Foreword

In this book, authors Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann explore an area of design often ignored by traditional product designers and usability professionals: designing the behavior of complex systems—in particular, the behavior of increasingly pervasive, and sometimes all but invisible, software-enabled technology. Cooper and Reimann believe that understanding humans, not just technology, is the key to making these interactive systems both powerful and pleasurable to use.

Alan Cooper is not your typical designer—he's a programmer, inventor, strategist, and a card-carrying member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and ACM SIGCHI. He's accomplished in each of these worlds and has something important to say to programmers, designers, product planners, and usability professionals alike.

Cooper has been designing software since the arrival of personal computers more than 25 years ago. Few people have thought as long and deeply about the design of software interfaces. His conclusion: Most software today is barely fit for human use—"weak and oppressive" are two of his more printable characterizations of digital products.

What is the problem?

It is this: Software does not reveal itself through external form—something mechanical devices tend to do. In software, the cost of adding one more new feature is almost nothing, whereas adding features to mechanical devices almost always increases their costs. Software lacks sufficient negative feedback to limit its complexity. The result is pure Rube Goldberg: digital products with feature piled upon feature. The trouble is that each incremental feature makes a product more difficult to use. That leaves us with products that are increasingly hard to use—and with growing frustration as we try to use them.

The problem grows as microprocessors become increasingly powerful, making computing less and less expensive. As a result, computers are built into more and more products. And where there are computers, there must also be software. And where there is software, very often, there is user interaction. Already, it's difficult to find new cars, appliances, or consumer electronics that do not require users to interact with software. We are slowly being suffocated by software that, at best, doesn't meet our needs and that, at worst, presents a danger to our well-being.

The authors of this book blame the problem on the technology-driven nature of the software development process. In About Face 2.0, Cooper and Reimann advocate exactly the opposite approach: a people-driven process in which "meeting the goals of the user comes first, last, and in between," a process of Goal-Directed Design.

In the traditional software development process, lots of people inside a company—and often customers as well—ask for new features. In many companies, the resulting list of features often becomes the de facto product plan. Programmers make this approach worse by picking or negotiating their way through the list, often trading development time for features. In such a process, it is difficult to know when a product is complete, let alone good.

The heart of the problem, Cooper and Reimann conclude, is that the people responsible for developing software products don't know precisely what constitutes a good product, or even the right product. It follows that they also do not know what processes lead to a successful product. In short, they are operating by trial and error, with outcomes like customer satisfaction achieved by little more than blind luck.

Cooper and Reimann advocate six significant changes to conventional methods of software development in the Goal-Directed Design methods they lay out in this book:

• Design first; program second (The old way: Begin programming as soon as possible—applying design at the end if at all; or, in more progressive environments, program and design concurrently.)

• Separate responsibility for design from responsibility for programming (The old way: Programmers made significant decisions about how users interact with the software—often while in the middle of programming, a clear conflict of interest.)

• Focus on meeting user goals (The old way: Analyze users' tasks without considering their goals, why they perform tasks.)

• Define specific, archetypal users (personas) for your product based on careful observation of actual and potential users (The old way: Managers and programmers talked about "the end user" without being specific—allowing the term user to stretch to fit almost any situation.)

• Use personas as the main characters in scenarios: a primary tool in defining the function, behavior, and form of interactive products (The old way: Use marketing checklists to define product function, or let programmers decide what they think should be built.)

• Follow principles of design for behavior (The old way: Rely on principles of form alone, guess the rest, and then, iterate bad interactions through user testing until most of the worst problems have been patched.)

This book is a primer for the design of digital-product behavior, written by pre-eminent authorities in the trenches of interaction design and based on 10 years experience in the design consulting world and more than 25 years in the computer industry. It is a book that no product planner, interface designer, usability professional, or programmer will want to be without—a guide for making our software and our world better. We should heed its authors' advice.

Hugh Dubberly
February, 2003

Hugh Dubberly is a principal in Dubberly Design Office, which focuses on communications systems, interaction design, and information design. At Apple Computer in the mid ‘80s and early ‘90s, Hugh managed cross-functional design teams and went on to manage creative services and corporate identity for the entire company. While at Apple, he served at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena as the first and founding chairman of the computer graphics department. He later moved to Netscape and became Vice President of Design. Hugh has also taught classes in the Graphic Design Department at San Jose State University, at the Institute of Design at IIT, and in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.