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Alan Cooper Profile picture
Alan Cooper
@MrAlanCooper
Trying to be a Good Ancestor. Founder of @Cooper, 'Father of Visual Basic,' inventor of design personas, produced 'the first serious business software' for PCs
2 subscribers
Sep 23, 2018 • 42 tweets • 7 min read
As a programmer, an inventor and an author, I have used and benefited from intellectual property protection all of my professional life. That is, I have used patents, copyrights, and trade secrets in my work. 1 Interestingly, up until the early 1990s, software was not patentable in the USA. As a software inventor, this bothered me. It seemed clear that there were some things in software that should be protectable. 2
Aug 8, 2018 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Every feature in @adskFusion360 is sensible and powerful. The way they work together is nonsensical and inscrutable. 1 @adskFusion360 One example: If you create an empty component, then create a body, it won’t instantiate in your new component, and you can’t move it there. Instead, you have to instantiate a body, then convert it into a component. WTF? 2
Aug 7, 2018 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I have never designed a CAD program, so you are well ahead of me, however, I do not believe that Fusion is anywhere near as easy to use as it can and should be. 1 From a distance, the culprit appears to be the 2D thinking. I understand that many parameters need to be expressed in 2D, but that doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING has to be expressed in 2D. 2
Aug 2, 2018 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
My latest build is completed. It’s a cabinet for holding router bits. 1 I don’t own anywhere near enough router bits to fill it, but my meager collection was already in chaos. I couldn’t find the right bit, and they can get dull when they are not stored correctly. 2
Jul 30, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I used the word “art” the other day in a tweet, and it was exactly like stepping on a land mine: an unexpected explosion occurred. 1 Now my feed is filled with people debating the meaning of the word “art.” OMG. I used the term as a shorthand—something I will never do again—for the practitioner’s ability to choose their challenge. 2
Jul 28, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
If you think there is a component of “art” in the job of the interaction designer (or UX designer) then you and I have two different world views of what this whole profession, discipline, practice is about. 1 Art is personal expression, and that doesn’t really play a role in making users happy. Personal expression is what makes YOU happy. 2
Jul 23, 2018 • 27 tweets • 4 min read
Just to be clear, of course there’s a return on investment for UX. 1 But there are problems with that fact. 2
Jul 22, 2018 • 8 tweets • 1 min read
Where is it written in stone that designers need to know business? Why don’t business people have to learn about design? 1 There are a lot of fine businesses out there, but there is a distinct shortage of well-designed products. I’m saying that the critical ingredient in successful products isn’t middle management but rather design. 2
Jul 18, 2018 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
A lot of people can’t tell the difference between a turd and a faberge egg. One-half of the employer/employee relationship is paying good money to get their faberge egg polished.
Jul 10, 2018 • 24 tweets • 7 min read
When I was 14 I fucking hated the way they taught math in school. 1 I fucking hated the way it was taught from that point on. It was always taught in the exact same way: for math geeks. 2
Jul 9, 2018 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
In the tech world, customers are frequently not users, and in B2B software, customers are almost never users. I NEVER use the word “customer” interchangeably with “user.” 1 This is true even for a lot of consumer software. For example, I bought my Mac, but not my MacOS. Most of the websites of which I am the user are not ones I paid for, and I cannot be considered their “customer.” 2
Jun 30, 2018 • 24 tweets • 5 min read
Visual thinking is a critically important skill for interaction designers. 1 The ability to diagram an interaction is a foundational skill for interaction designers. 2
Jun 29, 2018 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
UX people get asked the value of their work all of the time. They don’t have a good answer. 1 There are two reasons for this. 1) They don’t, in fact, provide value; and B) The people who hire them and ask that question don’t really care and don’t really want any “UX”. 2
Jun 10, 2018 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
The power struggle that underlies the creation of a good user experience is hopelessly awash in money. 1 You have to look at what the primary goal of the organization is. Is it trying to make great products or make lots of money? Many practitioners are hired for the former, but the driving force of the organization is usually the latter. The latter always wins. 2
Jun 4, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Every single time I’ve ever used Apple’s Pages app, it puts this obnoxious dialog box in front of me. 1 Every single time I’ve ever used Apple’s Pages app, it always puts my personal templates—that I have created and stored—at the very bottom of this scrollable box. 2
Apr 23, 2018 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
You are curious about this because you and I have dramatically different notions of what “interaction design” actually is, what it does, and how one goes about doing it. We have never had common ground on this point. 1 Interaction design has always meant addressing what the program does rather than how it presents its controls to the user. I believe that that notion has lost much ground in the last decade, and the associated terminology has become bowdlerized. 2
Apr 18, 2018 • 37 tweets • 9 min read
About 9 years ago, I made a storage rack for small parts for my workshop. Its little drawers hold various nuts, bolts, and washers. 1 It’s made of welded structural steel, but uses commonly available commercial plastic drawers. Each level of 4 boxes rotates independently on a lazy susan bearing. The whole unit is on casters, so I can move it around the shop to where the action is. 2
Apr 12, 2018 • 16 tweets • 2 min read
Pretty much all of the last 4 centuries of classical woodworking and furniture design is a result of coping with the annual shrinkage and expansion of wood. 1 Plywood is layers of wood glued at right angles, so it doesn’t expand or contract. It fundamentally changed the nature of wood working and design. 2
Apr 12, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The only people who do things for “pleasure” are affluent hobbyists or rich kids with no real sense of what needs to be done in this world. Of course there are exceptions, but I’m talking Pareto distribution here. 1 I’m an affluent hobbyist, so I make things that are clever and/or nice but have no business model. The things I make costs hundreds of dollars. Elon Musk makes things to amuse himself with hundreds of millions. We prolly spend about the same percentage of relative worth. 2
Mar 14, 2018 • 28 tweets • 4 min read
This thread is about Slack, but it’s also a glimpse into how and why email slowly destroyed itself. 1 There was quite a bit of innovation in the email world 20 years ago, but Microsoft—as they do—stomped the shit out of the competition. 2
Mar 4, 2018 • 19 tweets • 2 min read
Keep in mind that while interaction designers are working hard to convince people that design is worthwhile, those same people are working hard to convince IxDs that design is cheap, visual tweaking. 1 Keep in mind that there is a lot of short-term money to be made by cutting spending on design. 2