Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper, an advocate of interaction design, runs a design company and writes books about how to make software user interfaces more usable by addressing the user's goals.

Cooper is sometimes called "the father of Visual Basic", although much of work on Visual Basic was done by Microsoft's internal development group. Cooper was the leading force behind Visual Basic 1.0 and pioneered the use of an Integrated development environment to create a GUI via wrapped calls to system routines in the API (see Adapter pattern).

Cooper's original programs were called "Tripod" and later "Ruby"^[1]. They were intended as more of an end-user tool, but development at Microsoft led to Visual Basic becoming a tool for programmers instead.

Contents 1 Bibliography 2 See also 3 External links 4 Notes and references

[edit] Bibliography

• About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design (ISBN 1-56884-322-4)
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (ISBN 0-672-31649-8)
• About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design (with Robert Reimann) (ISBN 0-7645-2641-3)
• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design (with Robert Reimann and David Cronin) (ISBN 0-4700-8411-1)

[edit] See also

• Design methods
• Design thinking
• Interaction design
• User centered design
• User experience design
• Windows Pioneers

[edit] External links

• Cooper Consulting
• Alan Cooper Interview on .NET Rocks
• Conversation with Alan Cooper at Channel 9
• Alan Cooper on Ruby and why he was called "the Father of Visual Basic"
• SEOV: Visions of Alan Cooper (Video Interviews)
• Alan Cooper on what companies must do to improve software products - mp3 format

[edit] Notes and references

Preceded by JoAnn Hackos

ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award 2004

Succeeded by –