Alan Cooper: Wow!

Yesterday over on Channel 9 we had the pleasure of seeing a video with Alan Cooper after his presentation at the recent Patterns and Practices Summit at Microsoft and gave a rather enlightening discussion on dealing with users.

One of my favorite lines of his was:

The thing is that the users don’t know, you can’t get blood from a stone, users are got a good source of software, you’ve got to have software built by experts, and you’ve got to have software designed by experts. Software is too complicated and too big and too costly and too difficult to let users have anything to do with it.

As it turns out... he’s got a few books, namely:

• About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design


• About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design


• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

I will need to pick those bad boys up before too long as I am quite interesting in hearing more of what he’s got to say.