Cooper Expands to New York
A message from Alan Cooper
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Cooper has acquired Catalyst Group, a user experience design consultancy in New York City. By combining forces with this experienced and talented team, we are confident that we can assist a larger and broader range of clients even more effectively than we now do individually. We are so happy with this merger that we may even do it again soon. Given the apparent trend of independent design firms being swallowed up by larger organizations or otherwise buffeted by the winds of business change, this move may strike some as curious. I’m ok with that. I know that the value our expanded team can bring to clients around the world is still very much in demand - now more than ever.
When Cooper started this whole design consulting business 23 years ago, the only other firms nibbling around the edges of the discipline were some forward-thinking industrial designers. There were no universities teaching interaction design (or user experience design, or whatever you choose to call it), and nobody anywhere had a business card that said, “Interaction Designer” as their job title. Even at Cooper we were a bit fuzzy about the boundaries of what our newly-developing skillz could accomplish.
Our first decade taught us much. We not only created a company, but we created the practice of interaction design and established it as a profession. I wrote two books about what we learned that are still widely read today. We pioneered most of the tools that user experience designers routinely depend on today, things like pair-design, scenarios, personas, and qualitative field studies. Without a doubt, the most important thing that we learned was entirely unexpected, and proved to be the most potent arrow in our quiver. We learned that designing digital products from the user’s perspective had an astonishingly powerful effect on our client’s entire business. We discovered that the behavior of a company’s application, product, or website had more effect on their fortunes than any other aspect of their organization.
There are those who imagine that design is about pretty pictures on the screen, or about getting the “Submit” button in the right place on the Web page. Certainly, those are details that need to be done correctly, but they have little to do with the essence of user centered experience design. Saying that Cooper “does design” is like saying Apple “makes computers.” The computers that Apple makes are an enabling mechanism for a level of customer attention unprecedented in the technical world, and rare in any world.
The design that Cooper does enables us to ask and answer the critical questions about what an organization does, who it does it for, why it should do more or less of it, and to chart a path for future success.
I consider something to be strategic if it has the power to fundamentally alter the course of a business. Designing behavior is what we do, therefore interaction design is strategic design. Upon realizing this, in 2002, we changed our company name from “Cooper Interaction Design” to just “Cooper.” There really wasn’t a single word or phrase that described what we did. We brought profound insight to our clients. We enabled them to move beyond their cultural roadblocks. We shocked our clients with our ability to see into the mysteries of what they imagined to be impenetrable institutional knowledge. One of our clients proclaimed that Cooper was “expert at becoming experts!”
Along with this seminal realization of the awesome power and importance of interaction design, we realized that the obstacles to its adoption were equally powerful and systemically effective. One does not lightly convert an organization from attending to the needs of its product to attending to the needs of its users. Becoming responsive to user’s needs is not a feature that can be added to an application. Such a conversion involves radical changes to the undergirding value system of the organization, and those values are held firmly in place by cultural norms, evaluative rubrics, and personal ambition.
At Cooper we work with hundreds of different companies in dozens of different fields. The people at these companies are experts in their chosen sphere with years of experience and a daily focus on the complex economic, social, and engineering issues that affect their work. As outside consultants we rarely tell them something they don’t know, and we routinely find that superb solutions to the client’s challenges are already known within the organization. The problem is twofold: 1) there are typically hundreds of apparently viable solutions known within the company, and 2) The relative value of these solutions is obscured by tradition, current practice, personal advocacy, and numerous cognitive biases.
We relish the role of the outsider, marshaling many different perspectives to see through wicked problems. Computer pioneer Alan Kay famously declared that, “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points” and as the outsider, we are privileged to wield that advantage for our clients’ benefit. Catalyst Group, the company Cooper acquired, is small, with only 12 full-time employees, but the company has been successfully operating for 17 years and among its staff are some of the more prominent leaders in the UX profession. By joining forces, Cooper now has a larger, more flexible staff, along with offices on both coasts. What is more important, the New Yorkers bring an outsider’s perspective to the venerable Cooper staff in San Francisco. Conversely, our new Manhattan staffers are excited to be seeing things in new ways working alongside the Left Coast designers. In our own offices, we are already feeling the immensely positive effects of the power of the outside perspective.
— Alan and Sue Cooper, Founders
