About Face 2.0--The Essentials of Interaction Design

Alan Cooper

Robert Reimann

Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
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Copyright © 2003 Alan Cooper

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2002114842

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For Sue, still my best friend after 22 years.

For Julie, for your love, kindness, and constant inspiration.

For Cooperistas past, present, and future;
and for those visionary practitioners who
have helped create a new design profession.

Credits

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Chris Webb

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About the Authors

Alan Cooper is a pioneering software inventor, programmer, designer and theorist. He is credited with having produced "probably the first serious business software for microcomputers" and is well known as the "Father of Visual Basic". For the last ten years his software design consulting company, Cooper, has helped many companies invent new products and improve the behavior of their technology. At Cooper, Alan led the development of a new methodology for creating successful software that he calls the Goal-Directed process. Part of that effort was the invention of personas, a practice that has been widely adopted since he first published the technique in his second book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, in 1998. Cooper is also a well known writer, speaker and enthusiast for humanizing technology.

Robert Reimann has spent the past 15 years pushing the boundaries of digital products as a designer, writer, lecturer, and consultant. He has led dozens of interaction design projects in domains including e-commerce, portals, desktop productivity, authoring environments, medical and scientific instrumentation, wireless, and handheld devices for startups and Fortune 500 clients alike. Joining Cooper in 1996, Reimann led the development and refinement of many Goal-Directed Design methods described in About Face 2.0. He has lectured on these methods at major universities and to international industry audiences. He is a member of the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Institute of Design.

Acknowledgments

The authors express their deepest gratitude to the following individuals, without whom this new edition of About Face would not have been possible: Sue Cooper, CEO of Cooper, who saw the time was right for a new edition; Chris Webb at Wiley, who shared that vision; Pat Fleck, who juggled the finances to get the project underway; Sara Shlaer, our Project Editor, and Mary Lagu, our Copy Editor at Wiley, who each helped us sharpen our words and clarify our thoughts, and were each a pleasure to work with from start to finish.

We would also like to thank the following colleagues and Cooper designers for their contributions to this volume, for which the authors are greatly indebted: Kim Goodwin who over the last five years has collaborated with the authors, co-developing, and refining many of the concepts and processes detailed in Part I; Hugh Dubberly, for his help in developing the principles at the end of Chapter 7 and for his assistance in clarifying the Goal-Directed process with several beautiful diagrams found in Chapter 1; Gretchen Anderson, Elaine Brechin, and Doug LeMoine for their contributions on user and market research in Chapter 4; Ernest Kinsolving and Joerg Beringer at SAP for their contributions on the posture of Web portals in Chapter 8; Wayne Greenwood for his contributions on mapping controls in Chapter 11; Nate Fortin for his contributions on visual branding and visual interaction design in Chapter 19; Jonathan Korman for his contributions to the Afterword, which include ideas from his forthcoming book, Best to Market; Dave Cronin for his many thoughts on the topics of kiosk and Web design; and Chris Weeldreyer for his insights into the design of embedded systems. We would also like to thank Elizabeth Bacon, Steve Calde, John Dunning, Kim Goodwin, Wayne Greenwood, Lane Halley, Berm Lee, Ryan Olshavsky, Angela Quail, and Chris Weeldreyer for their contributions to the Cooper designs and illustrations featured in this volume.

We are also grateful to clients David West at Shared Healthcare Systems and Mike Kay and Bill Chang at Fujitsu Softek for granting us permission to use examples from the Cooper design projects featured in this book. We wish also to thank the many other clients who have had the vision and the foresight to work with us and support us in their organizations.

Finally, we would also like to acknowledge the following authors and industry colleagues who have influenced or clarified our thinking over the years: Christopher Alexander, Edward Tufte, Kevin Mullet, Victor Papanek, Donald Norman, Larry Constantine, Challis Hodge, Shelley Evenson, Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, Stephen Pinker, and Terry Swack.