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Alan Cooper Knows Process

What’s the biggest challenge for interactive coordination? In my world it’s the extensive planning needed to make accurate estimates and then the planning time needed to build a proper product. Great design takes careful consideration of micro and macro perspectives. So often a project goes the route of least resistance – the route that engineers see as easiest to execute, but not necessarily best for the client or their customers. Alan Cooper seems quite jaded but also beautifully eloquent in his description of the problems and strategies for correcting these. While he is talking about software I think the clip is very applicable to the web.

“Interaction design is not art… ...the problem is that… the design people are brought in as advisors, and you can give all the advice you want. What you need is someone to take responsiblity. Those designers are in fact, not responsible, and do not have authority for the behavior of the software. And they may give advice on the behavior of the software but ultimately the programmers, the engineers and the people who write the code are the ones who call the shots about the behavior of the software.”

Check out Alan Cooper on Microsoft’s Channel 9.

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