In the second half of my audience with Alan Cooper, we try with some difficulty to get back to the original script. If you haven't read the first part of this Interview then you may like to do so before continuing.

In this second part, we talk about Cooper's books, "About Face" and "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". We look at Interaction Design issues with Web sites and Portals and Wireless Web Devices and WAP Phones. We talk about old Industrial Age marketing techniques and why the Information Age has heralded in a paradigm shift away from broadcast media and old fashioned mass marketing think. And finally, what is wrong with that word "Design".

Throughout Alan Cooper demonstrates that he's a lot more than a reformed geek with a God given ability for delivering a more usable product. No. Beyond that he has a deeper understanding of the big picture in the high technology industry and why you need to look at the whole problem - marketing, product design, strategy, branding and technology together, from a User Centered Goal Oriented perspective if you're going to get it right and beat your competition.

I have a feeling that the quantity of information available on the net is growing so fast. And, the expectation of business owners and what can be delivered, is growing so fast. All this is happening much faster than our ability to understand the problems with such information and the problems of what people want to do with it.

The result is that the quality of the Interface is deteriorating because we simply can't get a handle on this problem fast enough. Would you agree with this?

I agree with that! Let me talk a little about why it is true.

The issue is not complexity. The human mind happens to be an awesome tool for grasping and managing enormous complexity. That is what it is really good at. The human mind does wonderfully sophisticated tasks. The human mind in an instant can look at a face and recognize it and remember it. We just don't have computer programs which can do that. Little kids can do it - with hundreds and hundreds of faces.

When you wake up in the morning and look around, you see so much stuff that if complexity were an issue you would just pass out.

So complexity is not the issue.

Remember what programmers do: they role-play being a central processing unit. When you are doing this role playing and are given the task of recognizing a face then you freak out. You say, "Gosh, the problem is complexity"

The human mind doesn't work that way. The human mind is very different from a traditional central processor. I highly recommend the book, "How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker.

The point is that, it is really a good thing to let humans do human like stuff. Let the humans do stuff that they are good at and let the computer do things that computers are really good at.

For example, using any typical operating system e.g. Linux, NT, MacOS, when you create a chunk of data, you have to put it in a named data block, some file. You then have to put that in some place, in a positionally notated storage hierarchy. So you have to choose a name, and you have to choose and specify a place, a node in a tree. When you want that information back again, you have to remember the name that you gave it and you have to remember the place that you stored it. Then you go to that place, remembering the name, and there it is. You can retrieve that data. It's very logical and it's very appropriate but this is a model which is designed for computers.

The Problem is that humans are really bad at remembering names and places. With that kind of specificity, especially in a recursive hierarchy, where the nodes are exactly alike regardless of what level they are. Of course, computers happen to be really good at remembering stuff like that. However, the computer doesn't give me any help in remembering. The computer delegates that [remembering] job to the human. That's because the guys who invented operating systems.... that sort method comes from Kernighan and Plauger, from Unix. If you're a computer program remembering a simple file name in a directory is a trivial task. They [ the operating system inventors] just handed that task out to the human user.

That is not a simple or trivial task for humans. No one has ever gone back in and said, "Hmmm. Is this appropriate?" I talk a lot about this in my first book, "About Face".

One of the really interesting things is that the World Wide Web really attenuated the quality and vigor with which the computer programming community, forced users to deal with that recursive, hierarchical file system, and the problem of remembering names and places. This is one of the significant reasons why using the web is easier than using desktop software.

The problem is that the cost of doing that was that the web was less powerful. Now what we are seeing is that the web is getting increasingly powerful and we find that Users are having to do more and more remembering. We're falling back into those old models and the result is that it [the web] is getting hard to use again.

The issue isn't complexity. The issue is inappropriateness.

If I said to you, "Here is a 14 digit number that I want you to memorize" If you were a computer that would be appropriate; if you are a human that would be inappropriate.

Right. You look at a telephone and you see those 12 buttons [ the numbers plus * and # ]. Those 12 buttons are very very old. Their presence is not defensible.... from a Goal-Directed(R) point of view.

Even though I use my telephone all the time, the one thing that I never want to do, is refer to my telephonic correspondence by number. In fact, I'm not sure that I want to refer to them by name either. So 1-800-flowers is much more convenient to remember than trying to remember 356-xxxxxx etc. What I'd really like to do is be able to see a picture of flowers or be able to say "flowers" [to the phone].

Exactly!

If you have a modern cell phone then you know that you have probably recorded into the memory, 50 or 100 phone numbers, and you probably have a speed dial of 8 or 10 numbers which you dial frequently. If you think about the number of times that you key in from scratch, a phone number - area code, prefix, number - is maybe 1 in 10. The other 9 times, you use numbers which the phone has already remembered. Yet the physical interface of the phone which is presented is highly tilted towards dialing those numbers from scratch.

You need a functional overlay and you have to switch into a meta-mode in order to dial up numbers which the phone has already memorized and you regularly dial. This is because we don't think from a Goal-Directed(R) point of view. We don't look at the way people actually do things. Instead we look at the technology and we say, "The way you telephone someone is by typing in a number." Then we say, "Hey we could make this more convenient by having it remember numbers".

Why not instead say, "People always call, the people that they always call". Then you could have something simple like a knob on the top of telephone which just spins through the top 20 people that you call all the time. And by the way, for the rare occasions when you do have to call a strange number, then you turn it over and open up the back and there are the numbers [keys].

When you use Goal-Directed(R) Thinking then you can easily come to those kinds of conclusions. Otherwise you are always thinking from the point of view of technology or from the point of view of business. Business tends to look at the competition. Technology people tend to look at yesterday's technology and extend it.

Its been a year or so since it [The Inmates are Running the Asylum] was published. How has it been received? Is the audience listening?

The book has been a big success. It's a big fish in a small pond. I didn't get on Oprah! like I thought I would (he laughs). If you look on Amazon.com then you'll find around 43 reviews posted. 40 of them rave about the book and 3 of them say "It's not the programmers, it's somebody else", which I think proves my point.

I absolutely feel that the book has made a difference.

It took 20 months to write the book. It was published in April 1999. When I began the book, the world consisted of programmers and managers. I felt that the managers had stepped down from their role of responsibility and had handed the reins of the industry to the programmers. Meanwhile, the programmers were trying to do the best they could but with the wrong tools. That's why I called the book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum". I was addressing the book towards managers and saying that by giving the reins to the programmers, you are making a mistake.

I was saying that what needs to happen is you [the managers] need to bring design into the world.

So, welcome to the year 2000. Now, designers are a part of everything. Companies today, big and small, old and new, have created positions at the VP level for User Experience, User Interaction, Chief Experience Officer. These are typical. You find these roles in companies from IBM to Yahoo! to tiny little startups that you have never heard of.

It's sweeping the industry. I think that you will see this universally within a year or two. It already enormously influential today. American business does not create a VP position lightly. So this is serious. People believe that the User Experience is important. There is an idea that design is part of the solution.

I guess that my job is Interaction Designer. However, I find it next to impossible to find companies who are willing to hire Interaction Designers. All my colleagues who do this stuff actually have other job titles. I have the feeling that Interaction Design just doesn't get the press that it needs.

I see a lot of Web Designers talking about Information Architecture and how it is really, really important to the design of a good web site. Then there is Information Engineering, Usability Engineering, HCI and so forth, coupled to the huge success of Jakob Nielsen's book which is pushing Usability Engineering.

What can be done to raise the profile of Interaction Design and promote the fact that Interaction Design isn't Usability Engineering?

Well, you touch on a problem that we have encountered. Unfortunately the word "design" has a very different interpretation in business. Design is considered to be a creative process that is applied at the very end of the heavy lifting and that it has a very minor affect on a product. So the word "design" is problematic.

Usability Engineering, on the other hand, and all usability stuff, has the singular advantage of having a lot of pseudo scientific data which impresses a lot of people.

I saw my task as "Making the World safe for humanity, one click at a time!"

So I set about figuring out how to do that. I realized that what you have to do is create a discipline which focuses on the User, the eCustomer, the person at the other end. So, we created here our methodology we call the Goal-Directed Approach. It's based on understanding the User by understanding their Goals. And understanding their Goals by understanding the User.

I saw this as a design process. We fed the Goal-Directed Approach into our design process and we positioned it that way. I call myself an Interaction Designer. However, it's an interesting problem. When you say, "design", you marginalize yourself in the industry. What we have realized is, that if you take a Goal-Directed Approach and apply it to Interface Design then you will get a better Interface. But that is not significant. It won't have a significant impact on the success of the product. It will make it nicer. However, it will be way too late in the process to have a significant influence.

With Interaction Design and the Goal-Directed Approach has an enormous benefit on the strategic makeup of the product and it has an enormous beneficial effect on the strategic positioning of the company, and of the brand, and of pricing, and of channels, and of all marketing. It turns out that the Goal-Directed Approach has an enormous strategic benefit and value.

So how do you sell that? Should it be called Interaction Architecture rather than Interaction Design?

Well we wonder that too and we are wrestling with that right now.

The word "design" is toxic in the world of business.

The number 1, single most important thing that you, Mr. Product Developer can do to maximize your quality and effectiveness and make your customer happy, is bring Goal-Directed Interaction Design in earlier in the process.

When you say the word "design", business people tell you that design comes at the end of the process. So we are in this weird oxymoronic situation where the name we have selected is toxic to what it is that we are trying to accomplish. We don't yet know what the solution is.

It's a huge problem.

All that Usability Engineering stuff is very very expensive. What it does is say, "We will make your product better". That's good! But it doesn't say what the cost is. It's like the Clean Air Initiative. The Clean Air Initiative, is that a good thing? Would it have been better not to have filled our skies with smog in the first place? Yes!

So I find myself in the situation that people know I am a critic of Usability. I'm not a critic of Usability because I think it doesn't work. No. It's like being a critic of chemotherapy because it would be better if we could prevent cancer rather than have to use highly draconian measures to cure it.

I like to say that good Goal-Directed Design allows you to produce release 3 quality in the release 1 timeframe.

Let's talk a little about introducing Personas and Usage Scenarios to Marketing People.

I had a client recently with a lot of very expensive market research information. This research defined market segments, types of people who might be prospective customers. The problem I had with this was the vagueness of the definitions.

However, the marketing people at the client really believed that their research had nailed the problem so they were very skeptical about the Persona Definitions and openly said it was wasting their time. What do you say to people who raise that kind of objection? How do we get buy-in for your methodology?

Well, yep. That is a problem.

Everyone wants better solutions and happier customers.

Industrial Design is a discipline which has been around for quite a while and was developed as a methodology to help tame the excesses of the industrial age. Well, the industrial age is over. It's now the digital age. Now we need digital methodologies. Industrial Design was a nice thing for making real nice buttons which look pushable. It's not very good at all for making buttons which allow people to understand the consequences of their pushing them. Consequences are an Interaction Design Issue. It's a Digital Issue.

The same thing is true of marketing. All those marketing people are contemporary marketeers. They were educated in the marketing techniques of today. These were matured in the 50s and 60s when radio and TV matured to their full potential. These are broadcast paradigms.

All of the above. [That stuff] is not being reflected. They have an existing method of marketing that they use. The reality is that such techniques worked for broadcast media. When you are broadcasting your message, you have to think in terms of demographics and channels to market. When you're working in the digital age and dealing with all this complex functionality, you have to be thinking in terms of Users and specific scenarios.

The example I use is the guy who works on the assembly line at the automotive plant in Haywood, California. He is a working class guy, likes to watch TV and drink beer, on the weekend he gets in his pickup truck and he goes up to the Sierra Nevadas and goes out into his favorite trout fishing stream and stands there in his waders and does a little fly fishing.

Then there is the executive, who is Chairman of the Board of the automotive plant. He eats at fancy French restaurant. He makes a lot of money. He drives a Mercedes Benz off-road vehicle. On the weekends, he too likes to get away from it all. So he drives up to the Sierra Nevadas and wades out into the same stream in his really expensive Orbis Hip Waders and uses his 300 dollar fishing rod and he stands not 50 feet away from the other guy who works for him on the assembly line. Both trying to catch a trout.

From a demographic point of view, there is no two more different guys. Now, if you own www.flyfishing.com then these guys are your market. It's not a broadcasting world anymore. So all those old lessons of marketing are no longer applicable.

It's a cliché to say that the world is changing because of computerization. However, people don't realize when it's pulling the rug out from under them. Marketing people call the World Wide Web, "the New Media". The problem with this is that they then think it's just like the old media. But it isn't! They thought that TV was radio with pictures but it's not. The World Wide Web is vastly different from those Broadcast media.

Marketing people used to think in terms of demographics and problems like how do you sell a toothbrush. Well that is very very different from how you sell a [cellular] telephone. How you use a toothbrush is pretty much the same because it's a mechanical device. I don't care whether you are short or tall, or skinny or fat. How you use your toothbrush is pretty much the same as how everyone else uses it.

However, you can be demographically speaking, the same gender, the same age, the same income and the way you use your cellular phone is dramatically different from the way the guy standing next to you is using it. That's because it is really an Information Object and not a Physical Object.

All that marketing think just doesn't apply anymore.

So all that market research data isn't a waste but you need to turn the slant on it and make people aware that it just isn't about mass marketing anymore. It's about individual marketing.

Absolutely. All that research is great. We are omnivorous about data. We're hungry for market research. We'll eat it all. We also like to go out into the field and do our own corroborative stuff.

We like to poke around and look for surprises because it's always the surprises which are the most valuable. If we could predict the surprises then we wouldn't be needed.

It's really easy to say, "Old media. New Media" and you take from it, that old media was watercolors and new media is oils. But it's not that way at all.

Old Media is carvings in stone and new media is communication from another planet. It is a dramatically different thing. We haven't really gotten there [ to the correct answer ] yet.

If you go out on the web, you can see the incredible emphasis placed on mass marketing. I believe that mass marketing will die way down. It won't go away. In the same way that radio didn't kill newspapers, and TV didn't kill radio, new Media and the WWW will not kill mass marketing but will change it forever. Radio didn't kill newspapers but it changed its role in our daily life. TV didn't kill radio, it just relegated it into our automobiles.

Exactly!

The Internet is going to relegate broadcast media to a narrow band of influence. You are still going to see TV ads aimed at the lowest common denominator but it is not going to be the way that the bulk of people get information and do their commerce.

It used to be that people bartered for goods with their neighbors, then came along cities and stores, then came supermarkets and department stores, then the retailing experience changed again. People still barter but it's a tiny tiny part of commerce. What's going to happen is that not all of retail is going to the web but an enormous segment of it is going to the web.

So you're still going to have people who like to go shopping and places such as "Nike Town" where it's an experience and the purchased item is a souvenir of the shopping experience. People will still do that kind of retail. However, when it's time to get a pair of shoes exactly like the last pair I had which are now worn out. I'm not going to go to a store. I'm going to do that on the Internet.

Clearly, you are grappling with the terminology, "So am I!"

The really encouraging thing is, and I presented this at a talk to my own people recently, and I said, "When we started 8 years ago, we said that we are going to change the world because people are unaware of the power of Goal-Directed Interaction Design." We were going to change that and make people aware.

So the other day, I said to my people, "We won!", because now everyone is aware. It hasn't made it into all the corners of the world yet but basically, it's not a discussion about whether this is worth paying attention to. It's a question of "just how much attention should we devote to this?" I consider that a great victory.

I really think that we have turned a corner and I'm really excited. Even though, every day, I see examples of really bad digital products out there, I know that the forces within those companies which produce [ the digital products ], those forces understand that they are living on borrowed time and that they are going to have to fix them eventually.

I think that things are still going to get worse before they get better. However, I am now convinced that things really are going to get better. Whereas 5 years ago, the issue was in doubt.

All I can say is,

"Keep fighting the good fight, David!"

Cheers and Good Luck with the site.