Home > Interviews >

Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper has more energy than a locomotive, and he thinks faster than a speeding bullet. He must type pretty fast too, because he's provided us with some of the most helpful books in user interface design and yes, dare I say it, personas. Alan's description of personas lit up our discipline like the Daily Planet building, and his ideas are still a sizzling topic of conversation. His history reads like a who's-who of influential people and radical technologies. And now? Well, of course...he's back into thinking lots and lots about trains, which were his very first love.

Read the Interview

Excerpts From the Interview

So when I was wandering in Zurich in 1972, I saw one of these banks with basement windows. Looking down into the basement, I remember I saw this computer. It was an IBM 360 and it had this panel covered with lights and buttons and switches and knobs. I stood there looking at it, and I said 'I'm going to learn what all those buttons, knobs and lights are for.' A couple of years later, I did: They are there to impress people. That's their main role.

There are a lot of people who think that we'll solve the problem by getting programmers to be interaction designers. I think that's totally wrong. Why would you take perfectly good programmers and have them do anything other than programming? What you do is you have the interaction designers do interaction design.'

More About Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper has been highly influential in bridging the gap between technology and users. He is the author of The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, About Face, and its children, About Face 2.0 and About Face 3. He is also the founder of Cooper, a Bay Area interaction design and user experience consultancy.