The recently launched MSNBC redesign really grabbed our attention yesterday. While we don't universally love everything about it, we found ourselves playing around with it a bit longer than we would have expected to. Here's a sampling of some of the comments heard around the studio.

Doug LeMoine:
This is a pretty impressive effort toward designing an interaction framework for a massive media conglomerate with a dozen sub-brands, content licensing deals with who knows how many third-parties, and an absolute clustercuss of a styleguide. I’d say that the designers performed capably under this duress, delivering strong mechanisms for staying upright and pointed downhill amidst the avalanche. I like the nifty “upscroll” that reveals an info-rich header (but crikey this particular header has a heckuva lot going on). The “annotated scrollbar” holds the experience together, providing a modicum of navigational predictability across the various content sets. I have a variety of visual critiques, large and small, but overall I’ll high-five MSNBC for not being afraid to spook loyal readers with new ways of interacting with content.

Imon Deshmukh:
Of course it feels strange at first, and I’m not sure if I would have noticed the option to scroll up to uncover content, had nobody mentioned it. My reaction is similar to how I felt when I first saw the new Cooper site [Editors' note: stay tuned for this!]: I’m not sure if it’ll really work, but it’s something I haven’t seen before and it feels more than an attempt to be different just for the sake of it. Even if it doesn’t work out, trying something new and different when everyone is watching is something I can appreciate and admire.

Tim McCoy:
Kudos to MSNBC for abandoning the cluttered, segmented, ad-saturated layouts typical of news websites for a truly content-forward experience. It’s a lot of change to encounter all at once, so the experience is a bit foreign, but I think that will pass with time as readers learn new idioms and the design adjusts to the strains of use. It is an odd hybrid of the information density of a sovereign desktop/iPad app and the long-page scrolling breadth of a web page. And it speaks volumes about how interconnected our content has become that the editors expect to provide every story with some combination of images, videos, interactives, and related articles.

Dave Cronin:
I really appreciate the fact that the MSNBC team tried some daring stuff with their redesign. As with any such effort, some of these innovations will probably turn out to not-so-good, others will turn out to need some tweaking, and if we’re lucky a couple of these ideas will help us all move forward with how we deal with all kinds of information coming from every different direction. I’m really digging the use of the upscroll to access headlines (in a similar vein to where search lives on the iPhone), and I like how far the vertical scroll has been pushed even further as a primary navigation element, as well as the nifty little jump buttons along the scrollbar. The site is certainly not perfect, though. While I can tell there is an underlying grid, it could certainly be stronger—it looks like every vertical layer is on a different horizontal rhythm. And while I know it’s tough to do anything graceful with big display ads, these feel particularly clunky, especially the way they stick with you as you scroll, breaking the vertical orientation of the page a bit.

Congratulations to the litl team for a great showing at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), taking home awards in packaging, hardware and software, the latter of which we're proud to have contributed to. We're thrilled to have been part of such an amazing team and grateful for the recognition from the IDEA panel and litl.

Here's what the judges had to say about the litl user interface:

Designed to remove the barriers between you and web content, it is extremely simple to use and eliminates the clutter and distractions of traditional computer interfaces.

Credits from the litl blog:

Thank you and credit to John Chuang, Aaron Tang, Chris Bambacus, Chris Moody, Havoc Pennington, Eben Eliason and Ron Frank of litl; Daniel Kuo, David Fore, Jenea Hayes and Noah Guyot of Cooper; and Christian Marc Schmidt and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

The best-rated automatic cat feeder on Amazon has some serious interaction design problems, risking both well-fed cats and confident owners. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the machines that take care of our four-footed friends.

Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

As you may know, Alan Cooper, our fearless leader and co-founder, is the creator of Visual Basic (or at least the visual part-- Bill Gates is the one who decided to marry it to Basic). MSDN has recently put together an interesting series of interviews around the history of Visual Studio, including this one with Alan.

Regardless of the countless poorly designed applications that have been brought into the world by Visual Basic, it's hard not to see the monumental impact Visual Studio has had on the way software is created. Hear from the godfather himself about the making-of and implications of his game-changing work.

If you're having issues (or have issues) with Silverlight, you can find other formats of the video here on the MSDN site.

Here's a video featuring Eoin Woods, a software architect at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), talking about Apex, the new equities portfolio management system being built for the company's well known active management group:

Cooper worked with closely with BGI users and developers for almost 2 years going from from concept to detailed design and well into construction.

Much of the talk is focused on the technical architecture of the system, but you get the first glimpse of the user interface at 23 minutes in. Around the hour mark he takes questions, the first of which is about interaction design.

We're really excited about how it turned out, and a lot of credit and congratulations are due to the incredibly smart and talented folks at BGI.

We're excited to announce the release of the litl, a simple, and quite frankly, very cool, computer for the home.

We're proud to say that we helped design the litl. We worked for a year alongside the amazing folks at litl, as well as a number of other partners including fuseproject, Fort Franklin and Pentagram to make the vision a reality.

The litl can be used in both laptop and easel modes (to support lean-forward and lean-back interactions), and does away with a lot of the unseemly artifacts of more traditional desktop idioms like folders and menus. It's closely integrated with the social Web and designed around family life.

We'll get a case study about our efforts up on our site as soon as we can. In the interim, check out the litl site for more about the computer and the company.

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

Credits: Emma van Niekerk and Suzy Thompson.

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

A few weeks ago, Cooper appointed Ed Niehaus as President & CEO. Ed is a Valley veteran, with a rich background is in public relations, branding and business-building. He met Alan when Visual Basic was merely a twinkle in Alan's eye, and since then, Ed has worked with a long list of the Valley's top companies, and has been on the board of half a dozen, both public and private. Yahoo!'s founders hired Ed when they wanted to grow their business beyond a server in a trailer on the Stanford campus. Steve Jobs hired Ed's PR firm - already the agency for Pixar and NeXT - when Jobs returned to revive Apple and launch the iMac.

In the brief time that he's been with Cooper, he's told us some great some stories that we've wanted to share, so we sat down with Ed to pick his brain about his background, the Steve experience, and where digital technology is going.

Tell us how you got involved with interactive products.

I got on The Well in the late 80s, and it was a real community, one in which over 1000 people shared every aspect of their lives. It was a microcosm of what the blogsphere is today: communities of shared interest, each one with what amounted to a bartender, serving up domain expertise, keeping the conversation going and stopping fights before they got out of hand.

The quality of the content was actually very high despite having no formalized process for reputation-building; the Well's secret was its profound lack of ease-of-use. We called it the ‘bozo filter’ because you had to be smart and determined to even begin to use the dreadful text-based software. The intellectual equivalent of fraternity hazing. Today I guess you could say that a lot of products have a bozo filter, only in reverse: you feel like a bozo if you bought one.

After a while I noticed that a 'company' was doing business through a community over which they had no control, right there on The Well: that company was the Grateful Dead! They got huge promotional value, a lively market for show tickets, T-shirts etc. Of course there also was an outlaw market for bootleg show tapes. Even so, think of the possibilities! Companies could turn their information outward to face their customers and, if they were willing to - gasp! - forgo controlling and spinning what the customer said, they could build trust, and build business through online communities. If only the bozo filter of dial-up online services would get out of the way!

Companies already were building user groups around their products. Programmers banded together because software was so hard to make, and found that being a community gave them the clout they needed to squeeze the information out of the hardware vendors. For instance, developer groups famously got Steve Wozniak to share the ‘secret’ schematics for the early Apple computers. But, the relationships between vendors and user groups were often dicey. One CEO I knew called his company’s users' group ‘The Bedwetters Club,’ because they had the gall to complain when things didn't work. It was that thinking, not 'content' like brochure websites, that interested me when I first saw the NCSA Mosaic web browser.

You got involved in The Well to help them with PR and branding; what does ‘brand’ mean in the interactive space?

You could think of a brand as a piece of real estate in someone's head, a little patch of ground that is the sum total of the experiences that they've had with a particular product or service. Things changed in the 90s: a million new brands put most of that real estate underwater. Wired magazine got to be an inch thick, and half the companies advertising in it had logos that looked like the rings of Saturn.

And, suddenly, consumers had clout! As a PR agency, we started evangelizing, ‘Branding is Dead!’ A bit ironic because Yahoo was just three people when we started, and grew on our watch to be - among people under 21 - the most widely recognized brand in the world.

Now, in some ways, branding really is dead. Today it's about the experience.

Today branding often is about love. So, on one hand you have Dell and Microsoft, ‘needed’ brands. On the other hand you have Apple, a ‘loved’ brand. Dell has a P/E of 12; Microsoft's is 13. Apple has a P/E of 120. Companies do the math, and come to Cooper saying , ‘We want to be the iPhone of (our product category)!’

Speaking of Apple, is there any part of your ‘Steve experience’ that seems particularly relevant to the work we do?

Working with Steve can be brutal, but you get a chance to see firsthand his tremendous eye for detail and the clarity of his vision. Nobody can judge work like Steve can -- design, advertising, engineering -- you name it, Steve knows, and look out because he'll tell you. He has got a hierarchy of judgment that's really pretty simple: at the top is ‘Insanely great,’ which is the best in category that you'll see in your lifetime. Then there's ‘really, really, really great,’ - and he says it packed with emotion - that's the best that you'll see this year or maybe this decade.. And, there's ‘shit,’ and that's the entire hierarchy.

I wish you could have seen Steve in action with Lee Clow of Chiat/Day, working on Apple's ‘Think Different’ campaign. Lee, the living legend whose creations ranged from the ‘1984’ Apple commercial to ‘Yo Quiero Taco Bell,’ showed an early version of ‘Here's to the crazy ones’ from the ‘Think Different’ campaign. A full minute of black-and-white pictures of Picasso, Einstein, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, Bucky Fuller, amazing music and Richard Dreyfus reading this poem, seeing it for the first time brought the hair up on the back of my neck. So here I am, practically with tears rolling down my face, and Steve just looks at Lee, shakes his head, and says, ‘You've lost it.’

I thought, ‘What?! That's one of the greatest ads I've ever seen!’ And here's Steve going, ‘No. The music isn't right. It was right before. And you've changed the pace of the pictures, and you've got them in the wrong order.’ He sends them packing, back to LA. They came back after probably 30 hours with no bodily functions, and I was stunned. It was a lot better. Steve has a vision of what great is, and he's never going to settle for anybody else's standard of great.

That's great for Steve. What does that mean for the rest of us?

For the rest of us, it's about the experience. We might not have Steve's vision of what's going to be great, but each of us knows what ‘insanely great’ is when we see it and use it.

It's easy for product companies to fool themselves that what they're doing will get them there. They convince themselves that they know their technology, that they know their domain, and that compromises and half-measures will get them there. But what I’ve learned is that true impact in the market only comes from maintaining an undying commitment to creating something that is truly “insanely great.”

Are there any lessons to learn from tough economic times?

In hard times, executives focus on cost and time-to-market. The impact of controlling these two factors to the exclusion of everything else is two things go out the window: adherence to the company's vision and attention to the customer's experience. Engineering is motivated to find shortcuts to meet timelines, figuring they can always come back later and ‘Fix the UI.’ Product marketing is motivated to get something out quickly and let the users sort it out. Suddenly, user research is too time consuming and, ‘Besides, aren't the users’ needs always changing?’

The fact is, if you really study your users, their needs actually are knowable and don't change very quickly. If you want to thrive in tough times, you have to craft a vision that meets those needs in a way that exceeds expectations, and nail the delivery.

Last night, our own Kim Goodwin presented her talk "Designing a Unified Experience" at the IxDA NYC, generously hosted by our friends at LiquidNet.

(Click the button on the bottom right of the "screen" for a fullscreen view.)

About the talk

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.

The Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosts Lane Halley and Jeff Patton in Portland for a talk and workshop on blending agile and user-centered design. On Wednesday night, May 6th, Lane and Jeff present a talk titled “Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile.” On Thursday, May 7th, they'll teach a full-day workshop titled “All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques.” Here's more information about the course and registration details. We hope to see you there!

Enterprise resource planning systems must, by their very nature, serve the needs of a wide variety of people, and the implementation of these systems can result in the needs of one person being sacrificed in order to meet the needs of another. In an article on Forbes.com, Dan Woods does a nice job of laying out the pitfalls and frustrations attending ERP and other monolithic business software.

We particularly like the article because he mentions Alan and credits him for formalizing the use of personas, but it's also a sophisticated look at how system design is begging for effective tools to understand the network of human needs that must be balanced in order to create effective solutions:

...[S]ome users get more value from software applications than others. This is because software is written from a certain user perspective. In many cases, the problems and challenges faced in making software work can be explained by the tension created when the design of software is dominated by one perspective over another. In CRM systems, for example, the sales reps who must do the work of entering data about contacts and meetings often must be bludgeoned or bribed to do so. They get little benefit from such tracking, as opposed to the VP of sales, for whom the data is a vital way to understand what is happening.

Check it out "One Software Doesn't Fit All" on Forbes.com.

Join us for a beer at the spectacular Autodesk Design Gallery to celebrate the release of Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, the definitive field guide of Cooper's design tools and techniques written by our own Kim Goodwin.

Weds, February 18
6:00 - 8:00

One Market Street
Suite 200
San Francisco
(here's a map)

Please feel free to bring your colleagues, friends and anyone else who's as excited about the practice of design as we are.

Building security requires that all attendees be on the guest list. Please let us know if you'll be able to join us by RSVPing here:

http://crush3r.com/page/pcgsgmmtum
(Anyone can RSVP — just send this along to your friends)

For more about the book, Kim posted a sneak peek at the contents a couple weeks back. And of course, you can pre-order on Amazon.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion.

In this edition, we thought a bit about public transit. It's great for the environment and pocketbook, but it isn’t without its own headaches. Managing departure delays and worrying about getting off at the right stop make commuting less carefree than it could be. So how can we make the experience better? Meet Commuter Buddy, a concept application that lets commuters sit back and enjoy the ride. So…enjoy.

Credits: Suzy Thompson, Emma van Niekerk and Alex Long.

Tim sparked an interesting discussion around the office last week when he circulated a post from Derek Powazek's blog called "Programmers are tiny gods." It offers a provocative analogy for the designer/programmer relationship:

Programmers are the Gods of their tiny worlds. They create something out of nothing. In their command-line universe, they say when it’s sunny and when it rains. And the tiny universe complies ... So if you’re working with a programmer, you have to treat him or her like a God. You have to pray. You cannot issue edicts. You have to come on bended knee. “Here’s the problem I have. I need a solution. Please help.”

It's from a series called “Things I learned the Hard Way.”

Tim McCoy: It's a nice insight into the psyche of many development organizations. This is meshing with a sentiment I’ve heard a lot lately: “Don’t tell me what to build. Tell me what you need built.” It’s a subtle distinction that replaces the feeling of micromanagement with one of empowerment.

David Fore: Right. But this sentiment begs a fundamental question. When a programmer objects to being told what to build, how can biz decision makers ensure they aren't wandering into the weeds, building a taco stand rather than a playground, let's say. In other words, taken to the extreme, this sentiment means the inmates shall run the asylum. Alan, do you want to rewrite your book?

Tim McCoy: For me, it doesn’t challenge the notion that design has the responsibility of describing the product and development the responsibility of creating it.

I recently had a conversation with a developer who said “I want the definition of behavior as soon as possible, and I want to delay the definition of implementation for as long as possible.”

The issue is that being told what to build is a command, not a dialogue. Being told instead what needs building is an invitation to collaborate. That acknowledges programmers as professionals with expertise designers don’t generally have. (In turn, it assumes programmers acknowledge designers as professionals with expertise they don’t generally have.)

Programmers then have the flexibility to assess what building that thing would entail, express concerns over feasibility, timeline, motive, etc., and offer alternatives or adjustments that impact their ability to be successful.

So it’s about removing the friction to object to in the first place. Derek is being sensational with the bended knee bit, but the sentiment is sound. The payoff of his post is this:

The good news is, programmers want their work to be used, and the good ones know that the design matters. So programmers and designers actually have the same goal: getting the stuff used. If each can honor the talents of the other, great things can happen.

It’s about approaching developers as co-conspirators in producing great work: designers know what needs to happen and developers know how it can.

Lane Halley: I think you’re right on when you say “being told what needs building is an invitation to collaborate” and that designers and developers can be “co-conspirators in producing great work.” However, there are some nuances to the situation.

I think that when SW developers are removed from business decisions about what they are building (e.g. work for a salary, or code for hire), there’s a sense of relief when someone, anyone, steps up and takes ownership for the “what” of the product. However, at many companies, this responsibility for the “what” isn’t totally owned by Designers, it’s a space shared with Business Analysts, Product Managers and other folks.

I’ve also seen small teams of collaborative generalists at Web 2.0 companies and startups who have a different attitude. Those folks don’t think of “design” as a separate role, it’s more like an activity, or a skill set that has to exist within the team, somewhere. SW developers who work in this environment feel a greater sense of ownership of the product, and expect to be involved in defining the “what” too.

Tim McCoy: That’s a great point. The dynamic in a small team, startup, or indie development shop is usually much different from the situation Derek describes. I think it’s a side effect of the traditionally down-stream role developers have in larger established organizations that leads to this outlook, and why it’s design’s responsibility to say “hey, I’m not coming down here to drop a spec on your desk, I want to talk about how we can solve this thing.”

People are looking for ways to economize in these uncertain times. We can all see the evidence of environmental crisis brewing alongside the economic downturn, and it's easy to feel powerless in the face of such global forces. With politicians and businesses seeking avenues to a sustainable future, Cooper wondered how design might help individuals cut costs while also encouraging behavior that was environmentally responsible.

This all started when Environmental Defense approached Cooper, asking us to imagine new ways to make it easier for people to save resources. We performed research throughout the Bay Area, then collaborated with Environmental Defense to model our findings and identify design opportunities. From this point of inspiration, we continued on our own, crafting a quick eco-friendly concept: Economizer, a service that helps consumers save money while making sustainable choices. The service consists of a core set of internet-aware services with optional components such as hardware data collectors, social networking applications, and dedicated smart phone interfaces.

Economizer: Scenario 1 on Vimeo
(Watch this video in fullscreen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right of the player.)

A while back, several of us in the studio had a little spontaneous discussion about voice user interfaces over email. We thought we'd share some highlights. Please pile on in the comments section.

Steve Calde: What are people’s experiences with voice user interfaces? [A client] is interested in learning more about how to document voice-activated systems, and wondered if we had any experience to share.

Alan Cooper: You could also suggest to them that voice interfaces are inherently bad and will never work very well.

Dave Cronin: Why are they inherently bad?

I agree that they often are bad, but it seems to be more an implementation issue than something intrinsic about voice commands.

Stefan Klocek: The reason they are inherently flawed is that we use our voice for other more important things in addition to the system level input we would like to give to our DVD player. There is no way for the voice interface to understand that the context has changed and that I am no longer giving it a command, rather I am now giving my child a command or am simply muttering to myself. Of course we could imagine a system in which we indicate context by saying “DVD player - pause”, but this is adjusting my input to the deficiencies of the system.

This year, we continued our Halloween dress-up tradition with the theme of "monster mash-up." We did the ordinary challenge of coming up with a clever costume one better by mixing it with our love of puns. Everyone came dressed as a monster mixed with another costume idea.

The final set of realized costumes included The Creature From The Barack Lagoon, a skeleton out of the closet, a flying purple people greeter, a fairy goth mother, Robert Ghoul-et, a M(ummy)ILF, and some monsters of rock. We planned to crawl down to the Embarcadero for lunch, but with the possibility of rain, we lurched and lumbered across the street to dig up some pizza. Returning to our lair, we fired up the Wii for a monsters-of-mash-up-rock, Guitar Hero play-off.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

The Drawing Board: Our Building's Elevator on Vimeo.
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. (Just ask our partners and friends—we really can’t help ourselves).

This sort of thing makes a fun thought exercise, so we thought we’d share it with you as a series of narrated slide shows we’ve called “The Drawing Board.” These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So…enjoy. Discuss. Design.

Taking the Call on Vimeo
Credits: Chris Noessel and Stefan Klocek.