aside. While personas alone are useful in establishing a common understanding of who the users are, their true power is realized when they are put to work in scenarios. Scenarios describe how the persona will ideally interact with the new system or service in order to achieve his or her goals. In so doing, scenarios elicit key requirements, and serve as the first broad strokes of the design. Though it makes little mention of them, the Long study used scenarios in conjunction with personas, maximizing their benefit.

Further investigation into the usefulness of personas presents an exciting opportunity to elevate the persona debate from the slippery slopes of opinion to the terra firma of evidence. Subsequent studies would ideally be conducted outside of an academic setting, include a larger sample size, and avoid secondary investigations into materials that may cloud results. They should also continue to follow best practice approaches for persona development and use, such as depicting the personas with photographs rather than sketches, and putting personas through their paces in scenarios throughout the design process. Here at Cooper, we’re not particularly well-positioned to take on an impartial research study of the efficacy of our methods, but we welcome scrutiny from academics and practitioners alike, and hope to see more investigations that pick up where Mr. Long left off.

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Recent reports on the holiday shopping season show that despite the tough economy resulting in a sharp decline in spending overall, the shift from brick and mortar to online shopping continues. Because “going to another store” in the online world is as easy as a mouse click, retaining customers throughout the shopping and buying process is critical. Does your site have what it takes to give customers a satisfying shopping experience and earn their loyalty?

Between some friends’ regrettably-timed birthdays and the holidays themselves, the past month has provided me ample opportunity to interact with and admire recent advances in online shopping and checkout design. From that admittedly unscientific sample, here are some thoughts on key aspects of the checkout experience to consider, as well as my take on the winners at each step.

Searching and inspecting

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As your customers’ first encounter with your site, the searching and inspecting experience is critical. Think of your site’s browse and detail pages as a top-notch personal shopper, and design them to mirror the qualities and behaviors of superstars in that role:

• Flexible: Make sure your site supports multiple modes of shopping (such as browsing within broad categories as well as focused searching based on specific criteria), and enables users to easily recover if they click into the wrong item or just want to continue shopping.
• Good listener: Many customers have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for - is your site designed to listen? Filters that expose a wide selection of available criteria, work together, and support multiple values are great ‘listeners’. If you’re not sure what options to provide, monitor the use of your search box to identify filter candidates.
• Efficient: Performance matters, so be sure you’ve tuned your page updates to deliver lightning-fast results.
• Forthcoming: Ensure that your browse pages provide users enough information to quickly disqualify undesired items and develop strong interest in appropriate items, and that detail pages include all information needed to close the sale. While a picture is worth 1,000 words, it can’t say anything if it’s too small - an image size that’s ample for displaying a collection of small items like shoes or belts could induce squinting and frustration when presenting full-length dresses. On browse pages, provide a control for adjusting image size, and include interactive swatches of color options to reduce the need to drill in. On detail pages, provide multiple views and close-ups with minimal navigation.

Winner: Endless

This site rocks my world with a half-dozen filter categories that work in tandem, allow multiple values, can be reset with a single click, and update results in the blink of an eye. Replacing the ‘more colors’ bar with a row of interactive color swatches would earn them an A+.

The details view retains users’ context, supports mouse-over close-ups for any of the seven different views of the item (directly accessible via thumbnail), and provides two seamless paths back to browsing mode.

Bonus points: Endless places their customer service number in the site’s persistent header. This grace note not only saves customers the frustration of hunting through the site for help, it also reinforces the company’s attention to customer experience, solidifying brand loyalty.

Selection and confirmation

Once the user has identified an item they want to purchase (or are at least strongly considering), your site’s job is to take that order as quickly and efficiently as possible and get the customer back to browsing or on to finalizing the sale.

While most sites do a reasonable job of taking the customer’s order, I’m dismayed that so many still use drop-down controls for color and size selection - and that in the worst cases, these controls function independently. If an item isn’t available in certain color and size combinations, the worst thing your site can do is make your customer jump through several hoops to get that disappointing news. Interdependent, clickable color swatches and size buttons make it easy to spot what options are truly available to the customer and encourage flexibility in the their size and color selection.

Winner: Banana Republic

Visual treatment clearly indicates that some sizes are not available in the selected color; clicking a size updates the color swatches to visually indicate that some are not available in the selected size.

When it’s time to confirm the selections that have just been made, a non-modal confirmation window is a popular solution. Good for users and good for business, this approach retains the customer’s context and encourages continued browsing rather than prematurely ushering shoppers to the checkout line. While the pattern has become common, subtleties of the design can have a big impact on user experience:

• Error recovery: The confirmation dialog is asking the implied question “is this correct?” As such, courteous sites are prepared for an answer other than “yes,” allowing the user to modify or undo their selection rather than watch helplessly as a mistake is automatically ‘confirmed’.
• Dismissal time: While it sounds inadequate, about five seconds proves to be ample time for users to visually register confirmation details and intervene if needed, without the dialog lingering so long that it begins to feel like a houseguest who’s overstayed his welcome. Include a mechanism for manually dismissing the dialog, but endeavor to protect users from ever needing it.

Winner: J.Crew

Error recovery mechanisms and a ‘just right’ dismissal time distinguish this superior implementation of a common pattern for confirmation.

Checking out

If there is one faux pas that I’d like to permanently eradicate from the online shopping world, it’s the presumption of requiring users to create an account before they can complete their purchase. You’re moments away from sealing the deal, so why on earth would you put an unnecessary hurdle in front of your customer? While it’s true that creating an account greatly speeds subsequent transactions, online retailers would do well to remember that a first transaction is like a first date - your customer isn’t ready to commit to a relationship yet! Rather than forcing account creation up front, allow users to complete their transaction, then chivalrously offer to save the information for use on subsequent visits.

Focusing on the positive, however, there’s a lot to admire about the evolution of the online checkout process. More and more retailers are moving away from multi-page designs that drag users through the shopping bag review, shipping details, billing details, and submission tasks as distinct, siloed steps. In the best new checkouts, a single page provides simultaneous access to the shopping bag (complete with ability to modify selections), shipping and billing details, and order submission, resulting in the perception (and reality) of a streamlined, efficient, and easy purchase experience.

Winner: Anthropologie

After a rocky start with a required account, this site wins me over with a single-screen checkout that combines an editable shopping bag, auto-collapsing summaries of completed sections that keep the users’ focus on the next logical chunk of information to be entered, and one-click checkout for returning customers.

So now that I’ve introduced you to my darlings of the online shopping world, which sites’ checkouts do you go gaga over?

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As my fellow Cooperistas will attest, I’m passionate about a lot of things: interaction design, birthday cake, shoes… But product packaging? No, I wouldn’t have included that last one in the list - at least, not until I caught myself swooning over Amazon’s new Frustration-Free packaging.

Suddenly, it all came back to me in a rush of emotion: the anger, frustration, and threat of serious injury when struggling to extract a tiny memory card from its giant plastic “clamshell” package. The tedium and anxiety of twisting countless plastic-coated wire ties in a seemingly never-ending effort to release toy components from incarceration before the child loses interest and starts playing with an empty box instead. The disbelief and disgust over the trail of excessive plastic waste left behind after opening a single product. And I am not alone. To tap into the packaging-frustration zeitgeist, Amazon has encouraged customers to post pictures and videos of their worst experiences to the Gallery of Wrap Rage, and the responses are pouring in.

These consumer-hostile packaging practices are a perfect example of business needs trumping user needs. For far too long, companies have designed packaging that serves only two masters: product marketing and theft reduction. Mark Hurst's This Is Broken features a particularly rich example of product packaging that fails to address the need to get the item out of the package.

Because Amazon doesn’t have to deal with retail display or shoplifting, they were in a unique position to sidestep the usual drivers for package design and think (pardon the pun) “outside the box”, focusing on customers’ goal of liberating products from the package so they can actually use them! And as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos notes in his letter to customers introducing the program, “in addition to making packages easier to open, a major goal of the Frustration-Free Packaging initiative is to be more environmentally friendly by using less packaging material.” According to their FAQs, products with Frustration-Free Packaging can often be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box.

Just in time for the holiday consume-a-thon, Amazon delivers human-friendly, eco-friendly package design. Now really, who wouldn’t be passionate about that?

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Here at Cooper, we’re pretty well known for our holistic and methodical approach to design, but don’t let that fool you - when the situation calls for it, we’re more than happy to get all “mavericky” with our clients and provide some good old fashioned ad-hoc consulting.

For example, I was recently asked to provide management support to a client who is in the midst of implementing a Cooper re-design of their robust web application. As I immersed myself in the project, I was quickly reminded of my previous life as a project manager and business analyst at a large software company, and how easy it is to fall into the many efficiency traps that often permeate large-scale development projects.

Over the course of my recent engagement, I identified several critical success factors for effective project teams, and some specific things that both project managers and team members can do to ensure project success.

Establish structure and discipline

At the start of a project, it’s common for managers and participants to be certain only of the impending release date - everything else is anyone’s guess. While this date is sometimes arbitrary and malleable, more often than not it is tied to a critical business driver and can’t (or won’t) be moved. When resources are scarce, project scope becomes the only fungible element, and typically suffers multiple revisions over the course of a project. With an aggressive deadline, shifting scope, and no clear plan for success, folks will naturally conclude that the project is doomed and assume a “death march” posture. In this environment, the focus switches from getting things done to simply getting through the day, which inevitably requires frequent puppy breaks.

To instill confidence in the project from the start (as well as in times of change), successful project managers consistently provide a clear path:

• When developing or revising a detailed project plan, always put a short-term work plan in place to guide the team’s efforts in the interim.
• Require team members to set firm commitments for task completion, and hold them accountable for meeting those deadlines.
• Be disciplined about changes in scope and keep them to a minimum. If scope cuts are needed, move quickly to identify what’s in and what’s out, and be clear about which plan (old or new) the team should be operating under while changes are being evaluated.

Act with urgency

Without a sense of urgency, projects become deeply vulnerable to inefficiencies, meeting proliferation, and analysis paralysis. Nothing says “death march” more clearly than dozens of individual contributors shuffling into a conference room, slumping in their chairs, and staring off into space or their laptop screens while each in turn gives a perfunctory status update or discusses issues of interest to only a small subset of the attendees in excruciating detail.

Enforcing structure and discipline goes a long way towards communicating a sense of urgency, but successful project managers also keep meetings lean and efficient:

• Look for opportunities to handle regular status updates via email or in small groups, and reserve meetings for resolving issues.
• Keep meetings small, but make sure that the necessary decision makers are present and engaged, and set a clear timetable for issue resolution if it can’t be closed out in a single session.
• Watch the body language of meeting attendees - they may not tell you directly, but odds are their posture and expression will communicate loud and clear if they’re sitting in a meeting that provides little or no value to them.

Cultivate a sense of ownership

If workers don’t feel personal responsibility and ownership for the project, they will distance themselves from it at the first sign of trouble. Without a sense that everyone on the team is working towards a common goal, dynamics can quickly devolve into finger pointing and sandbagging and waiting for everyone else to get their act together before anyone is willing to begin their own work. In this environment, even minor setbacks and churn can crush morale, and the resulting feelings of pointlessness, hopelessness, and distance prevent people from looking for creative ways to keep things moving forward.

To keep the team engaged and motivated, even during difficult times, successful project managers instill a sense of ownership in each team member:

• Articulate a clear and compelling vision for the project up front, and ensure that everyone understands the customer, user, and business benefits that success will bring. If scope is reduced, acknowledge that the original vision will not be delivered in the first release, and map out the steps that will be taken later to get there, or why the revised vision is more appropriate.
• Encourage participants to take full ownership of their tasks, work with the necessary people to resolve issues on their own, drive their deliverables to completion by the dates they committed to, and look for opportunities to streamline and speed their work.
• Be on the lookout for flagging morale and address it with individual team members directly. Listen to their complaints, acknowledge mistakes that have been made, commit to addressing issues they raise, and ask them to reaffirm their commitment to the project and to moving forward in a more positive way.

Lead

Successful project managers don’t just take meeting notes, update status reports, and assemble project plans - they lead:

• Set the tone of the project. Set expectations, serve as an example, and hold team members accountable.
• Instill confidence by developing a clear plan and using it to guide and drive the project forward.

Be the change you want to see in the project

Turns out that Gandhi fella was on to something. An individual project team member may not be able to single-handedly turn things around, but you’d be surprised what an impact you can have simply by adopting good habits of your own:

• Fully engage in meetings and operate with a sense of ownership and urgency at all times. Move aggressively to define what is needed from you, by whom, and when.
• Make specific commitments, and then do what it takes to meet them. If your PM isn’t managing to deadlines, set them for yourself, make them public, and hold yourself accountable.
• Whenever scope creep rears its head, point it out to the entire team to force a conscious choice about increasing or changing the project scope.
• Respect your own time, and demand that others do the same. Be judicious with the meeting invitations you send and accept. When you do attend meetings, don’t just be a warm body in a seat or a multi-tasker who’s not really present - give the meeting your full attention.
• Take ownership of your role in the project. Work with the necessary people to resolve issues, and drive your deliverables to completion by the dates you committed to.
• Turn a critical eye to the way things have always been done, and look for opportunities to streamline and speed your work. Can you complete and hand off a discrete part of your deliverable so the next person in the chain can get started?

Projects succeed when project managers and team members alike operate with discipline, urgency, ownership, and leadership.

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Election Day is finally here, and as ballots are cast and counted, I’m hopeful that voters will declare victory for the candidates and measures that I care most about. But as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA’s Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past 8 years. As AIGA reports on their website:

“In July 2007 the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) accepted AIGA Design for Democracy’s research and best practice recommendations for ballot and polling place information design. Guidelines and editable samples were distributed to 6,000 election officials across the country this January. As a result, local jurisdictions now have the tools to apply communication design principles and make voting easier and more comprehensible for all citizens.”

Why, then, am I holding a ballot that violates at least three of the Top 10 election design guidelines, including the use of all caps, center-alignment, and tiny fonts?

As Marcia Lausen notes in Design for Democracy: Ballot + Election Design, typographic specifications are often dictated in well-intentioned but misguided election law. So while the valuable work of Design for Democracy is to be commended, it alone is not enough to bring about the change we need in the design of ballots and other voter information and materials.

So as you head to the polls, review your ballot carefully — not only for its content, but for its design. Make note of the ballot’s flaws, and contact your state and county registrar and representatives to press them to implement the AIGA guidelines. In addition, consider participating in the Polling Place Photo Project, which seeks to document what is politely described as the “richness and complexity" of the voting experience in America.

Most of all, don’t forget to vote!

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