Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic”, Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows “for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools.”
Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely approved as the “Father of Visual Basic”, Cooper is with known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading associations design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical contact design tools to Make high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows “for his invention of the visual further environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering perform in establishing the auditorium of relationships design and its fundamental tools.”
Alan Cooper grew going on in Marin County, California, United States where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture. He college programming and took upon contract programming jobs to meet the expense of college.
In 1975, soon after he left literary and as the first microcomputers became available, Alan Cooper founded his first company, Structured Systems Group (SSG), in Oakland, California, which became one of the first microcomputer software companies. SSG’s software accounting product, General Ledger, was sold through ads in popular magazines such as Byte and Interface Age. This software was, according to the historical account in Fire in the Valley (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first serious thing software for microcomputers.” It was both the Begin of Cooper’s career as a software author and the start of the microcomputer software business. Ultimately, Cooper developed a dozen native products at Structured Systems Group back he sold his fascination in the company in 1980.
Early on, Cooper worked as soon as Gordon Eubanks to develop, debug, document, and declare his business programming language, CBASIC, an in advance competitor to Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s Microsoft BASIC. Eubanks wrote CBASIC’s precursor, BASIC-E as a student project though at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California once professor Gary Kildall. When Eubanks left the Navy, he united Kildall’s thriving operating system company, Digital Research, Inc., in Monterey. Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to colleague them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and move ahead department. After two-years at DRI, Cooper departed to develop desktop application software by himself.
During the 1980s, Alan Cooper authored several issue applications including Microphone II for Windows and an early, critical-path project supervision program called SuperProject. Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved realization in the business-to-business marketplace.
In 1988, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language (code-named “Ruby”) that allowed Windows users to build “Finder”-like shells. He called it “a shell construction set.” After he demonstrated Ruby to Bill Gates, Microsoft purchased it. At the time, Gates commented that the further would have a “profound effect” on their entire product line. Microsoft initially settled not to pardon the product as a shell for users, but rather to transform it into a professional press on tool for their QuickBASIC programming language called Visual Basic, which was widely used for concern application proceed for Windows computers.
Cooper’s vivaciously installable rule facility, which became famous as the “VBX” interface, was a Famous component of “Ruby”. This develop allowed any 3rd party developer to write a widget (control) as a DLL, put it in the Visual Basic directory, and Visual Basic would find it, communicate in the same way as it, and present it to the addict as a seamless portion of the program. The widget would be active the tool palette and occupy menus, and users could incorporate it into their Visual Basic applications. The invention of the “VBX” interface created an entire other marketplace for vendors of these “dynamically installable controls.” As a result of Cooper’s work, many supplementary software companies were dexterous to adopt Windows software to puff in the 1990s.
The first stamp album ever written practically Visual Basic, The Waite Group’s Visual Basic How-To by Mitchell Waite, is dedicated to Alan Cooper. In his dedication, the author calls Cooper the “Father of Visual Basic.” This nickname has often served as Cooper’s one-line resume.
In 1994, Bill Gates presented Cooper following the first Windows Pioneer Award for his contributions to the software industry. During the presentation, Gates took particular note of Cooper’s innovative con creating the VBX interface.
In 1998, the SVForum fortunate Cooper past its Visionary Award.
Early in his career, Cooper began to critically regard as being the accepted entrйe to software construction. As he reports in his first book, he believed something important was missing—software authors were not asking, “How do users interact following this?” Cooper’s to the fore insights drove him to Make a design process, focused not on what could be coded but on what could be designed to meet users’ needs.
In 1992, in answer to a suddenly consolidating software industry, Cooper began consulting with additional companies, helping them design their applications to be more addict friendly. Within a few years, Alan Cooper had begun to articulate some of his basic design principles. With his clients, he championed a design methodology that puts the users’ needs first. Cooper interviewed the users of his client’s products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy. Born of this practice was the use of personas as design tools. Cooper preached his vision in two books. His ideas helped to goal the addict experience leisure interest and clarify the craft that would inherit be called “interaction design.”
Cooper’s best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, was first published in 1995. In it, Cooper introduces a combination set of practical design principles, essentially a taxonomy for software design. By the second edition, as the industry and profession evolved, “interface design” had become the more precise “interaction design.” The basic proclamation of this LP was directed at programmers: Do the right thing. Think about your users. The wedding album is now in its fourth edition, entitled About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, and is considered a initiation text for the professional relationships designer. Cooper introduced the ideas of software application posture such as a “sovereign posture” where an application uses most of the announce and waits for user input or a “transient posture” for software that does not rule or engage once the user whatever the time. With websites he discusses “informational” and “transactional” postures in About Face.
In his 1998 book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Alan Cooper outlined his methodology, called Goal-Directed design, based on the concept that software should readiness the user towards his or her ultimate ambition rather than trap him or her in computer minutiae. In the book, Cooper introduced a other concept that he called personas as a practical associations design tool. Based on a brief a breath of roomy air in the book, personas hastily gained popularity in the software industry due to their odd power and effectiveness. Today, the concepts of associations design strategy and the use of personas have been broadly adopted across the industry. Cooper directs the notice of his second scrap book to the businessperson: know your users’ goals and how to satisfy them. You craving interaction design to accomplish the concern right. Cooper advocates for integrating design into event practice in order to meet customer needs and to build better products faster by act out it right the first time.
Alan Cooper’s current focus is upon how to effectively unite the advances of associations design taking into consideration the effectiveness of agile software move forward methods. Cooper regularly speaks and blogs very nearly this upon his company’s website.
Cooper is a addict experience design and strategy consulting unmovable headquartered in San Francisco bearing in mind an office in New York. Cooper is credited[by whom?] with inventing several widely used design concepts, including goal-directed design, personas, and pair design. It was founded by Sue Cooper and Alan Cooper in 1992 in Menlo Park, CA, under the name ‘Cooper Software,’ then varying the name to ‘Cooper Interaction Design’ in 1997. Cooper was the first consulting unquestionable dedicated solely to interaction design[according to whom?]. Its original clients were mainly Silicon Valley software and computer hardware companies.
The company uses a human-centered methodology called “goal-directed design” that emphasizes the importance of arrangement the user’s desired end-state and their motivations for getting there.
In 2002, Cooper began offering training classes to the public including topic as dealings design, service design, visual design, and design leadership.
Cooper has served as the President of Cooper (formerly Cooper Interaction Design), a addict experience and interaction design consultancy in San Francisco, California since its founding in 1992. Cooper helps their customers with dealings design challenges and offers training courses in software design and expand topics, including their Goal-Directed design (under the CooperU brand).
In 2017, Cooper became share of Designit, a strategic design arm of Wipro Digital. Cooper Professional Education continued to exist as a teaching and learning isolation of Designit until it closed its doors to business on May 29, 2020.