Alan Cooper

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Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software programmer and programmer.

Cooper is best known for his book "Father of Visual Basic," as well as his book "Because The Inmates Are Running The Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore Sanity."

He created Cooper, a leading interaction design company, and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to produce high-tech products.

Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows on April 28, 2017 "for his creation of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC" and "for his pioneering work in the field of interaction design and its basic tools."

Early life

Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States, where he studied architecture at the College of Marin. He learned programming and took on contract programming jobs in order to pay for college.

Alan Cooper formed Structured Systems Group (SSG), a student computer development firm in Oakland, California, in 1975, soon after he left college and as the first microcomputers became available. GE's software accounting service, GM, was sold in Byte and Interface Age magazines. According to this article (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first legitimate business applications for microcomputers” at the start of Cooper's career as a software developer and the start of the microcomputer software industry. Cooper, in the end, created a dozen original Structured Systems Group products before he sold his interest in the company in 1980.

Early on, Cooper began working with Gordon Eubanks to write, debug, document, and publish his CBASIC, a young competitor to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's Microsoft BASIC. When attending the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, Eubanks wrote CBASIC's precursor, BASIC-E as a student course. Professor Gary Kildall was a mentor. When Eubanks left the Navy, he joined Kildall's thriving operating system firm, Digital Research, Inc., in Monterey. Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of the four foundings of the university's research and development staff soon thereafter. Cooper left DRI to create desktop application software by himself after two years as a DRI engineer.

Alan Cooper authored several company applications, including Microphone II for Windows and a phase-critical project management service called SuperProject in the 1980s. In 1984, Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates, where it found success in the business-to-business market.

Alan Cooper invented a graphic programming language (coded "Ruby") in 1988 that allowed Windows users to build "Finder"-like shells. It was described as a "shell building set" by the author. After he demonstrated Ruby to Bill Gates, Microsoft bought it. Gates predicted that the development would have a "profound effect" on their entire product line at the time. Microsoft did not initially intend to publish the product as a shell for users, but rather to convert it into a business development language for their QuickBASIC programming language, Visual Basic, which was widely used for Windows machine application development.

The cooperative's versatilely installed control unit, also known as the "VBX" button, was a well-known piece of "Ruby." With this technology, any 3rd party programmer could write a widget (control) as a DLL, embedded it in the Visual Basic directory, and Visual Basic would be able to locate it, work with it, and display it to the user as a seamless component of the application. The widget will be included in the tool palette and appropriate menus, and users could use it to extend their Visual Basic applications. The introduction of the "VBX" interface opened a whole new market for these "dynamically installed controls" in the 1990s.

Alan Cooper's first book about Visual Basic, The Waite Group's Visual Basic How-To-Total, is dedicated to him. Cooper's "Father of Visual Basic" has often been referred to in the author's dedication.

Bill Gates presented Cooper with the first Windows Pioneer Award in 1994 for his contributions to the industry. Gates paid special attention to Cooper's contributions to the VBX interface during the presentation.

The SVForum honoured Cooper with its Visionary Award in 1998.

Cooper began to wonder about the accepted route to software development early in his career. As he wrote his first book, Cooper believed something important was missing: "How can customers use this?" Cooper's early insights led him to initiate a design process that wasn't focused on what could be coded but rather on what could be designed to accommodate users's needs.

Cooper began working with other organizations in 1992, assisting them in making their applications more user friendly. Alan Cooper had started to articulate some of his basic design principles within a few years. He advocated for a user-first approach with his clients. Cooper surveyed the owners of his client's clothes and discovered the common threads that made these people smile. Personas were used as design aids in this instance. In two books, Cooper shared his vision. His suggestions aided in the user experience movement and helped define the art of "interaction design" that would eventually be referred to as "interaction design."

About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, Cooper's best-selling first book, was first published in 1995. Cooperin it introduces a comprehensive set of useful design principles, essentially a code for software development. As the industry and profession changed, "interface design" had become the more precise "interaction design." The main message of this book was directed at programmers: do the right thing. Consider your customers. The book is now in its fourth edition, titled About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and is widely distributed as a foundation text for the professional interaction designer. Cooper introduced the concept of a "sovereign posture" in which an application draws the majority of the space and waits for user feedback, or a "transient posture" for applications that does not run or interact with the user all the time. In About Face, he addresses both "informational" and "transactional" positions.

Alan Cooper's book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore Sanity, based on the belief that software should propel the user toward his or her desired destination rather than enslave him or her in computer minutiae. Cooper introduced a new model in the book, personas as a practical interaction design device. Personas quickly grew in the software market thanks to their unpredictability and effectiveness, based on a brief review of the book. The concepts of interaction design and the use of personas have been widely adopted throughout industry today. Cooper directs the businessperson in his second book: know your customers' needs and how to please them. To do the job properly, you need interaction design. Cooper advocates for integrating design into company practice in order to satisfy customer needs and produce higher quality products faster by doing it right the first time.

Alan Cooper's current research is on how to effectively integrate the advancements of interaction design with the use of agile software development techniques. Cooper's website has regular talks and blogs about this.

Cooper is a user experience design and strategy consultancy firm headquartered in San Francisco with an office in New York. Cooper is credited with inventing numerous common design techniques, such as goal-directed planning, personas, and a pair style. Sue Cooper and Alan Cooper established the company in Menlo Park, CA, first under the name 'Cooper Software,' then changing the name to 'Cooper Interaction Design' in 1997. The initial clients, for the most part, were Silicon Valley software and computer hardware firms.

The company's goal is to develop the user's aspirations for getting there and assess their motivations for getting there by using a human-centered approach.

Cooper began providing instruction in 2002, including topics such as interaction research, service planning, graphic design, and design leadership. Cooper has been President of Cooper (formerly Cooper Interaction Design), a San Francisco, California, user experience and interaction design firm that has served as a leader in interaction design and development, as well as their Goal-Directed brand (under Cooperation University).

Cooper joined Designit, Wipro Digital's strategic design arm, in 2017. Cooper Professional Education continued to exist as a Designit education and learning division until it officially closed on May 29, 2020.

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